The Damned

Visconti tells the rise of Nazism not as political chronology but as the rot inside a single family. The film runs from the Reichstag fire of 1933 to the Night of the Long Knives in 1934, watching both from the dinner table of the von Essenbecks, a steel dynasty. Friedrich Bruckmann, the works manager, ingratiates himself with the Nazis by murdering the family patriarch with the help of young Martin. The Night of the Long Knives sequence is the most contested passage. The SA gathering and the SS executions that follow are staged as a male revel that turns into blood and point-blank machine-gun fire, with the camera lingering over the bodies. Dirk Bogarde, Ingrid Thulin, Helmut Griem and Helmut Berger star. The screenplay by Nicola Badalucco, Enrico Medioli and Visconti was nominated for the Best Original Screenplay Oscar. Who it is for: viewers interested in how fascism was accepted as a class calculation rather than a moral one. Who it is not for: anyone expecting nuanced history. The film goes deliberately over the top, becoming opera at times and nightmare at others, and never attempts restraint.