On Screen

...Indeed, Thomas Mann is paid a dubious compliment by having the film's most melodramatic villain named Aschenbach, after the very different protagonist of Death in Venice...

...For such things we must be grateful to Pollack's direction and Robert E. Thompson's screenplay (though James Poe gets top screen-writing credit, his contributions do not survive in the final version...

...They show up spendidly in the two-shots on her partner's shoulders and appear to be the hands of both Death and the Maiden in one...

...The number of year's-best lists that feature The Damned, the votes it garnered at various critics' polls, the long lines of the damned que-ueing up outside the theater where it is playing, the sheer prestige of its maker, Luchino Visconti, make unavoidable a brief assessment of that director's career...

...Sydney Pollack says that the last straw is supposed to be the accidental ripping of Gloria's last pair of stockings, and I concede that such an absurdly anticlimactic minor mishap will drive the exasperated person over the brink...

...Scenes on the dance floor when nothing much is happening beyond the monotonous, lethargic roundelay, or when exacerbated contestants pick fights or just pick away at their partners...

...His reminiscences of childhood are neither too sarcastic nor too touching...

...But, but, but...

...But all kinds of scenes are managed with quiet brilliance...

...And, of course, it is dubbed into a variety of accents ranging from British to low-comedy that have traditionally left Hollywood smilingly unconcerned...

...Other roles are very neatly managed, too, both individually and in the here all-important ensembles...

...The various family hates, rivalries and intrigues are not, however, sketched in with noteworthy clarity or skill-only the bustle and ritualism of upper-class life in that era are well conveyed-and with the dialogue and characterization we are in for rough sailing right away...

...I suppose this is partly due also to her not being made into enough of a loser in other episodes of the film, and to Jane Fonda's deep, vital attractiveness, which even the dark triumphs of make-up, costuming and performance cannot quite overshadow...

...dime-fiction lushness like, "It's a young hate, pure and beautiful...

...I have not been able to see Ossessione, but on the basis of La Terra Trema I am willing to admit that he was one of the fathers of neo-realism...

...Usually Visconti is, besides other bad things, nonactor-prone, allowing such erratic performers as Burt Lancaster, Claudia Cardinale, Alain Delon, Farley Granger, Maria Schell, Michael Craig and Jean Sorel, among others, to foul up his films...

...Even during the regular dancing one partner has to support the other while he or she sleeps", here one or the other virtually has to carry the partner through lap after punishing lap, while the camera spins, lurches, staggers along...

...It is typical of the film's nonartistry that, instead of letting the able actor do his own impersonating, Dietrich's recording of a song is grafted onto the soundtrack...

...A film like White Nights, admired by Pauline Kael, strikes me as the ultimate in pseudo-art...

...The director, Sydney Pollack, and Lathrop keep the camera chasing after the dancers with good effect, particularly in the brutal elimination sprints...

...but he keeps the other aspects in firm control and handles the transitions effortlessly...

...As Gloria, that fine little actress, Jane Fonda, graduates into a fine big actress...

...And there are even fortuitous benefits: Miss Fonda has fascinatingly long, spatu-late fingers-hands that arc bony and poignant without being aristocratic or beautiful...

...It is, as customary with Visconti, a very long film whittled down from an even longer one, and crammed full of disparate elements, mismanaged in themselves and mutually conflicting...

...As I look at Visconti's later output, I find it pretentious, posturing, bloated and extremely empty under all the window-dressing...

...As Rocky, Gig Young, that ex-matinee-idol-that-failed, makes a spirited comeback...

...As for Bonnie Bedelia, she is an actress whose appeal lies in some kind of fundamental ordinariness, which she usually epitomizes for other people's delectation, not mine...

...It emerges, with Gig Young's strong collaboration, as a shattering and humane scene devoid of false heroism or histrionics...

...We begin in 1933, at a family dinner of the mighty Essenbeck clan, a faintly disguised and grossly fan-tasticated version of the Krupps...

...but his films always tend toward grand operatic gesture at the expense of subtle, searching honesty...

...In a sense, The Damned is an extension and elaboration of Sandra, which did not need elaboration, only oblivion...

...But even her hardness has (unlike in Spirits of the Dead) a lining of humanity, and there is something about her very toughness that repeatedly moves us...

...The script, by Nicola Bada-lucco, Enrico Medioli and Visconti himself, is undoubtedly trashy even in Italian...

