The Damned

On the night of 30th June 1934, Nazi troops moved against Ernst Rohm’s paramilitary SA (Sturmabteilung) in a putsch that lasted three days and saw over 85 deaths. Hitler’s antagonism against the SA owed to their continued independence; the putsch was also an excuse for striking at his critics, demonstrating the force and deadly efficiency of his own SS troups, and consolidating his power base.

The carefully orchestrated coup was called Operation Hummingbird, but has gone down in history as the Night of the Long Knives.

This nefarious moment in German history provides the 20-minute centrepiece to Luchino Visconti’s ‘The Damned’. Subtitled ‘Götterdämmerung’ (trans. “twilight of the gods”), the Wagnerian reference is apposite. Visconti’s film is operatic to the point of being overwrought, particularly in its increasingly melodramatic last half hour.

The stage upon which this opera of Nazi-ism, power struggles, sexual ambiguities and compromised morality plays out is the Essenbeck Steelworks, owned by a powerful industrial family whose political allegiance is important to Machiavellian SS officer Aschenbach (Helmut Griem). ‘The Damned’ opens with a birthday party for the ageing Baron von Essenbeck who announces his retirement, leading to instantly fractured interrelationships inside and outside of the family as the appointment of the new director of the company hangs in the balance.

The rank outsider* in all of this is Frederick Bruckmann (Dirk Bogarde); however, he has two aces up his sleeve: his relationship with the Baron’s widowed daughter, Sophie (Ingrid Thulin), and the backing of Aschenbach.

Through Aschenbach’s machinations and Sophie’s borderline erotic manipulation of her sexually confused son Martin (Helmut Berger) – whose predilections range from cross-dressing to paedophilia to mother-fixation – Bruckmann is appointed director of the steelworks. But it’s not long before his obsession with complete control over both firm and family – not to mention his reluctance to take the political hard line that his deal with the devil (or rather his suave earthly representative Aschenbach) requires – leads to his downfall.

Bogarde excels as Bruckmann: a vivid, complex study of ambition, fear, moral cowardice, desperation and, finally, abject defeat. Ingrid Thulin goes a wee bit ‘Lady Macbeth’ towards the end, but by this point Visconti’s shovelling on the theatrics like there’s tomorrow. Helmut Berger, Visconti’s homo-erotic camera clearly favouring him over the rest of the cast, gives a memorable performance if sometimes for the wrong reasons; but there’s no doubt that he gets across Martin’s vicious amorality.

Further down the cast list, Umberto Orsini and Charlotte Rampling deliver compelling turns.

But it’s Helmut Griem who eclipses even Bogarde. “That one may smile, and smile, and be a villain,” to quote ‘Hamlet’. Aschenbach smiles, and smiles, and soothes, and coerces and chills. Martin’s demonic ascension and engineering of Bruckmann and Sophie’s fate is nothing but the movement of Aschenbach pulling the strings. Griem plays him with infinite charm and assured understatement. Amidst the emotional excesses of Visconti’s lurid epic, he’s the calm centre of stillness, composure and complete ruthlessness.



*Readers of Sheridan Morley’s book on Dirk Bogarde’s early career will, I hope, forgive the pun.

Ill Met by Moonlight

By 1957, Powell and Pressburger were moving towards the annulment of their partnership. It had been an almost decade-long decline.

‘Gone to Earth’ was a slab of melodrama, ‘The Elusive Pimpernel’ a bit of pantomime camp, ‘The Tales of Hoffmann’ a failed attempt to recapture the magnificence of ‘The Red Shoes’, and ‘O … Rosalinda!!’ a self-indulgent flop, audiences showing either a singular lack of interest in operetta or an understandable caution in approaching films with three exclamation marks in the title.

