Watch The Damned For Free

You won't be disappointed!

Good movie but grossly overrated

Fantastic!

Actress is magnificent and exudes a hypnotic screen presence in this affecting drama.

"The Damned" is pretty much what I expected from a Luchino Visconti epic from the 1960s...it's very long, very slow and very mannered. However, unlike some of his other tediously long films ("The Leopard" and "Death in Venice", it is more watchable...possibly because it's so perverse.The film is about a rich industrialist family in Nazi Germany during the early years (1933 or so onward towards WWII). At the beginning, they seem relatively normal though over the course of the film, these conniving and avaricious folks sell their souls to the Nazi regime in order to maintain power and financial success. In the process, some get wrapped up in the SA (and are eventually destroyed), rape, incest (multiple times), cross-dressing and more...until by the end of the film most of them are dead and the remaining family member is a soul-less ghoul of a man.The story is a decent overview of the German industrialists in general. They were an evil lot who profited tremendously from the build up to the war. Plus, unlike most WWII films, you really see nothing of the country except life for this family. So, the persecution of Jews, Hitler's seizing power and much more are only mentioned in the film as opposed to being directly dealt with in the story. This was NOT a bad thing and makes the film very unique. What also is unique is how incredibly perverse everyone is. There is a lot of nudity...some of which is quite incestuous and kinky. So, it's clearly NOT a film to show the kids or your mother or Reverend Jenkins!Another important thing I must mention is the slowness of the film. It is NOT a movie the average person would enjoy and that is a trademark of many of Visconti's later films. This isn't so much a criticism but an observation. I much prefer his earlier work (such as "Rocco and His Brothers") but many seem to like his slow epics. To each his own....but like his other films, "The Damned" might have been better with a bit of editing and tightening up of the story.

Luchino Visconti's "The Damned" looks at the role industrial capitalism had on the madness infecting 1930's Germany. One of the director's best films, it revolves around the Essenbecks, an aristocratic family whose massive wealth and high status depend on a steel works factory. The family head, Baron Joachim von Essenbeck, detests the National Socialists, but nevertheless allies his company with them. His son is already a Nazi member and another Essenbeck woman already has a Nazi lover, so why not side with them? After all, with the German Revolution crushed, this seems to be the way the winds of Germany are blowing.As a communist sympathiser this of course repulses the Baron (the Nazis set about eradicating all communists, Marxists, worker movements and, contrary to their name, weren't remotely socialist), but he must act to protect his wealth, and so reluctantly aligns his company's future to the fortunes of the Nazis, his factories reordered such that they do whatever is necessary to assist the German war machine. As the film progresses, however, the Baron's steel works will be slowly appropriated by the Nazis from within, both the Baron and his son will die and all remaining Essenbecks will be systematically replaced by Nazi figureheads.Visconti was himself a communist and aristocrat (Renoir and Pasolini, whom Visconti admired, were also communists), and so his film is primarily concerned with examining the relationships between Naziism and capitalism, and aligning the excesses of both. This project sometimes tips into sensationalism; Visconti has the Baron's son rape his cousin and then his mother, and the film quite shamelessly dips into homosexuality, drug use, incest and paedophilia.But such morbid topics were common in Italian cinema at the time ("Seven Beauties", "The Conformist" etc), most notably by the great provocateur Pier Paolo Pasolini. Pasolini maintained that consumer capitalism was worse than fascism because fascism's oppressions operated openly, its very "visibility" offering something to struggle against. But capitalism, Pasolini believed, was far more insidious. It was invisible, able to disavow its failings, and created a society in which citizens were willing participants in their own consented exploitation.So Pasolini's solution was simply to destroy the traditional family unit. Throw everything vile and debased at it. Why? Because the backbone of capitalism was, at the time, deemed to be traditional family, which itself rested on patriarchal values. Destroy the family, liberate it from itself, from its restrictions, and you win. Of course history has shown such thinking to be severely wrong. Today capitalism both sells conservatism and "empowers" the family to lovingly destroy itself, willingly.But many Italian films of the late 1960s and early 70s which dealt with fascism followed a similar trend, mostly due to the writings of Wilhelm Reich in his book, "The Mass Psychology of Fascism". These films, like Reich, link various sexual and physical dysfunctions to the very anxieties of fascism. Think Bernardo Bertolucci's "The Conformist", in which fascism is nurtured through the anchoring of sexual inhibition in the authoritarian miniature state of the family. The belief was that fascist anxiety stems from these suppressions, which ultimately results in a form of paralysis in which the subject is adjusted to all authoritarian orders and so willingly submits in spite of his degradation.But Visconti takes a slightly different approach. Nazis, especially during this era, were typically portrayed as being either the "id unchained" or perpetually repressed. Most of "The Damned" itself conforms to these trends. Here, when the "masculine ideal" of Nazi Germany comes under threat (by feminism, the literary and artistic Avant-Garde, socialism and sexual deviancy etc), we see it resorting to the fascist repression made possible by violent father figures (Hitler etc), all of whom repress sexual excess and transfer it instead to a kind of violent machismo.Visconti, however, was also influenced by Lukacs, a Marxist theorist who argued against modernism. And so Visconti also portrays the aristocracy and bourgeoisie (ie Old Germany) in various states of decline as they are infected and dominated by the future (Nazism). Visconti's Nazis - the new order - are themselves emblematic of the transmutation of every (sexual) impulse into predation (figured most obviously in the paedophilia of the Baron's son and the raping of his own mother), the drive for power, and finally the death wish (in the Freduain sense; desire cloaks death).This is made most clearest during a scene in which SS troops raid what is essentially a Socialist Alliance "homosexual sex party" and execute everyone present. Here, Nazism's dream of a classless state is revealed to be false. The sexual self (ie, the totally liberated moment or movement) is always contained and then destroyed by the demands of power (be it feudal, capitalist, monarchist etc), an act which itself serves as a metaphor for Hitler's annihilation of certain factions to please others, be they the SS, the military or the Prussian ruling class. So unlike Bertolucci and Passolini, it's not only a case of fascism spiralling out of the authoritarian family, but of fascism legitimising a kind of private deviancy (always aligned with predatory power) inside the family whilst publicly crushing all similar displays. In this way Visconti sets up a weird tension, the SS son molesting children and raping his mother behind closed doors whilst SS gangs brazenly kill SA officials, Jews and homosexuals in public.Beyond this you have the usual pros and cons of Visconti, "The Damned" too reliant on dialogue, boardroom discussions and the format of the nineteenth century novel. Like most of Visconti's films it observes as powerful "families" jostle for position, the "old order" trying to guarantee its future but failing to be absorbed into the "new consensus". Unlike these films, its tone is haunting and nightmarish.8.5/10 - See "The Garden of the Finzi-Continis".

