DIRECTOR: Luchino Visconti
BOTTOM LINE: Many of the old German families sided with Hitler in the closing days of the Weimar Republic. Luchino Visconti’s “The Damned” centers on the Essenbecks (loosely based on the Krupp family) on the night of the Reichstag fire in early 1933. After a grand opening, the film misfires. Part of the reason is that Visconti edited the film around his then-lover Helmut Berger, who did his famous Marlene Dietrich impersonation. However, the absolute destruction came from Hollywood when it lopped off an additional thirty minutes on the film’s American release. As a result, Dirk Bogarde, Charlotte Rampling, and Helmut Griem, despite giving their all, fade in and out of the picture.
STREAMING: Amazon Prime Video
https://thebrownees.net/sixty-five-queer-films-made-under-the-hays-code-1934-1967
https://thebrownees.net/sixty-five-queer-films-made-under-the-hays-code-1934-1967-table-summary
https://thebrownees.net/fifty-two-post-hays-code-queer-films-released-in-the-decade-1967-1976
