Word: visconti
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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...
...group of traveling tarts, and a lover of men who are unlovable to others. Somewhere along the line, like Greene, she has become a Catholic but, again like Greene, she has a weakness for touching the "untouchable." Her last untouchable is an Italian of fathomless duplicity named Visconti, who has bilked everyone from cardinals to oil sheiks. Now he is on the run, having been classified as a war criminal...
...DAMNED. Surely one of the most perverse and decadent movies in recent film history, director Luchino Visconti's picture is a long and stunning tapestry of murder, corruption, sexual abberation and power-lust...
...happening in the nation outside-but that's neither important nor worth thinking about. What is important is the incredible richness of the film visually: blood, transvestism, child molestation and all the rest come together to form a lushly orchestrated grand opera of emotional sickness. To be sure, Visconti has indulged himself to the fullest: he takes his sweet time in depicting each sick ritual of his metaphorical family. But while you may be revolted by it, you might love it-and, God, in either case, there is no chance you will forget it. Ingrid Thulin, Dirk Bogarde...
...seeds of evil planted at this banquet eventually take root during the film's two-hour 20-minute running time to produce what Visconti obviously hoped would be an allegory of prewar German history. Although the Von Essenbecks appear to have been modeled rather closely on the Krupps, The Damned is about as potent a parable of Germany as Wagner's Ring cycle, which it outdoes in zestful vulgarity. The actors all perform with an unbridled bravado, the cinematography is properly bilious, and there are enough sex scenes-a good many of them homosexual-to get the movie...