...These scenes bristle with horror, and when Sailor, an over-age contestant, is dying of a heart attack, the film expresses his agonizing vision by going into slow motion...

...But here, as a famished, several months pregnant Okie wife, in the contest mostly for the food (her husband, by the way, is played with fine, fanatic, dumb-animal anger by Bruce Dern), she manages to be honestly gripping: naive, confused, downtrodden, yet willingly, tenaciously dancing, plodding, hanging on...

...There remain the flaws I discussed in my last column, and the ultimate incredibility of Gloria's suicide-at least as presented on the screen...

...He is not afraid of overplaying the two-bit mc aspect of his role, as overplayed it must be...

...The hysterical scene in the shower is sensibly played much more for the sickness and horror of it than for vulnerability and heartbreak...

...When she smilingly sings, out of the pit of her hopelessness, a mendaciously cheerful pop song and a few coins are tossed at her by the audience, the screen fills up with that dauntlessness and endurance that is the countertheme of this dirge with dancing...

...What impressed me most is that I did not really recognize Miss Fonda-and I don't mean the frizzed hair and other tricks of make-up, good as they are...

...And because the camera had to keep whirling along with the dancers, no ground-level lights, only overhead ones, could be used...

...There is bathos like, "I accepted a ruthless logic and I can never get away from it...

...Still, although They Shoot Horses, Don't They...

...This beginning, with the various members of the family, including friends and retainers, shown in their behind-the-scenes as well as on-the-scene stances, is the first and last effective sequence of The Damned, vaguely reminiscent of a family chronicle like Budden-brooks...

...scenes in the rest area, backstage, with people often too tired to rest properly, crumpled up in bizarre positions, or bickering, or snatching at pitifully inadequate remedies, or having hysterics...

...It is regrettable that instead of his bogus Marxism, for which he has no genuine understanding, Visconti should soft-pedal this other theme of his, for which he seems to have much more profound concern...

...The character emerges sleazy enough, yet not without a hardboiled charm, corrupt but with moments of solidity and even sympathy...

...And something else...

...but as it goes on, it becomes more and more the usual Viscontian strident pseudo-profundity devoid of human authenticity and artistic vision...

...But either because the incident is not etched sharply enough, or because too much time (including the seemingly liberating emergence of Gloria and Robert from the ballroom onto the boardwalk) intervenes between it and the shooting, Gloria's death remains unconvincing...

...What of it, though...

...What there is in his films, though, is a "deviate consistency," taking consistency in the sense of texture...

...Though shot in color, the film had to have the shoddy look of a godforsaken ballroom jutting out into the Pacific, and Lathrop accordingly underexposed and overdeveloped the film, getting a grainy texture and somber coloration-predominantly purplish brown of an unwholesome, almost macabre quality...

...And even such very minor characters who say next to nothing, like Turkey, Rocky's fat, cigar-smoking assistant (Al Lewis), or the 67-year-old woman who sponsors Robert and Gloria because they are Number 67 (Madge Kennedy) are vividly conceived in terms of appearance and mannerisms, but are not caricatured or condescended to...

...they are aimed at understanding, not empathy...

...Presided over by a steely old Baron Joachim von Essenbeck, the evening is complete with entertainment by the younger members of the family, which extends from young Gunther's sensitive cello playing to young Martin's outrageous transvestite impersonation of Marlene Dietrich as Lola-Lola in The Blue Angel...

...In almost all the Visconti films known to me the director alludes to, suggests, toys with homosexuality, keeping it, nevertheless, subliminal, marginal, or thinly veiled...

...Praise must go also to the makeup department, headed by another McCoy, Frank...

...does not, as a whole, reach the domain of art, many of its aspects and an aura that lingers on establish it as a true and eminent cinematic achievement...

...There is no more overblown, self-inflated and preposterous reputation in film than that of Luchino Visconti...

...Worst of all, it has been couched in that not quite un-grammatical yet less than couth translator's English that falls chillingly on the literate ear...

...The film is vastly inferior to the neo-realist work of Rossellini, De Sica and the early Fellini, and, in art, getting there first is far less important than doing the most with the discovery...

...The Stranger is Visconti's most palatable film, largely because he stuck close to Camus, had a superb cinematographer in Giuseppe Ro-tunno, and some marvelous acting, notably from Mastroianni and Georges Geret...

