Claysaba Excellent, Without a doubt!!

Sexyloutak Absolutely the worst movie.

Taha Avalos The best films of this genre always show a path and provide a takeaway for being a better person.

Guillelmina The film's masterful storytelling did its job. The message was clear. No need to overdo.

MartinHafer "The Damned" is pretty much what I expected from a Luchino Visconti epic from the 1960s...it's very long, very slow and very mannered. However, unlike some of his other tediously long films ("The Leopard" and "Death in Venice", it is more watchable...possibly because it's so perverse.The film is about a rich industrialist family in Nazi Germany during the early years (1933 or so onward towards WWII). At the beginning, they seem relatively normal though over the course of the film, these conniving and avaricious folks sell their souls to the Nazi regime in order to maintain power and financial success. In the process, some get wrapped up in the SA (and are eventually destroyed), rape, incest (multiple times), cross-dressing and more...until by the end of the film most of them are dead and the remaining family member is a soul-less ghoul of a man.The story is a decent overview of the German industrialists in general. They were an evil lot who profited tremendously from the build up to the war. Plus, unlike most WWII films, you really see nothing of the country except life for this family. So, the persecution of Jews, Hitler's seizing power and much more are only mentioned in the film as opposed to being directly dealt with in the story. This was NOT a bad thing and makes the film very unique. What also is unique is how incredibly perverse everyone is. There is a lot of nudity...some of which is quite incestuous and kinky. So, it's clearly NOT a film to show the kids or your mother or Reverend Jenkins!Another important thing I must mention is the slowness of the film. It is NOT a movie the average person would enjoy and that is a trademark of many of Visconti's later films. This isn't so much a criticism but an observation. I much prefer his earlier work (such as "Rocco and His Brothers") but many seem to like his slow epics. To each his own....but like his other films, "The Damned" might have been better with a bit of editing and tightening up of the story.

Syl Luchino Visconti's film, "The Damned," is perhaps disturbing and brilliant all at once. Visconti, the director, set to make a film about the German Nazis and a fictional family, the Von Essenbechs, who are wealthy and prominent. There are some very disturbing moments in the film especially with Martin's character, At first, I thought he was a closet homosexual but he really is pedophile and his crime against his mother is unforgivable much less unforgettable. I won't spoil that scene for you but be warned, it's disturbing. Martin comes across as a deeply troubled man and he is in the role. Ingrid Thulin and Charlotte Rampling play mothers and wives in this Shakespearean style tragedy reminiscent of Macbeth and Hamlet. Thulin and Rampling are both brilliant in their roles. Sir Dirk Bogarde is believable as a German Frederick. The family's weaknesses are preyed upon by an outsider who sets them up to self-destruction. We know what happens to Germany after the film ends and that is the horror of what happen to Europe as well. Seeing Martin transform into a powerful Nazi from the beginning is unpredictable without manipulation. The violence and sexual debauchery is also unforgettable as well.

jonathanruano "The Damned" is a masterfully horrific film about the decline of a family of wealthy steel magnates – the Essenbecks – in Nazi Germany. Director Luchino Visconti's main interest in making this film is in showing how evil corrupts Friedrich (Dirk Bogarde), Martin Essenbeck (Helmut Berger), and his mother (Ingrid Thulin). "The Damned" features a number of horrors, including brutal murders, a molested child driven to suicide, and a brutal rape. There is almost a temptation to criticize these scenes for displaying unmotivated violence. Yet Visconti does have a reason for presenting "The Damned" in this way. He wants to depict Nazism as decadent, narcissistic, and erotic. The ideas of Wilhelm Reich are also at play here. Martin is a repressed homosexual transformed into a pliant drug addict by his mother. The film's message appears to be that Martin's repression of his homosexuality leads him to embrace Nazism and become an SS officer. Yet Nazism does not contain Martin's uncontrolled sexual impulses, but merely perverts them. Martin becomes a sadistic brute who sexually molests a young girl. He seeks emotional and even sexual comfort in the bosom of the state, which he subconsciously equates with his mother. This strange association explains why Martin, in true Reichian fashion, brutally rapes his mother.Martin is not the only character to fall from grace. Friedrich's (Dirk Bogarde) ambition to become the president of the Essenbeck steel works and marry into the Essenbeck family leads him to form an unholy alliance with a number of unscrupulous Nazis, including Aschenbach (Herbert Griem) whose idea of socializing is to pontificate on the virtues of the Nazi ideology. This Faustian pact with the Nazis turns out to be a big mistake, opening the door for the Nazification of the steel company and the moral corruption of key members of the Essenbeck family. Then there is the mother (Ingrid Thulin) who feeds Martin's addiction to drugs and plans to marry Friedrich. Visconti's message here seems to be that Friedrich and the mother are not only unpleasant, but that their continued descent into evil results in their own destruction. Friedrich is already showing regret about his collusion with the Nazis in a very awkward love scene with the mother, but by then it is too late.Like all of his films, Visconti shows himself to be a master of cinematography. The camera moves skillfully along with the characters. The images are deliberately grim, suggesting evil and darkness at every corner and sometimes even a manic insanity. "The Damned" is not a masterpiece, but it is engrossing.

patrick powell Anyone coming to The Damned cold who didn't know that the film was made by Luchino Visconti would write it off as a TV movie which would be lucky to get much exposure on TV. At its best it is bad, and at times it is quite simply awful. And this from a director who has, at times, been lauded as one of the world's best. So what went wrong? Well, I don't know. It is quite in explicable. The acting is bad, the dialogue often truly awful and the direction is flat and uninspired. At times the film is lifeless. On paper it will have looked quite promising: show how a ruthless employee in league with the boss's daughter-in-law schemes and murders his way to the top of German steel company. Set it all in the Thirties as the Nazis are consolidating their grip on power to reflect the nature of the regime. Nothing wrong with that, except that the moral - goodness, weren't the Nazis quite awful - is about as unoriginal as you might get. But something, many things, went wrong in the realisation: the collection of English, German and I don't know from where else actors does not work (and I for one have never bought that Dirk Bogarde is even half as good as everyone else likes to say. The man is often a ham). They seem to be acting in different films. It occurred to me that were the actors all Italian, the direction might have just about worked - no, I'm clutching at straws. The dialogue is often so utterly banal and 'audience informing' that it could have been written by bad student director. I'll give just one very telling example of how ill-conceived it all is, how wrong-headed: yes, the Nazis were thugs as the well-documented Night of the Long Knives murderously demonstrated. But Hitler and the rest of his gang were essentially lower-class mediocrities who gained power through a bizarre set of circumstances. And they had a dog-in-the-manger attitude to German nobility, high finance and industrial grandees. So when the authorities come to arrest Herbert, they would not arrive in a battalion of gun-toting, steel-helmeted, black-uniformed soldiers, banging on the door to be let in - especially so early on in the regime when their grip on power was still untested and shaky. That whole scene can serve to sum up just how bad this film is. This gets one star out of ten only because the system doesn't allow for awarding no stars.