Fifty years on from its release, The Night Porter remains as controversial and shocking as it has ever been.
The story of an SS officer who groomed, raped and ultimately protected a teenage concentration camp inmate from execution before striking up a sadomasochistic relationship with her when they bump into each other years later – it is not a film for the faint-hearted.
Doomed lovers Maximilian Theo Aldorfer, played by Dirk Bogarde, and Lucia Atherton, portrayed by Charlotte Rampling, embark on a twisted love affair which sees them abuse each other, starve themselves, and finally offer themselves up for execution.
The film continuously snaps back in time to reveal the dark secrets of their shared past – showing the skin-crawling torture Max subjected a young Lucia to while she was interned in the camp.
In one scene, Max gleefully shoots a pistol at a naked Lucia in a kind of mock execution, while another flashback shows him presenting her with the severed head of one of her fellow inmates after she performs a sexual favour for him.
The most famous scene, which above all prompted accusations that the film was nothing more than ‘Nazi porn’, sees Lucia performing cabaret topless – partially dressed in Nazi uniform – for the pleasure of the SS officers.
The Night Porter understandably sparked widespread scandal when it debuted in 1974, and was panned by US critics who variously labelled the dark and twisted romance ‘offensive’, ‘a piece of junk’ and ‘Nazi Sexploitation’.
Many have described it as being the first film of the ‘Nazisploitation’ genre – lurid films which combine the dark themes of sexual exploitation, erotica and Nazism, and which many argue to be barbaric and devoid of artistic merit due to their themes.
The most famous scene sees Lucia performing cabaret topless – partially dressed in Nazi uniform – for the pleasure of the SS officers
The film depicts a love affair between SS officer-turned-concierge Maximilian Theo Aldorfer, played by Dirk Bogarde (right), and former concentration camp prisoner Lucia Atherton, portrayed by Charlotte Rampling (left)
The ‘marmalade scene’: A shocking sequence in the film shows a starving Lucia eating from a shattered jam jar
Harrowing scenes invoking the darkest images of the Holocaust show Lucia in a crowd of people being rounded up by the Nazis
One scene shows Max presenting Lucia with the severed head of another inmate – a twisted gift in exchange for a sexual dance
However, the film’s creator, Italian director Liliana Cavani, has long insisted it is a powerful and ‘honest’ love story and that the relationship between its central characters is ‘beautiful’.
For modern audiences, the young age of Lucia’s character and the fact that Max refers to her as his ‘little girl’ makes it impossible to see their relationship as anything other than perverse grooming.
‘It is a nauseating melting pot of schadenfreude, Stockholm syndrome, Lolita-like obsession, and Nazi fetishism that threatens to tear Max and Lucia apart,’ is how culture writer Lillian Crawford characterised the pair’s relationship in a BBC interview this year.
Audiences are lulled in by the film’s rather innocuous beginning, which sees hotel concierge Max wandering to work, conversing with colleagues and going about his tasks with military precision.
The audience soon discovers that Max is a reluctant member of a group of former Nazis who have been concealing their wartime crimes by destroying documents and eliminating witnesses.
While he supports the group’s activities, it becomes clear that Max harbours some shame and wants to remain ‘hidden away like a church mouse’.
But when a glamorous Lucia checks in at the front desk and his eyes meet hers, the true horrors of his past begin to be revealed and he can no longer escape them.
Twelve years after the end of the war their roles have changed, with Max shamefully hiding his Nazi past and Lucia a socialite married to a wealthy orchestra conductor.
When she stays at Max’s Vienna hotel as her husband leaves to continue his world tour, the pair’s mutual obsession reignites, and they restart their sadomasochistic relationship.
They engage in a disturbing role-play, re-enacting their old relationship as a prisoner and SS officer using chains and violently abusing one another.
The film is considered to be as one of the earliest portrayals of Stockholm syndrome, a term coined in 1973 to describe the physiological dependency a hostage develops with their captor.
Lucia’s youth and innocence – and loss of it – is underscored by a horrifying scene which shows a flashback of her on a fairground ride, flying around in the air with other children while gunshots can be heard ringing out in the background.
Another flashback shows the moment she and Max first meet, with harrowing scenes invoking the darkest images of the Holocaust showing her in a crowd of people being rounded up by the Nazis.
Many of her fellow victims are seen wearing yellow Star of David, a badge the Third Reich forced Jewish people to wear during the genocide.
Lucia, however, is not Jewish, but is said to have been imprisoned by the fascist regime over her father’s socialist ties.