Their last two outings were a return to the war movies that had made their name; but whereas the eight-film run of classics between ‘The Spy in Black’ in 1939 and the ‘A
Matter of Life and Death’ in 1946 were made during the war years (the latter in production just as the war was reaching its conclusion), ‘The Battle of the River Plate’ and ‘Ill Met By Moonlight’ came ten years afterwards: would that curious alchemy which made art of the propaganda film still function in retrospect?

Well, not with ‘The Battle of the River Plate’. Although a decent enough account overall of the sinking of the Graf Spree, Powell’s decision to film the movements of ships at sea resulted a highly cinematic footage utterly at odds with the patently studio-bound falsity of the rest of the film.

Which leaves us with ‘Ill Met By Moonlight’, their swansong, its box-office swelled by Dirk Bogarde in his dishy, matinee-idol prime, and again another account of an actual incident from the war.

The source material was a book by W. Stanley Moss recounting the exploits in Crete of Major (now Sir) Patrick Leigh-Fermor, an authentically individualistic English hero (as T.E. Lawrence to the desert, so Leigh-Fermor to the Mediterranean), and his successful kidnap of a high ranking German officer.

Powell and Pressburger’s take on Leigh-Fermor is romanticism writ large. Bogarde’s swooning performance is entirely in keeping with the sense of hero-worship with which Powell saturates the film. P&P favourite Marius Goring essays the German general with distinctly more gravitas.

And herein lies the enigma (and pleasure) of the film. Goring’s career office is a professional, but courteous with it: a Nazi and a gentleman. (P&P had been daring enough to portray ‘good’ Germans even in the war years: the harmless Vogel (Niall MacGinnis) in ‘49th Parallel’ and the dignified Kretschmar-Schuldorff (Anton Walbrook) in ‘The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp’.) Leigh-Fermor, however, is portrayed as a gentleman amateur. Ian Christie, in his wonderful study of Powell and Pressburger’s films, ‘Arrows of Desire’, describes Bogarde/Leigh-Fermor as “dressed as a comic-opera bandit when we first see him”. He goes on:

“… the whole story is framed, not only by its Shakespearean title but by a reference to the Odyssey … If the [film’s] realization does not live up to its promise or ambition, it remains nonetheless an intriguing stage in the military ideology that runs from Blimp … a defiant assertion of the gentleman-amateur ideal at a time when Britain was learning its new role in the world of superpower conflict and the end of Empire” (‘Arrows of Desire’, Faber & Faber, p.78).

Which is absolutely spot-on. Everything from Bogarde’s dashing leading man status to Goring’s good grace in defeat to the studied poignancy of the ending (the German officer tries to ‘buy’ the affections of a local Cretan child, with a view to leaving clues to his whereabouts, only for the lad – his loyalties hitherto in doubt – to be revealed as unswayable in his devotion to Leigh-Fermor). Which only makes the film’s far-and-away best scene that much more effective in its swift, no-nonsense efficiency.

Leigh-Fermor visits his contact, a dentist, in a Nazi-held town. Unbeknownst to him, he is followed. When the Nazi patrol (its sergeant a young Christopher Lee, speaking German like a native) burst in, Leigh-Fermor finds himself hustled into the dentist’s chair, a white bib-like cloth draped around his neck. Terrified of dentists, L-F plays along, not batting an eyelid when the patrol come stomping in, but losing his cool as soon as the dentist, hands shaking from fear, starts up the drill. The Nazi sergeant has his suspicions and pulls the cloth from his neck; L-F is clutching a pistol under it. He summarily executes the German soldiers. There’s nothing do-or-die or remotely heroic about the scene; he does it because he’s scared of dentists.

Seven years after ‘The Blue Lamp’ and just five after ‘Hunted’, and a full decade or more before the darker characterisations of ‘The Damned’ and ‘The Night Porter’, the anti-romantic-hero element of Bogarde’s cinematic persona is revealed in a brief lightning flash. So too the adaptability and menacing screen presence of Christopher Lee. And between them, a scene effective enough to transform what could have been Powell and Pressburger’s death rattle into a respectable send-off.

