Word: manne
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...Broken Clown. In his film adaptation, Luchino Visconti (The Damned) pays his utmost disrespect to the original by maintaining Mann's fustian and removing his intention. In the novella, the aging Author-Philosopher Gustave Aschenbach seeks renewal in Venice. But like the fugitive with an appointment in Samarra, he finds death awaiting him. An elusive and beautiful youth, Tadzio, attracts the writer. Though he never touches his beloved, never even speaks to him. Aschenbach is rendered immobile by his platonic affair. A plague of cholera racks the city. At any time the writer is free to leave...
Those events would be difficult to render in the best of cinematic circumstances. Director Visconti provides the worst. Mann is supposed to have based his hero on Gustav Mahler. So Visconti, ruthlessly deleting Mann's imagination, makes the neoclassic author a Romantic musician-accompanied by plaintive strains of Mahler's Fifth Symphony, emphasized until it becomes as banal as the theme from Love Story. Mann's Aschenbach was a harrowed spent figure with a dead wife and a grown daughter. Visconti's is played by Dirk Bogarde, a man barely into middle age. Accordingly...
Most important, Mann's treatment of the unconsummated affair of man and boy was a metaphor for Europe's decaying society. But Visconti takes the veneer and calls it furniture. With infinite tedium, he pores over every facet of Tadzio's Botticelli visage; with stupid distortion, he makes the boy, played by Bjorn Andresen, a flirt whose eyes flash a come-on to his helpless elder, like some midnight cowboy off the Via Veneto. He even concocts an elaborate bordello scene in which Aschenbach is shown as a heterosexual failure-a moment that proves as barren...
This film is worse than mediocre; it is corrupt and distorted. It is one thing to change an author's lines or his characters. It is quite another to destroy his soul. Mann's Death in Venice is, in fact, no more about homosexuality than Kafka's The Metamorphosis is about entomology. Visconti's poshlost may aspire to tragedy, but it does not even achieve melancholia; it is irredeemably, unforgivably...
...beaver's teeth pronged into a cigar." Skouras is merely an "oxlike package, voice like a child's rattle." Louella Parsons is kissed off as "The Queen Mother at Toad Hall." Marilyn Monroe, "a child with short legs and a fat bottom," wonders innocently: "Who is Thomas Mann...