The prisoners are stripped down and humiliated, with scores of women lined up while Max – in the role of a fake doctor performing ‘photographic studies’ – flashes a camera in their faces.
He takes a particular interest in Lucia, getting uncomfortably close to her and focusing in on her gaunt, terrified face.
Max – in the role of a fake doctor performing ‘photographic studies’ – flashes a camera in the prisoners’ faces
A horrifying scene which shows a young Lucia on a fairground ride, flying around in the air with other children while gunshots can be heard ringing out in the background
He immediately becomes obsessed with her and begins his sexual subjugation of her, in exchange protecting her as he and his comrades sign off on the murders of the other inmates.
One horrific scene shows him shooting at Lucia as she stands naked in a locked shower room, taunting her while she runs around desperately trying to stay alive.
Another shocking sequence shows Lucia and a group of frail inmates watching in horror as a male captive is brutally raped by a Nazi guard.
A deathly-looking Lucia, who appears resigned to her fate as she lies face up a few beds away from the unfolding atrocity, is then seen being pulled out of bed by a gloved hand.
Rather than raping her, the audience gets the impression that it is Max ‘saving’ her – a twisted narrative that runs throughout the film all while he himself is abusing her.
The film’s most famous scene sees Lucia forced to dance and sing for her life in a deconstructed SS uniform – wearing nothing but trousers, suspenders, gloves and an officer’s hat as she performs for her captors’ amusement.
Leering Nazis sit around in the officers’ mess, watching as a Venetian mask-wearing musician plays the accordion and a bare-chested Lucia gives a sultry performance of the Marlene Dietrich song ‘If I Could Make a Wish’.
Pleased with her show, Max ‘rewards’ her with the severed head of a male inmate who had been bullying her, in an apparent reference to the biblical tale of Salome.
Disturbing flashback scenes show a young Lucia during her internment in the concentration camp
One of the depraved scenes shows Lucia lying in bed as another concentration camp inmate is raped by a Nazi guard nearby
When they reunite after the war, concentration camp surivor Lucia represents a threat to Max and his former comrades.
As a witness to their horrific crimes, they are aware that she could unmask them, but Max’s deep obsession with her means that he will do anything to hide her identity.
He meets with a former Nazi collaborator who knows Lucia is still alive, and murders him offscreen to protect his secret.
Max and Lucia restart their sordid affair in his apartment, where they eventually lock themselves away together for days.
Increasingly paranoid after being interviewed by the police over the murder and aware he is now a target of his former Nazi comrades, Max rarely sleeps and chains Lucia to the wall, saying he is doing so ‘so they can’t take her away’.
The leader of the Nazi group visits Lucia while she is chained in Max’s apartment, telling her he is ill and that she should leave.
But she sends him away, making apparent that even after the years of abuse, she is staying with Max of her own free will.
Max rejects his Nazi comrades’ practices and quits his job, deciding to spend all of his time with Lucia in their self-imposed prison.
In one scene, Max gleefully shoots a pistol at a naked Lucia in a kind of mock execution
Max taunts Lucia with a pistol as she runs naked around a shower room in one scene
Furious that Max is concealing a key witness to their crimes, the former Nazi officers cut off the couple’s food supply and wait outside the apartment in case they try to flee.
When Max briefly emerges on the terrace, he is shot and injured by one of the watching men, and he barricades himself and Lucia inside.
Trapped in the apartment, Max and Lucia ration the little food they have left and become emaciated as they slowly starve to death.
In one disturbing scene, Lucia reaches for the remnants of a jar of jam, smashing it and then scooping up the last few drops from the shattered glass mess on the floor before Max notices what she is doing and the pair begin to fight over the shards.
Almost unconscious from malnutrition and with the electricity supply cut off to their apartment by the Nazi syndicate, Max and Lucia decide they have no choice but to leave.
Max rarely sleeps and chains Lucia to the wall, saying he is doing so ‘so they can’t take her away’
With Lucia dressed in a silk nightie similar to one Max gifted her while in the camp, and Max wearing the SS officer uniform he kept for years, the pair drive off under the cover of darkness.
They are pursued by one of Max’s former SS colleagues, and, resigning themselves to their fate, park the car on a bridge.
Weak and barely able to support themselves, they get out of the car and walk along the bridge arm in arm, propping each other up.
Two gunshots ring out and the lovers each collapse to the floor, dead, bringing the film to a haunting end.
Cavani, now aged 91, has said the moral of her film is that ‘love comes always with a price to pay’.