...Bellissima, which I recall imperfectly, seems to me worth reviving, if only to enable us to determine why we may have overestimated it-magnani's performance, perhaps...

...At every turning of the film they reveal something further of themselves-Sometimes unexpectedly better or worse than we would have thought, sometimes thoroughly fulfilling our aroused expectations...

...Still, such is Visconti's prestige, Sandra won the grand prize at Venice, very possibly the worst film to be so honored...

...I shall go on, next time, exploring this monument to bad taste and bad judgment, highly praised by a number of reviewers, and included in the ten-best Pantheon of both Vincent Canby and Judith Crist...

...movies like Senso and The Leopard are made for the greater glory of set and costume design, and emerge as equal kitsch despite the superior novel on which the latter is based...

...Time and all its creeping ravages, so powerfully conveyed by the acting, are as brilliantly evoked by the mutations of make-up...

...What results is spooky, deathly, diabolic-perhaps a cross between Holbein and Dante...

...And both are played very nearly to perfection...

...Miss York plays a semi-refined, semi-absurd would-be actress, strenuously emulating Jean Harlow, and trying to attract the eye of producers who might wander into the marathon's audience...

...Rocco and His Brothers begins satisfactorily in a vein that was, however, more or less exhausted by 1960...

...There were considerable problems to contend with...

...Especially imposing are Susannah York and Bonnie Bedelia, two actresses 1 have previously been less than keen, and sometimes downright down, on...

...scenes in Rocky's, the entrepreneur-Mc's office, where everything from seedy skulduggery to sterile lovemaking takes place...

...These grueling footraces around the ballroom, with the couples holding hands while the band plays rousing music, automatically eliminate the last three pairs to cross the finish line...

...and sheer junk like references to "your tiny little arse...

...As for Harry Horner's setting, it is a shrewd replica of an old Los Angeles ballroom that could easily double as one of the lower rings of Dante's Inferno...

...I mean that the actress here gives an antipodal performance: There is none of the glitter, kittenishness, or jollity that have been her specialties in the past...

...Pollack and Thompson have created two especially memorable characters: Gloria, the girl with the deathwish worn on her sleeve, and Rocky, the low-grade, hardened showman, are both absorbing and rich in surprises...

...Thus Sandra (Vaghe stelle dell' Orsa) goes in for all kinds of foolish attitudinizing about fascism, and politico-sexual mystery-mongering, but might have amounted to something had it not falsified the impact of a monstrous mother on her children as producing incest rather than, much more believably, inversion...

...The music reflects, exalts, mocks, and finally provides an aural epitaph for these dancing damned...

...It is an awesome sight to see these contestants grow feeble, haggard, ghostly before our eyes, becoming images of shuffling death...

...Deserving of note, too, are the performances of Allyn Ann McLerie and Red Buttons as overage contestants who nevertheless defy mortality...

...Young has just the right good looks gone partly to seed, and the properly flexible voice that turns oily in the limelight and greedy in the shadows...

...In his highfalutin and vacuous monograph on Visconti, Geoffrey Nowell-Smith writes, "his work has a devious consistency"-a phrase illustrative of the critical doubletalk and doublethink that parlays men like Visconti into greatness...

...For all I know, Visconti may be a good operatic stage director (his Figaro's Wedding, the only such work of his I saw, was resourceful and, until the grandiosely overdone last act, highly effective...

...She does it with a judicious balance of preposterousness and pathos, poise and desperation: The superficiality and flightiness of the character are kept as much to the fore as the naked need for affection, even if only from a vulgar audience, or, lower yet, from sordidly quick sex with another girl's partner...

...It all works very well, despite the difficulties, and when Lathrop's camera seems to collide head-on with some of those overhead light beams, the result is not only glaringly realistic, it is almost hallucinatory...

...If there is one thing wrong with the performance, it is the vestige of a Vassar accent...

...For in this rock-bottom marathon there are no runners gloriously expiring as they announce the victory of a Miltiades, only obscure human beings dragging themselves to exhaustion or death to proclaim obscurely the persistence of the human spirit...

...Hovering over all this is the banal music of the period, suggestively yet unostentatiously chosen and arranged by John Green who, in his previous avatar as Johnny Green, also wrote many of the catchy tunes...

...in English, it is a total mess...

...other than that, it is solid, untricky acting, squeezing all the juice out of the part but not chewing up its rind...