You Pays Your Money and Takes Your Choice

Luchino Visconti evidently belongs to what might be called the Freight Train School of film-making. In The Damned, he has strung together a picture with something in it for nearly every political and sexual hang-up of the twentieth century. At the outset there is a demure disclaimer that the characters depicted resemble anyone living or dead; but the film purports to be the story of a German steel dynasty which can only be Krupp’s, and it borrows freely (though God knows, loosely) from the actual history of the Krupp family. It also faithfully reenacts Hitler’s famous raid on Ernst Roehm and his homosexual SA camarilla in 1934. So much for the disclaimer.

But, as I say, it is quite a smorgasbord. Are you just a good old World War II anti-Nazi like (say) Jimmy Wechsler, permanently traumatized by Hitler? Then The Damned is for you; no 1943 potboiler, of the kind so embarrassingly ubiquitous on late-night TV these days, ever depicted Nazi Germany as more quintessentially evil. On the other hand, I have no doubt that the late George Lincoln Rockwell’s fading minilegions will flock to see it too; at the fade-out the Nazis are winning all over the place (it is still only 1934), and it will surely be gratifying to would-be gauleiters to see how the real articles did it in the Good Old Days.

WA

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William A. Rusher

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Luchino Visconti evidently belongs to what might be called the Freight Train School of film-making. In The Damned, he has strung together a picture with something in it for nearly every political and sexual hang-up of the twentieth century. At the outset there is a demure disclaimer that the characters depicted resemble anyone living or dead; but the film purports to be the story of a German steel dynasty which can only be Krupp’s, and it borrows freely (though God knows, loosely) from the actual history of the Krupp family. It also faithfully reenacts Hitler’s famous raid on Ernst Roehm and his homosexual SA camarilla in 1934. So much for the disclaimer.

But, as I say, it is quite a smorgasbord. Are you just a good old World War II anti-Nazi like (say) Jimmy Wechsler, permanently traumatized by Hitler? Then The Damned is for you; no 1943 potboiler, of the kind so embarrassingly ubiquitous on late-night TV these days, ever depicted Nazi Germany as more quintessentially evil. On the other hand, I have no doubt that the late George Lincoln Rockwell’s fading minilegions will flock to see it too; at the fade-out the Nazis are winning all over the place (it is still only 1934), and it will surely be gratifying to would-be gauleiters to see how the real articles did it in the Good Old Days.