‘I certainly didn’t have a sadomasochistic story in mind,’ the director said in a 2019 documentary. ‘We never even considered that term.
‘We wanted to tell the story of an ex-Nazi and an ex-concentration camp inmate.
The film includes horrifying depictions of the abuse suffered by concentration camp inmates
‘Each of them comes from a totally different world. It’s a story which in part resembles stories and descriptions I heard from concentration camp survivors that I interviewed.
‘Those experiences had left a permanent mark on those victims’ memories which will never be forgotten.’
Cavani was the daughter of committed anti-fascists and began her career making documentaries interviewing partisans and former concentration camp inmates, an experience she said inspired and informed her script for The Night Porter.
But many critics slammed the film for its inaccuracies and what they argued was an implausible storyline, which overtly, in their view, exploited the Holocaust as its theme.
Holocaust survivor Primo Levi called the film ‘beautiful and false’ and contended that ‘it has nothing to do with the camps’.
Lucia appears to choose to stay in Max’s apartment, suggesting that she has a twisted love for her captor
In 2010, academic Jörg Heiser argued that Cavani’s film turns ‘concentration-camp reality’ into ‘a playground for Nazi chic’.
Meanwhile Pullitzer prize-winning critic Roger Ebert wrote at the time of the film’s release: ‘The Night Porter is as nasty as it is lubricious, a despicable attempt to titillate us by exploiting memories of persecution and suffering.’
He added that while ‘Cavani describes her film as a love story, praises the honesty between her two leading characters, and sees the story as a straightforward handling of one aspect of the concentration camp experience… I see it as a shallow exploitation of that theme, containing no real insight or understanding.’
In her piece in The New Yorker, Pauline Kael likened the film to pornography, writing: ‘Many of us can’t take more than a few hard-core porno movies, because the absence of any human esteem makes them depressing rather than sexy; offers the same dehumanized view and is brazen enough to use the Second World War as an excuse.’
Max barricades himself and Lucia in his apartment and the pair starve, with no access to food
Cavani hit back at the criticism, saying that to her the central ‘romance’ between Max and Lucia and how they act it out ‘is nothing compared to the numberless couples who tear each other apart psychologically.’
Her co-writer, Italo Moscati, told the 2019 documentary that the idea that ‘there is a strange sense of solidarity that develops between the executioner and his victim’ once the horrors of the past have faded away ‘created a lot of discussion.’
‘The film basically shows the long-term effects of Nazism,’ he said. ‘It could also be used as a metaphor for things on a wider scale of humanity. Things often aren’t as neat and clean as they appear on the outside. Darkness exists.’
The film’s final scene sees the couple walk along a bridge arm in arm, propping each other up
Two gunshots ring out and the lovers each collapse to the floor dead, bringing the film to a haunting end
When it opened in 1974, the Italian ratings board sought to ban it, and an indictment was filed that pointed to the so-called ‘marmalade scene’, another erotic sequence and the shocking concentration camp flashbacks.
Cavani, her producer and the film’s stars faced criminal charges in a Roman court in relation to the film, but these were dropped and the censor’s decision was reversed following challenges by prominent filmmakers and critics who backed Cavani.
‘[In] Italy the movie was confiscated three times. It was forbidden to underage audiences. I had to go to the Board Of Censors, who knows why? Even back then it wasn’t clear,’ the director said.
Out of every dark and twisted scene in the film, she contested, the director of the board took issue because of the racy nature of just one.
‘Well, we won’t allow it to be shown because the woman is making love while on top of the guy,’ Cavani claimed he told her.
‘That, I had to say, almost made me faint. I was totally taken aback. I told him, “Sir, this kind of thing actually does happen, you know.”‘
Cavani was awarded the prestigious Golden Lion lifetime achievement award at the Venice Biennale last year (pictured at the ceremony with Charlotte Rampling)
Despite the film’s risqué scenes, dark subject matter and the divisive way it combines the two, it has endured as an art house classic which has had a lasting impact on film.
It has for years been ranked among the greatest films of all time, including in a 2019 BBC poll, while Cavani was awarded the prestigious Golden Lion lifetime achievement award at the Venice Biennale last year.
For culture writer Crawford, The Night Porter ‘is by no means a ‘respectful’ or indeed a ‘respectable’ film, but its strength comes from probing an aspect of Nazi thinking which few filmmakers would dare to investigate.’
Whatever the case, Cavani’s film has caused controversy and left its audiences with a sense of unease for decades, and will likely continue to do so for decades to come.
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