These Foolish Things

Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s ‘Despair’ (1978) was almost Dirk Bogarde’s last film, an experience that soured his already sceptical feelings about film-making. Fassbinder re-edited the film drastically, despite his star’s preference of the original cut. “He fucked up my performance” was Bogarde's blunt assessment during the BBC interview ‘By Myself’ which aired shortly after he received his knighthood in 1992.

He withdrew to Clermont, his house in France (referred to in the autobiographies as Le Pigeonnier) and concentrated his efforts on his writing, only taking the occasional bit of television work out of financial necessity. Directors continued to offer him scripts; Bogarde inevitably politely declined.

Fortunately for cineastes, Bertrand Tavernier tempted him out of retirement in 1990, a full twelve years since he had last appeared before a movie camera, with the lead role in the intimate family drama ‘These Foolish Things’ (or ‘Daddy Nostalgie’ to use the indigenous title).

‘These Foolish Things’ is the better title. ‘Daddy Nostalgie’ hints at a certain sentimentality. Nothing could be further from Tavernier’s aesthetic. There is not a trace of false emotion here.
Tony* (Bogarde) is a well-travelled Englishman living out his retirement in seaside villa in France which he shares with his humourless and emotionally inexpressive French wife Miche (Odette Laure). Following an operation, Tony finds himself almost housebound. As he supposed recuperation progresses, it becomes apparent that the surgery might not have been successful.
The couple’s all-but-estranged daughter Caroline (Jane Birkin) returns to the villa to stay with them and help nurse her ailing father. For the first time in their respective lives, father and daughter get to know each other. The poignancy of their relationship has its counterpoint in Tony and Miche’s fractious marriage.

With its deceptively slight narrative and numerous scenes of marital disharmony, ‘These Foolish Things’ could easily have been tedious, talky and decidedly uncinematic. Three things redeem it: the beautiful widescreen cinematography, effortlessly establishing location and mood; Tavernier’s intelligent handling of a fine, literate screenplay by Colo Tavernier O’Hagan; and Dirk Bogarde, giving his finest performance since ‘Death in Venice’. Waspish, sarcastic and yet, at heart, utterly vulnerable, Bogarde’s characterisation of Tony is multi-layered and completely real.

‘These Foolish Things’ is about a man in the twilight of his years. It is illuminated by one of Bogarde’s most desperately moving performances (kudos to Laure and Birkin, too; the film is, after all, a chamber piece) and stands as a fitting swansong to a great actor.

*And how bittersweet must it have been for Bogarde to play a character with the same first name as his then-deceased partner of fifty years, Anthony Forwood?

PERSONAL FAVES: Death in Venice

Thomas Mann’s ‘Death in Venice’ had already been adapted, operatically, by Benjamin Britten before Luchino Visconti came to film it in 1971. Both Britten and Visconti were gay, which perhaps accounts for the common misconception that the film is about an old man’s obsessive lust for a boy barely in his teens.

Wrong. The film, like its literary source, is about many things, not least the nature of art and beauty and the thorny question of where, between the two, the humanity of the artist resides. There is nothing perverse or cynical about the film. For all of its melancholy it is, in fact, one of the most beautiful works of film art in the history of the medium.

Mann’s novella was inspired by the author’s encounter with Gustav Mahler during a train journey. Shocked at Mahler’s physical appearance (the haggard Aschenbach at the end of the story, powdered, a line of mascara running down his face, is Mann’s fictive approximation). And it was for the purposes of fiction that the character became Gustav von Aschenbach, a writer of books, not of music.

A director whose forte was his immaculate attention to detail, particularly in the observation of social rituals (the minutiae of Mann’s descriptions are captured in vivid and poetic images), Visconti’s film is a faithful adaptation but for one crucial alteration.

