Word: essenbeck
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Visconti's style is extravagant and non-realistic, as you see when green begins to tinge the edges of characters' faces and collect in pools on the Essenbeck mansion's parquet floor. God knows the bedroom scene between power-crazed Ingrid Thulin and her contrite Bogarde employs dialogue no real person ever uttered. Visconti offers us human passions and errors on a grander scale than the realistic. Thus his blocking of scenes, which is heavy and slow, focuses dramatic energy inward onto the relationships of the Essenbeck family. Visconti's mise-en-scene is equally grandiose, incorporating massive interiors...
...half measures. In such films as The Leopard and Rocco and His Brothers, Visconti has inflated psychological conflict into perfervid librettos of passion, love, deceit, death and a kind of fermenting sexuality. But in The Damned he has outdone himself. The doomed figures of the title are the Von Essenbeck family, an informal assembly of back stabbers, thieves, perverts and murderers who can lay claim to being just about the rottenest clan since the Borgias...
...February night in 1933, the family gathers to pay birthday tribute to its patriarch, Baron Joachim, head of the vast Von Essenbeck steelworks on the Ruhr. Gathered around the birthday table are Martin, the Baron's deviate grandson (Helmut Berger), an off-again, on-again faggot with an occasional taste for whores and five-year-old girls; Martin's mother Sophie (Ingrid Thulin), a glacial blonde castrator, with her power-hungry lover (Dirk Bogarde); and assorted relatives who reveal such minor personality flaws as criminality, sadism, cowardice, and a timely penchant for Nazism...
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