The Night Porter [Criterion Collection] [Blu-ray]

Director: Liliana Cavani

Overview

The psychology of a sadomasochistic relationship between a former Nazi storm trooper and the concentration camp prisoner he loved provides the basis of this provocative, at times sexually and violently graphic drama. The story is set in the late '50s at a Viennese hotel that is owned by and plays host to former Nazis who get their kicks at the sadistic hands of the hotel porter, the ex-trooper. Most of them are facing trials for their war crimes, and all of them have taken care to get rid of any possible witnesses to their atrocities. The trooper too feels safe. His illusion is shattered when a woman and her husband check into the hotel and he recognizes her as the woman with whom he had a very kinky relationship in the concentration camp. They soon rekindle their painful relationship and episodes from their past and present are graphically depicted. They remain heedless of the attempts of the other guests to stop their twisted affair.

Product Details

Release Date:	12/09/2014
UPC:	0715515132817
Original Release:	1974
Rating:	R
Source:	CRITERION
Region Code:	A
Presentation:	[Wide Screen]
Language:	English
Time:	1:58:00
Sales rank:	11,203

Special Features

New 2K digital restoration, with uncompressed monaural soundtrack; New interview with director Liliana Cavani; Women of the Resistance, a fifty-minute 1965 documentary by Cavani composed of interviews with female partisans who survived the German invasion of Italy, with an introduction by the filmmaker; PLUS: an essay by scholar Gaetana Marrone, author of The Gaze and the Labyrinth: The Cinema of Liliana Cavani, and an excerpt from a 1975 interview with Cavani

Cast & Crew

Performance Credits

Dirk Bogarde	Actor
Charlotte Rampling	Actor
Philippe Leroy	Actor
Gabriele Ferzetti	Hans
Giuseppe Addobbati	Stumm
Isa Miranda	Countess Stein
Nino Bignamini	Adolph
Amedeo Amodio	Bert
Piero Vida	Day Porter
Geoffrey Copleston	Kurt
Manfred Freiberger	Dobson
Ugo Cardea	Mario
Hilda Gunther	Greta
Nora Ricci	The Neighbor
Piero Mazzinghi	Concierge
Kai S. Seefeld	Jacob
Carlo Mangano	Actor
Claudio Steiner	Dobson
Marino Mas?	Atherton
Manfred Freyberger	Dobson
Luigi Antonio Guerra	Actor
Daniele Paris	Composer

Technical Credits

Liliana Cavani

Barbara Alberti

Amedeo Pagani

Robert Gordon Edwards	Producer
Liliana Cavani	Screenwriter
Roberto Arcangeli	Sound Effects
Michael Billingsley	Sound Effects
Robert Rietty	Sound Effects
Barbara Alberti	Screenwriter
Amedeo Pagani	Screenwriter
Joseph E. Levine	Producer

Editorial Reviews

Damned in the United States yet praised in European quarters, Liliana Cavani's visceral psychosexual thriller invited controversy by focusing on the twisted bond between a Nazi and his former prisoner/lover. Max (Dirk Bogarde) and Lucia (Charlotte Rampling) cross paths once again in a Vienna hotel c. 1958, and reconsummate a depraved affair. Inevitably, some took the movie to task for what they saw as exploitative, crass and lubricious; many detractors excoriated it for trivializing the Holocaust. Historical veracity doesn't seem to be on Cavani's agenda, however. She constructs a deliberately unreal phantasmorgia onscreen, where Nazi regalia and imagery become not echoes of the literal past, but connotative symbols of sadomasochism per se, often presented in a dreamlike context - as in an oneiric (and violence-free) glimpse of a Nazi carnival torture ride for Jewish girls. Indeed, the movie feels most impressive given how successfully it cross-sections s&m as a conceptual phenomenon, severed from a historical framework. The film gradually becomes a dark immersion into the psyches of two individuals who enjoy giving and receiving pain, and an orchestra of sadomasochistic nuance. Nowhere is this more evident than in the picture's final act. Trapped by their pursuers in a barren apartment, the torturer and his victim/accomplice gradually starve themselves to death, clinging psychologically (and physically) to one other and growing wan and emaciated; at one point, Lucia walks barefoot over broken glass, lacerating the soles of her feet -- an act that single-handedly reveals her need (and desire) for self-abuse. Cavani has, in a few brilliant strokes, stripped away the sex and reduced her two diseased lovers to the core of pathological need. She is bolstered throughout by radical, courageous performances from Bogarde and Rampling, who she doubtless cast given their shared involvement in Visconti's Nazi-themed masterpiece The Damned five years earlier. Though the movie is as difficult to watch as one may expect from its premise, it is also brilliantly conceived and executed, and - in its own bizarre way - effective enough to merit serious reappraisal.