The director’s most decisive aesthetic decision was to allay the character more closely with the man who inspired him. Thus the Aschenbach of the film is a composer - moreover, by dint of the soundtrack, Aschenbach is Mahler. Evocative use is made of his Third and Fifth Symphonies, particularly the latter’s adagietto. (Even Karajan, a non-Mahlerian, was taken by the film enough to record the Fifth with the Berlin Philharmonic.)

Visconti also adds a series of flashbacks which concern, variously, Aschenbach’s attitude to his art, the death of his beloved infant daughter (viewed in this light, the effeminate young boy Tadzio [Bjorn Andresen], of an age Aschenbach’s daughter would have been, becomes almost a replacement for the composer’s fatherly devotion), and his debasement in the boudoir of a hooker - this last being the event that instils in him an obsession with cerebral and artistic purity and dignity.

A key flashback sees him in heated debate with Alfred (Mark Burns), a fellow composer:

Aschenbach: The creation of beauty and purity is a spiritual act.

Alfried: No, Gustav. Beauty belongs to the senses, only to the senses.

Aschenbach: You cannot reach the spirit from the senses. It’s only through complete domination of the senses that you can achieve wisdom, truth and purity.

At the risk of oversimplifying a deep, profound and thought-provoking film, ‘Death in Venice’ is about an artist who, suffering from nervous exhaustion, takes a supposedly recuperative sojourn only to be confronted with a vision of purity and beauty, but one that, by definition of his reaction to it, completely invalidates the principles by which he has tried to live.

The last half hour is shattering. Scenes dealing with Aschenbach’s increasing bad health, played out against a plague-ridden Venice stained with disinfectant and ravaged by fires, bookend the final flashback sequence, which demonstrates Aschenbach’s failure as an artist and public vilification.

Throughout, Dirk Bogarde’s performance as Aschenbach has been perfectly nuanced and intricately mannered, suggesting through the minimum of dialogue (he is onscreen the whole time, but entire stretches of the film pass without him uttering a word) the brittleness and emotional void of a man who has kept his humanity tightly under wraps. The last quarter of the film, however, is acting on another level. Bogarde progressively tears away layer after layer of his character, culminating in a moment of heart-breaking acceptance as Aschenbach finally attempts to reach out to someone only for it to be too late. He slumps back into his deckchair; the man and the artist are dead. It is arguably one of the most moving death scenes that any actor has played.

For Bogarde, Aschenbach was more than just a role:

The five months of work on ‘Death in Venice’ had been the hardest I had ever known for stress and mental strain; daily I had struggled with a personality … who had overwhelmed me to such an extent that every single function I performed in my daily life was as he would have done. I was never without his influence at any time, even in sleep. - Dirk Bogarde, ‘An Orderly Man’, chapter 1.

A Bridge Too Far

It's easy to see how Richard Attenborough's 'A Bridge Too Far', based on Cornelius Ryan's exhaustive account of Arnhem debacle Operation Market-Garden, was intended as a corrective to the big-budget, all-star-cast jingoist war epics so popular in the 60s and 70s.

For all intents and purposes, it takes its cue from the likes of 'The Longest Day' - epic running time (just shy of three hours); huge, intricately-orchestrated set-pieces; famous faces all over the shop (Sean Connery, Gene Hackman, Michael Caine, James Caan, Sir Laurence Olivier ... the list would be longer than the article itself if I listed everyone); an almost inappropriately stirring score by John Addison. In fact, it differs in only one crucial way.

It's about a fuck-up.

An Allied fuck-up.

This aspect of 'A Bridge Too Far' was never going to be its most popular attribute. And yet, when it was released, the almost inevitable storm of controversy that greeted it centred almost solely around Dirk Bogarde.

Here's Christian Browning, son of General Sir Frederick Browning (the real-life character Bogarde played) on his performance: "... poncing around with white gloves. Those gloves! Dirk played Anacleto in 'The Singer Not the Song' more or less the way he played Dad." (Quoted in John Coldstream's biography.) Here's co-star Edward Fox (quoted in same): "He was impersonating Freddie Browning completely wrongly. It was as if he set out to play him as a poofy waiter."

