Lucidno
THE NIGHT PORTER (1974 review)
From Monthly Film Bulletin, November 1974, Vol. 41, No. 490. — J.R.
Portiere di Notte, Il (The Night Porter)
Italy, 1973
Director: Liliana Cavani
Cert—X. dist—Avco-Embassy. p.c—Lotar Film. A Robert Gordon Edwards/Esa De Dimone production. A Joseph E. Levine presentation for Ital Noleggio Cinematografico. p—Robert Gordon Edwards. p. staff– Umberto Sambuco, Dino di Dionisio, Roberto Edwards, (Vienna) Otto Dworak. asst. d–Franco Cirino, Paola Tallarigo, (Vienna) Johann Freisinger. sc–Liliana Cavani, Italo Moscati. story–Liliana Cavani, Barbara Alberti, Amedeo Pagani. ph–Alfio Contini. co1–Technicolor; prints by Eastman Colour. col. sup–Ernesto Novelli. ed–Franco Arcalli. a.d–Nedo Azzini, Jean-Marie Simon. set dec–Osvaldo Desideri. m/m.d– Daniele Paris. cost–Piero Tosi. sd. ed–Michael Billingsley. sd. rec– Fausto Ancillai. sd. re-rec–Decio Trani. post-synchronisation d–Robert Rietty. sd. effects–Roberto Arcangeli. l.p–Dirk Bogarde (Max), Charlotte Rampling (Lucia), Philippe Leroy (Klaus), Gabriele Ferzetti (Hans), Giuseppe Addobbati (Stumm), Isa Miranda (Countess Stein), Nino Bignamini (Adolph), Marino Mase’ (Atherton), Amedeo Amodia (Bert), Piero Vida (Day Porter), Geoffrey Copleston (Kurt), Manfred Freiberger (Dobson), Ugo Cardea (Mario), Hilda Gunther (Greta), Nora Ricci (Neighbour), Piero Mazzinghi (Concierge), Kai S. Seefield (Jacob). 10,603 ft. 118 mins. English version.
Vienna, 1957. Max, a sadistic SS officer during the war, conceals his former identity in a job as night porter in a luxury hotel, where he caters to the jaded tastes of some of his former colleagues, also in hiding at the hotel. Together they have formed a self-styled ‘therapy’ group, accumulating evidence of their former atrocities so that it can be destroyed while they exorcise their feelings of guilt. Shortly before Max’s past is due to be reviewed by the group, the unexpected arriyal at the hotel of Lucia Atherton — a concentration camp victim of Max’s sadism who became his lover, and is presently married to an opera conductor — stirs up Max’s memories as well as her own. Lucia fails to reveal Max’s identity to her husband, and when the latter leaves for Frankfurt she chooses to stay behind, promising to join him later in his concert tour. Before long, she and Max have resumed their sado-masochistic affair. Max refuses to acknowledge Lucia to his former colleagues, and after she moves in with him and ignores the efforts of the police to locate her, Max’s fellow Nazis lay siege to the flat, fearful that the couple’s behaviour will lead to their own exposure. After access to food, electricity and water has been cut off for an extended, period, Max and Lucia emerge from the flat in their former outfits — his SS uniform and her party dress — and are shot down on a bridge.
A plot composed almost exclusively of implausible characters and improbable events; sound recording and post-synchronisation atrocious even by Italian potboiler standards; shots, dramatic situations and gimmicks seemingly imitated or approximated from Last Tango in Paris; sluggish pacing and laborious exposition . . . Theoretically, one could be describing the latest anonymous exploitation film. What chiefly distinguishes The Night Porter from this familiar category are two significant factors, possibly related: (1) the film has a Nazi-related theme which it pursues with ponderous intransigence, and (2) it has been widely acclaimed for its seriousness, audacity and overall achievement by critics on both sides of the Atlantic. Perhaps the only credible explanation of this second factor is a simple confusion of thought with deed, or subject with treatment. There might, conceivably, be something to be said for the film’s potential thematic interest apart from the sure-fire formula of combining sex and Nazis — namely, the sexual impulses that are suggested or touched upon by the Nazi horrors, and the related ambiguities reflected in Max’s shift of role from persecutor to victim. If Cavani had established her intrigue in either a believable setting (e.g., a Grand Hotel containing more guests than her central characters) or a stylistically coherent non-realistic one, and delineated it with even a modicum of visible intelligence, originality, consistency or taste, the strength of her theme alone might have sustained the film. But quite apart from the numerous Last Tango replays (which extend from a virtual substitution of jam for butter in a ridiculously over-acted sexual interlude to a fancy pan across a bridge in nothing less than the final shot), the performances are sufficient to place the film in the realm of the grimly risible: Charlotte Rampling, looking rather embalmed throughout, alternating between two or three c1iché poses (usually Caged Animal or Martyred Jeanne d’Arc), and Dirk Bogarde’s understandably uncomfortable efforts to link together all the stray notions of his character dictated by the script into some recognisable form of behaviour, which results in the spectacle of a talented actor skating in grease — and a parody of the various tics he has used to better effect in previous sadist or masochist roles. As if this weren’t enough, the concentration camp flashbacks are delivered with all the trappings of the worst salon art: trite arrangements of bed- frames to suggest prison bars bathed in kitschy hues of copper or smoky blue, decked out with arty camp-victim poses, and accompanied at one point by passages from The Magic Flute – as if to guarantee the project’s cultural credentials, and at the same time certify the universal significance of a subject that the director apparently felt needed some tarting up. Beside such a sensibility, the visual rhetoric of a film like The Pawnbroker (with its otherwise comparable flashbacks) seems in comparison a model of integrity, formal daring, ethical courage and restraint.
JONATHAN ROSENBAUM
first published in
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