Word: viscontis
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...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...
Italy's Luchino Visconti has little love for subtleties or 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...
...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...