(The very idea of Edward Fox, whose okay-chaps-what-ho performance isn't far short of parody, criticising a Bogarde characterisation as 'poofy' is hilariously ludicrous.)

So why all the Dirk bashing?

The answer goes back to one of the two reasons Bogarde accepted the role (three if you count the fact that Attenborough, by dint of a holiday home in Provence, was more or less Bogarde's neighbour): (i) a $100,000 salary, and (ii) Bogarde was first billed and his character has 'the Line'.

Discarding the former (okay, $100K is decent chunk now and was a fuckload back in 1977, but it was still peanuts compared to what the American cast members earned), Bogarde's ego was certainly stroked by the latter. Because so many big stars were cast, billing was alphabetical: therefore, before Caan, Caine and Connery, let alone the likes of Elliott Gould or Ryan O'Neal, Dirk Bogarde stands as top-billed actor.

Then there's the Line. Again, a note of explanation: Browning was under considerable pressure from High Command (specifically Montgomery) to deliver an against-the-odds success with Operation Market-Garden. Concerned over the logistics, dubious about taking Arnhem, Browning famously averred that they'd be going "a bridge too far". It's worth bearing in mind that he said this before the operation.

William Goldman's script - in all other respects a clear-sighted adaptation of Ryan's book - indulges in a jarring anachronism. Because Goldman opted to omit the critical meeting between Montgomery and Browning, Browning is essentially cast as the villain of the piece: monomanicially pushing the mission through despite everyone else's misgivings, fixated in true death-or-glory stylee that Market-Garden is infallible. Worse, in order to retain the line that gives both book and film their title, he has Browning foppishly muse, after the operation goes disastrously wrong, "Well, as you know, I've always thought that we tried to go a bridge too far". Which basically makes Browning sound like a pompous dick, blithely stating the obvious after the fact.

The script, however, is the writer's business; in this case an American scribe's take on a British snafu. That a British director happily filmed it is a matter for discussion elsewhere.

As regards Bogarde's involvement .... call me biased (I'm a fan, after all), but wasn't he merely doing what all actors do - reading the lines and taking direction?

And his performance? He plays Browning as aloof, slightly disconnected (attributes I'd imagine are necessary for a high-ranking officer in wartime, who makes decisions, and by extension gambles with lives, coolly and dispassionately). In a film where so many of the other stars just be themselves (Connery is Connery, Caine is Caine) or ham it up (Hackman as a Polish officer) or phone in wooden performances (O'Neal) or play on their established persona (Maximilian Schell and Hardy Kruger reprise their rent-a-Kraut roles from any number of previous outings), Bogarde's performance is definitely not the worst. Far from it. In fact, perhaps only Anthony Hopkins emerges from the whole production as giving a rounded, subtle, memorable performance.

'A Bridge Too Far' has some stunningly brilliant scenes and a fair smattering of shruggingly ordinary ones. Attenborough's direction is often geared to spectacle when human drama needs to be at the fore (I'd love Peckinpah to have made this film, to have given it the sense of waste, loss, brutality, desperation and hard-won, shell-shocked humanity that permeates every frame of 'Cross of Iron'). Peckinpah had been a Marine. Dirk Bogarde, too, had a military background. He served in World War II. His evocative poem 'Steel Cathedrals' is still frequently anthologised in collections of war poetry.

I wonder how many other actors in 'A Bridge Too Far' had also worn the uniform for real, not just as a costume.

The Singer Not the Song

In his biography of Dirk Bogarde, John Coldstream infers that the actor’s disinterest in ‘The Singer Not the Song’, his last outing for the Rank Organisation, led to his deliberately camp performance, a factor crucial to the film’s failure.

Although Bogarde was at the height of his fame when it was released in 1961, audiences clearly preferred him as the lovable Dr Simon Sparrow, or as dashing war heroes in the likes of ‘Ill Met by Moonlight’ or ‘They Who Dare’.

