Rating: 
Summary: Warner Bros. is Pathetic
Review: Once again WB fails completely with sound. Just listen to the difference in sound level between the main index screen and the film itself. The film sound has to be played at nearly full volume to be heard at any listenable level. Laughable. This happens repeatedly with Warner DVDs. ...
Rating:
Summary: Warner Bros. is Pathetic
Review: Once again WB fails completely with sound. Just listen to the difference in sound level between the main index screen and the film itself. The film sound has to be played at nearly full volume to be heard at any listenable level. Laughable. This happens repeatedly with Warner DVDs. ...
Rating: 
Summary: The Damned is - a masterpiece, a cinematic glory
Review: The Damned deals with the dark decadent sides of a very powerful, very rich, German family pre-WWII. Helmut Berger is spectacular as Martin von Essenbeck. Visconti sets the stage for a brilliant view into a seductive world of the bizzare. A must see, and see again! kind of film. Most do not understand the film, and therefore perceive it poorly. To understand this world one must step back in time to a place and time of extreme wealth, social unrest, political powerful, and decadence. The average viewer must understand this film has nothing to do with average people or average settings.
Rating:
Summary: Visconti Goes to Hell
Review: This astonishing if ultimately frustrating production fuses two motifs familiar from earlier Visconti works: the historical spectacular (Senso, The Leopard) and the family saga (La Terra trema, Rocco and His Brothers). But there almost any similarity with the director's early films ceases altogether. The Damned is history as Walpurgisnacht, focusing upon the peripeties of a German family of industrialists-evidently modeled upon the Krupps--whose secret repository of vices gives new meaning to the stock phrase "skeleton in the closet". On the eve of the Reichstag fire, the Von Essenbecks, owners of an important steel factory with close traditional ties to the military, gather to celebrate the birthday of the family patriarch, Joachim (Albrecht Schoenhals).
The heir to the dynasty is the elegant, amoral Martin (Helmut Berger), the only child of Joachim's son who has died in World War I and the beautiful, unscrupulous Baroness Sophie Von Essenbeck (Ingrid Thulin). Sophie is enamored of the ambitious Friedrich Bruckmann (Dirk Bogarde), and plans to use her son as a pawn to promote Friedrich's rise to power as head of the family business. Yet Sophie, in spite of her passionate love for Friedrich, is pathologically attached to Martin, who in turn has a psychopathic attraction to little girls. To guarantee the Nazis' control of the steel works, Friedrich conspires with the diabolical SS officer Aschenbach (Helmut Griem) in the killing of old Joachim, and later in the assassination of Martin's uncle Konstantin (Rene Koldehoff) during a homosexual orgy of SA followers on the Night of the Long Knives. But Friedrich's petty Machiavellian schemes to advance his own personal fortunes are readily outmatched by the superior cunning and ruthlessness of the Mephistophelean Nazis with whom he has sealed his Faustian pact.
It would be an understatement to characterize The Damned as oppressive. One of the standard conventions of older Italian films about fascism had been to pit bestial Nazis against numerically inferior but morally superior adversaries-the prototype is Roberto Rossellini's Open City. However, in this movie the forces of evil seem invincible. The film concludes-after Friedrich and Sophie have been forced to commit suicide following their nuptials-with images of a blast furnace: history being transformed into an inferno by the power of the total state.
Visconti further reinforces the pervasive mood of suffocation, an asphyxia nearly as much physical as moral and political, with a dazzling use of color mise en scène, emphasizing brown, black, and red shades, brilliantly realized by his directors of photography, Pasqualino De Santis and Armando Nannuzzi. Ever since shooting Senso, the director had shown a sensitivity to the expressive possibilities of color, but here he really outdid himself, without ever falling into the pictorialism that mars The Leopard as well as Death in Venice, and even more Ludwig. (Anyone who writes a book on the history of color cinematography one day will have to devote an entire chapter to Visconti.)
In his early films, Visconti seemed as much rooted in the 19th century as D.W. Griffith, Charlie Chaplin, or John Ford, a committed leftist who nevertheless owed as much to the humanistic realism of Alessandro Manzoni as to the economic and political doctrines of Karl Marx. But his career underwent a mutation in the1960s, signs of which are more evident in the febrile Sandra (1965), with its incestuous brother-sister relationship, than in the pallid, pious adaptation of Albert Camus' The Stranger (1967). The original, apocalyptically charged title of The Damned is La Caduti degli dei or The Fall of the Gods, an allusion to the final opera in The Ring of the Nibelung, bringing in both Richard Wagner-one of the spiritual godfathers of Nazism-as well as Wagner's vision of a fiery consummation of human history in the conflagration of Valhalla.
Yet Visconti's world ends in The Damned neither with a bang nor a whimper, but a fascist travesty of the heritage of European civilization, from art of ancient times down to the German cinema of the 1920s and 1930s. In this regard, the movie adopts the overtly deconstructive stance of postmodernism towards the past by showing how once viable cultural traditions can be corrupted and thus irretrievably lost. More of an allegory out of Sigmund Freud or Wilhelm Reich than a historical picture, The Damned does not at all pick up where The Leopard stopped, but anticipates in both dramatic strategy and style Stanley Kubrick's A Clockwork Orange, which in a memorable sequence juxtaposes the choral finale of Beethoven's 9th Symphony-already made grotesque by being performed on a synthesizer-with images of Adolf Hitler strutting before his rapt admirers extracted from Leni Riefenstahl's Triumph of the Will.
In my own opinion, Visconti was one of the great directors in the history of the cinema, but The Damned is an agonistic work rather than an accomplished one, the record of an artist's struggle with his own personal demons. Still, The Damned is far more impressive than any of Bernardo Bertolucci's psychosexual exercises in interpreting history-not to mention a rebuke to such Fellini psychedelic schlock as Julietta of the Spirits or Satyricon--and Visconti got invaluable support from his cast, especially Ingrid Thulin and Dirk Bogarde, although some viewers may have a problem with Helmut Berger as the epicene Martin. Warner Home Video asks quite a stiff price for this tape, which does not seem to me wholly justified. The picture quality is adequate in copies I have seen, but this version is the R rated one, missing some footage deleted to change the original X-the IMDb gives the Italian running time as 155 minutes-- and the aspect ratio is not 1.85 letterbox as it should be, but full screen television.
Rating: 
Summary: This is the cut version
Review: This is the "R" rated version of " The Damned".And all "R" rated versions are slightly cut and censoured.When will we see the uncut version ?
Rating: 
Summary: Yuck
Review: Wallowing around in all of the sensationalism is an interesting story--about how the German upper classes tried to use Hitler and wound up being used by him--and how a lucky few, particularly the Krupp family, lived to tell about it and keep getting rich . . .Unfortunately, this story gets lost because of two things--the Marxist viewpoint of the script, which sees Hitler as the natural product of capitalism (Hitler was the product of a lot of things, but he wasn't natural and whatever the numerous flaws of this particular economic system, it has yet to produce a fascist dictator is this country) and Visconti's determination to prove just how bad the Nazis were by piling on the perversions, never more so than in the character played by Helmut Berger, the cross-dressing, child-molesting, drug-abusing, mommy-loving Nazi. Apparently, just oppressing the entire German population, murdering six millions Jews, and starting World War II just wasn't wicked enough--to make sure we really hate the guy, he has to shoot up and wear nylons as well . . . Saddest of all, the film completely lacks the combination of epic sweep and intimate storytelling that characterizes Visconti's best films, such as SENSO and THE LEOPARD. It moves like lead, is lit like a campy horror film, and reduces one of the great evils of world history to camp. And that is a crime against art.
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