Criterion Blu-ray Film Review

The Damned (1969) • Blu-ray [Criterion Collection]

The story of a wealthy German family’s entanglement with the Nazi regime in the early-1930s.

The Italian title given to Luchino Visconti’s lurid, sordid drama of Nazi Germany’s first year says everything about the director’s aspirations: La Caduta Degli Dei, “the fall of the gods”. It confirms with its clear allusion to Wagner’s Götterdämmerung that the people in Visconti’s film aren’t to be taken literally as individual Germans in 1933. Instead, they’re symbols of the country as it slid into totalitarian horror, and symbols of the human potential for evil, whether as active participants or passive enablers. The “fall” here is partly the loss of the old-money Essenbeck family’s industrial empire to the upstart Nazis, but also a moral fall.

Still, just as Warner Bros. insisted the movie be made in English, Visconti had to settle for The Damned (a title which had confusingly been recently used by Joseph Losey in 1963) and also for a comparatively dull Maurice Jarre score where he’d wanted Wagner. Compromises like these, and the…