Bogarde was given his choice of the two main roles in ‘The Singer Not the Song’, indicative of Rank's fears of losing him. Bogarde was already tired of the formulaic fare on offer, and ill-feeling between him and Rank supremo Earl St John had been in the wind for a while. Nonetheless, he was one of their biggest stars, and had already been lured to Hollywood for the Franz Liszt biopic ‘Song Without End’.

So Bogarde, swayed no doubt by a significant paycheque (Rank threw a serious budget at the production), took the role of Anacleto, the Mexican bandit chief who enters into a love-hate relationship with an unorthodox priest. Title as metaphor, geddit? The singer not the song = the priest not the religion.

Clad in black (most notably in the extremely tight-fitting leather trouser department), sneer fixed in place, eyebrow perpetually arched, a white cat on his knee in several scenes - this four years before the first onscreen appearance of Blofeld in ‘Thunderball’! - there can be no doubt that this was miscasting writ large. It says something, then, that Bogarde is easily the best thing about the film.

Equally miscast is John Mills at his most avuncular as Father Keogh, the priest who stands up to Anacleto. The script calls for a dynamic - almost an attraction - between the antagonists. Clearly, a much younger, more energetic actor should have been cast instead of Mills.

Of Mylene Demongeot, the European starlet who plays the girl caught between them (a role which should provide the film’s human centre), the kindest that can be said is that she was no actress.

Another misjudgement was retaining Nigel Balchin as scriptwriter. A writer at the forefront of twentieth century British realism (his best known work, ‘The Small Back Room’, was filmed by Powell and Pressburger in 1948), he was simply the wrong man to adapt Audrey Erskine-Lindrop’s melodramatic novel. Also, the geniuses at Rank saw fit to put the whole thing in the hands of Roy Ward Baker, director of ‘The One That Got Away’ and ‘A Night to Remember’, films which demonstrate attention to detail and emotional distance from otherwise thorny subject matter (a German POW’s successful escape bid in the former; the sinking of the ‘Titanic’ in the latter) - again, obviously the wrong man for the job.

In ‘Snakes and Ladders’ - his only autobiographical volume that deals in any detail with his Rank years - Bogarde includes a publicity still from ‘The Singer Not the Song’, but doesn’t mention the film by name anywhere in the text. No reason for him to; audiences stayed away in droves. Baker took the brunt: his career deflated; it was six years before he directed again, and even then he was reduced to trashy Hammer horror quickies.

Curiously - perversely, even - ‘The Singer Not the Song’ began to find its champions. Particularly in France, where it swiftly became a cult hit. Today it exists as a cinephile’s guilty pleasure, one that’s all the more enjoyable for knowing that Bogarde was in on the joke.

The Night Porter

An assertion contested in John Coldstream’s biography, but one that Dirk Bogarde comes back to time and again in his autobiographical writings, is his presence at the liberation of Belsen.

Only during really bad thunderstorms would I remember Belsen, and the girl, shorn head covered in scabs, face cracked with running sores from which she carelessly waved away the April flies, who grabbed my hand and stumbled with me along the sandy tracks amongst the filth … - Dirk Bogarde, ‘Snakes and Ladders’, chapter 3.

In April … we came to Belsen and the first concentration camp: a hideous ‘liberation’ this time which erased forever the erroneous idea we had that ‘Jerry is really just the same as us’. No way was he. - ‘Backcloth’, chapter 4.

In Vught Camp, or perhaps in Belsen, I can’t remember exactly which now (both were as terrible) I had wandered through huts piled high with the relics of human life: hair in mounds, higher than myself, from shaven heads. - ‘An Orderly Man’, chapter 9.

This latter passage is perhaps the most contentious in Bogarde’s memoirs, since he discusses the atrocities in the context of 'The Night Porter', easily the most controversial film in which he appeared.

