The Damned (Italian: La caduta degli dei [literally, "The Fall of the Gods"], German: Die Verdammten (Götterdämmerung)) is a 1969 film by Luchino Visconti.
The Damned has often been regarded as the first of Visconti's films described as 'The German Trilogy'. The others are Death in Venice (1971) and Ludwig (1973). Henry Bacon (1998) specifically categorizes these films together under a chapter 'Visconti & Germany'. Visconti's earlier films had analysed Italian society during the Risorgimento and postwar periods. Peter Bondanella's Italian Cinema (2002) depicts the trilogy as a move to take a broader view of European politics and culture. Stylistically, "they emphasise lavish sets and costumes, sensuous lighting, painstakingly slow camerawork, and a penchant for imagery reflecting subjective states or symbolic values," comments Bondanella.
Plot
The film centers around the Essenbecks, a wealthy industrialist family who have begun doing business with the Nazi Party. On the night of the Reichstag fire, the family's conservative patriarch, Baron Joachim von Essenbeck, who represents the old aristocratic Germany and detests Hitler, is murdered. Herbert Thallmann, the family firm's vice president who openly opposes the Nazis, is framed for the crime. He escapes the grasp of the Gestapo, but his wife Elizabeth (Charlotte Rampling) and their children are sent to Dachau concentration camp in an effort to lure him to return. The empire passes to the control of an unscrupulous relative, the boorish SA officer Konstantin (René Koldehoff). Waiting in the wings is his son Günther (Renaud Verley), a sensitive and troubled student, and his nephew, Martin (Helmut Berger), an amoral playboy who is secretly molesting his young cousin as well as a poor Jewish girl. He is dominated by his possessive mother, Sophie (Ingrid Thulin), the widow of Baron Joachim's only son, a fallen World War I hero. Martin's drag performance as Marlene Dietrich in The Blue Angel, at his grandfather's birthday celebration, notorious at the time of the film's release, has since become an iconic image in cinema history.
Friedrich Bruckmann (Dirk Bogarde), an employee of the family firm and Sophie's lover, ascends in power despite his lowly social status, thanks to the SS officer and family relation Aschenbach (Helmut Griem), who pits family factions against each other to move their steel and munition works into state control. Friedrich kills Konstantin in the SS coup against the SA during its 1934 meeting to deal with its dissatisfaction with Hitler. Known as The Night of the Long Knives, the SA meeting and the subsequent executions of its leaders by the SS is portrayed as homosexual orgy and bloody gangster-style massacre. Aschenbach dismisses Friedrich, who now controls the family fortunes, as a weak social climber and not a loyal Nazi. Aschenbach subsequently makes a deal with the discounted and ignored heir, Martin, to remove Friedrich and his mother (who has mentored and encouraged Friedrich's rise) from control, so that he may get what is owed him. Martin sexually assaults his mother, who subsequently falls into a catatonic state. Now in the SS, he allows Friedrich (who has been decreed the name and title of von Essenbeck) to wed his mother, and then hands them the poison to commit suicide.
This film is a thinly veiled reference to the Krupp family of Germany, whose steel company was based in Essen, Germany.
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