"The Damned" is a masterfully horrific film about the decline of a family of wealthy steel magnates – the Essenbecks – in Nazi Germany. Director Luchino Visconti's main interest in making this film is in showing how evil corrupts Friedrich (Dirk Bogarde), Martin Essenbeck (Helmut Berger), and his mother (Ingrid Thulin). "The Damned" features a number of horrors, including brutal murders, a molested child driven to suicide, and a brutal rape. There is almost a temptation to criticize these scenes for displaying unmotivated violence. Yet Visconti does have a reason for presenting "The Damned" in this way. He wants to depict Nazism as decadent, narcissistic, and erotic. The ideas of Wilhelm Reich are also at play here. Martin is a repressed homosexual transformed into a pliant drug addict by his mother. The film's message appears to be that Martin's repression of his homosexuality leads him to embrace Nazism and become an SS officer. Yet Nazism does not contain Martin's uncontrolled sexual impulses, but merely perverts them. Martin becomes a sadistic brute who sexually molests a young girl. He seeks emotional and even sexual comfort in the bosom of the state, which he subconsciously equates with his mother. This strange association explains why Martin, in true Reichian fashion, brutally rapes his mother.Martin is not the only character to fall from grace. Friedrich's (Dirk Bogarde) ambition to become the president of the Essenbeck steel works and marry into the Essenbeck family leads him to form an unholy alliance with a number of unscrupulous Nazis, including Aschenbach (Herbert Griem) whose idea of socializing is to pontificate on the virtues of the Nazi ideology. This Faustian pact with the Nazis turns out to be a big mistake, opening the door for the Nazification of the steel company and the moral corruption of key members of the Essenbeck family. Then there is the mother (Ingrid Thulin) who feeds Martin's addiction to drugs and plans to marry Friedrich. Visconti's message here seems to be that Friedrich and the mother are not only unpleasant, but that their continued descent into evil results in their own destruction. Friedrich is already showing regret about his collusion with the Nazis in a very awkward love scene with the mother, but by then it is too late.Like all of his films, Visconti shows himself to be a master of cinematography. The camera moves skillfully along with the characters. The images are deliberately grim, suggesting evil and darkness at every corner and sometimes even a manic insanity. "The Damned" is not a masterpiece, but it is engrossing.

Visconti's bizarre examination of a powerful and wealthy family whose downfall both parallels the rise and foreshadows the fall of the Third Reich is never less than entertaining, it has to be said. Certainly not to the tastes of all, it seems to revel in the decadence and debauchery it portrays in much the same way a tabloid paper feels it has to publish dozens of photographs of the pornography it pretends to condemn. Look how depraved these incestuous cross-dressing Nazis were; apart from one pious voice the whole nation, it seems, is condemned with one broad stroke and we are given no contrast against which to compare such depravity.The characters of the Von Essenbach family are each representative of a facet of 30s German character, all joined in a desire for power or the need to be protected beneath its wing, prone to making strident and unyielding demands and dismissing the rights of those who stand in their way. This leaves us with a morally repugnant lot, none of whom we can empathise with, and also tempts the cast to overact at times. Ingrid Thulin is particularly guilty, and even the usually laconic Dirk Bogarde becomes overwrought at times.For all these faults, the film is shamelessly entertaining and fascinating to watch. It plays like a Shakespearian tragedy at times, and you feel compelled to see it through to the end just to find out the fate of each character.