Ironically, its genesis was in a visit the director, Liliana Cavani, made to Dachau for a documentary. Witnessing a well-dressed woman laying a wreath not to any of the victims but to the Nazi officer with whom she’d had a sexual relationship whilst an inmate, Cavani began to wonder what would happen if the officer had survived and they met again after the war.

Accordingly, ‘The Night Porter’ begins in 1957, former concentration camp commandant Max (Bogarde) holding down the titular job at the Hotel zum Oper, a fading remnant of Viennese society. He attends periodic reunions with comrades from the war at which they hold mock trials for each other. These serve two purposes: a cathartic 'defence', allowing them to reassert their loyalty to the Third Reich, and a weeding out of actual evidence or witnesses against them - such evidence swiftly disappears ... as do witnesses.

As Max's 'trial' approaches, he starts to get cold feet. His fellow officer Klaus (Philippe Leroy), the self-appointed "devil's advocate" in these proceedings, takes the whole thing very seriously. When Max states that he just wants to live a quiet, unassuming life ("like a church-mouse"), Klaus assumes Max has something to hide and decides to have him watched and followed.

It turns out that Max does have something to hide: the latest guest at the Hotel zum Oper, Lucia (Charlotte Rampling), wife of a world famous conductor in town to premiere a new production of Mozart’s Die Zauberflote*. Flashbacks weave through the fabric of Max's day-to-day life, revealing their earlier association: Lucia the submissive to Max’s sexual sadism, the whole perverse affair played out under the shadow of the swastika. In the film’s most provocative image, seized upon for the poster artwork, he exerts his sexual control by having her perform a torch song for the benefit of the other officers dressed only in trousers, braces, a pair of leather gloves and a Nazi cap. Costume has seldom been used in film to make such a darkly erotic statement.

This middle section of the film is Cavani's greatest achievement, the past and present interconnecting so fluidly; overlapping. As the Fifties-set sequence segues into a resumption of their relationship, this time with Lucia participating "of my own free will", things threaten to tip into melodrama. Lucia’s husband harries the Austrian authorities to investigate her disappearance; Max’s fellow Nazis get hot under the collar about the attention his indiscretions could draw to them. They stake out his apartment, preventing food or supplies from reaching him and Lucia. As Morgan Freeman puts it in 'Seven', "this ain't gonna have a happy ending" ...

To put it mildly, ‘The Night Porter’ upset quite a few people on its release and is still a cinematic hot potato now. My mother, one of staunchest Dirk Bogarde fans alive (her zeal for him in his matinee idol days is a good indication of how popular the man was - kind of the di Caprio of post-war British cinema), says of 'The Night Porter', "I didn't like him so much when he started making those kind of films."

The agitation of the mind? Just a bit! Cavani turns in a challenging and complex study of attraction, exploitation and twisted sexual dependence. She is aided by the searing performances of her two stars. Bogarde is disturbingly credible, his characterisation an extension of the ambitious, amoral Nazi sympathiser he had played four years earlier in Visconti’s ‘The Damned’.

But as compelling as Bogarde is, though, ‘The Night Porter’ is Charlotte Rampling’s film all the way**. Fearlessly putting herself through an emotional wringer from which most performers would recoil, she delivers a tour de force of acting. If you think, say, Emily Watson's performance in 'Breaking the Waves' or Nicole Kidman's in 'Dogville' are brave (and they are), then check out 'The Night Porter' - Rampling defines what a brave performance truly is.



*Its satirical treatment of Masonic secrecy notwithstanding, Die Zauberflote (The Magic Flute) is Mozart's most accessible opera, boasting some of his loveliest arias. Cavani turns it into a symphony of horrors, the way Kubrick did with Beethoven's Ninth in 'A Clockwork Orange'.

**Bogarde and Rampling became close friends after 'The Damned'. Bogarde only agreed to 'The Night Porter' so long as Rampling was cast as Lucia. His novel 'Voices in the Garden' is dedicated to Charlotte Rampling and her then-husband Jean-Michel Jarre.