Word: visconti
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...trademark of Italy's most successful commercial cinema. De Sica--whose current illness elicited a message of good cheer from the gathering--was represented by a single film, Pasolini's Orestiad was presented, and Bertolucci's pseudopolitical Before the Revolution was dusted off, but Fellini received no recognition, and Visconti figured only as the object of indignation at news that the director was abandoning professedly leftist views to make his next film for a wealthy rightist publishing concern...
This was perhaps one of the mildest provocations Visconti has offered the festival and the city itself: his latest Ludwig is a disaster excused only by reports that the director's illness forced its completion by a substitute, and Death in Venice, the films, which first marked Visconti's decline from films about decadence into decadent films, was most of all an insult to the city whose landscape and legend he abused...
Cukor juggles stock character types and familiar plot complications with playful expertise. Henry and Augusta, along with her lover Wordsworth, a fortune-telling black African, wind up on a mock spy adventure on the Orient Express as Augusta delivers an illegal $100,000 ranson to Visconti (her wildly romantic first lover) held captive in Africa. Fortified by the belief that love conquers all, Aunt Augusta cajoles, lies, steals, blackmails, and is deported in the course of her mission. When she finally does deliver the ransom, she collapses hysterically in her now aged lover's arms only to find that...
...played here by the international beauty Helmut Berger, Ludwig never consults a plan, hectors an architect or drives a construction foreman crazy. Visconti doesn't even make anything humanly or dramatically interesting out of Ludwig's other major project-rescuing Richard Wagner (Trevor Howard) from his debts and subsidizing the première of Tristan and the beginning of work on the Ring Cycle. Such activities imply a mysterious will and energy that cries out for interpretive speculation; but this would interfere with Visconti's simple view of Ludwig as a moony homosexual victim...
...Maybe Visconti is afraid that complexity of character-he uses all his actors as bits of movable scenery-or dramatically meaningful sequences would distract attention from his endless, pointless photography of galloping horses, gliding boats, and light-footed lads. Or maybe the movie is a huge metaphorical joke: Ludwig, after all, built empty, rambling castles where no one ever lived. This movie is constructed along a similar plan. There was, though, a certain magnificence in Ludwig's madness. Visconti's movie is merely maddening...