November 2025 Patreon round-up: EXCLUSIVE - Films in Focus podcast #12: The Damned + Advanced Script for Mirrors of Kane narration (w/ Majority Report call-in opposing Chris Pappas)

First suggested by a patron following my episode on The Zone of Interest last year, Luchino Visconti's 1969 melodrama The Damned - set during the rise of dictatorship in thirties Germany - provides a suitably apocalyptic conclusion (for now, at least) to my two-year $5/month tier Films in Focus podcast. Based on patron polls conducted every couple months, I recorded a dozen episodes on films which often followed troubled protagonists trying to figure out themselves, and the world, against a backdrop of socially fraught circumstances (call this "the Fire Walk With Me effect"). Of course, to label Martin von Essenbeck (Helmut Berger) a "protagonist" stretches may associations with that term. He certainly is no hero; aside a few key exceptions like the put-upon anti-Nazi couple of Herbert (Umberto Orsi) and Elizabeth Thallmann (Charlotte Rampling), the film is almost entirely stocked with schemers, cowards, and outright fascists, and yet Martin still emerges as perhaps the worst of them all. Nor does he fit our usual conception of an active central figure; although his illicit desires and self-indulgent actions drive the narrative, it is other characters who manipulate him into or out of the place that they want him. Having inherited his grandfather Joachim's (Albrecht Schoenhals') shares of the family's steelworks following a staged assassination, Martin finds himself in a three-way tug of war. This involves his conniving mother Sophie (Ingrid Thulin) and her lover Friedrich Bruckmann (Dirk Bogarde) who want Martin to serve as an impotent figurehead for their ambitions; his cousin once removed Konstantin (Reinhard Kolldehorf), prominent in the SA paramilitary division of the Nazi Party, who wants to retain his executive control by sidelining Martin completely; and his other cousin once removed, the SS officer Aschenbach (Helmut Griem), who maneuvers various actors in a game of thrones which could tighten the Party's grip on this important industrial firm while also offering Martin a source of ego-stroking pride as well as an outlet for feverish, fetishistic revenge.

This is the plot of The Damned; however, the impression it creates has as much to do with the saturated, operatic quality of its visual flourishes and the darkness of its sexual psychology as with the intricacy of its narrative mechanics. This is especially true during the film's idiosyncratic dramatic centerpiece, a re-creation of "The Night of Long Knives" in which the once-central SA stormtroopers were betrayed by Hitler and slaughtered en masse by the SS and Gestapo amidst a drunken orgy at a country resort. Around here, the film's second half tips into a more intense, brooding, hot-blooded, and exaggerated pitch reminiscent of other Visconti films of the time. Indeed, this discussion encouraged me to dip back into my own Visconti mini-retrospective of sixteen years ago, when I reviewed The Leopard, Rocco and His Brothers, and Ludwig after big-screen viewings in Boston - The Damned very much incorporates elements of all three from its vision of a patriarch presiding over a dying world to its dysfunctional family portrait driven by jealous rivalry to its vision of decadent depravity in the midst of a ruling class' decline.

I'm also re-visiting past work - while setting up a future project - for the sake of the $1/month reward, offering another narration script for the upcoming Mirrors of Kane video series in a continuation of last month's trend. After next month's Twin Peaks Conversations episode, exclusives will be put aside in favor of advances for both tiers, while I work on finally finishing the four big projects behind the scenes in 2026: Mirrors of Kane, and Lost in Twin Peaks, the TWIN PEAKS Character Series, and Journey Through Twin Peaks.

What are the November rewards?

Remembering the Movies, Feb. 25 - Mar. 3

Every Friday, we look back at films released 10-100 years ago this week.

Visit Remembering the Movies to further peruse the past

This week, we finally take a break from 1931 (which has dominated the past few weeks) and skip forward for a screwball from Sturges. There are several classics in the lineup this week, as well as an interesting back-and-forth between Siskel and Ebert (as well as a Tom & Jerry cartoon from the fifties - hard to say which duo is more contentious).

This might also be the place to the mention for those who missed it that Blog 10, the year-end round-up, finally made its debut last week. Check it out for some great links, images, and excerpts...

Ludwig

Seen in the light of of the lugubrious Death of Venice, the impressive but stoic Leopard, and the emotionally devastating Rocco and His Brothers, the decadence and historical pageantry of Ludwig can seem almost refreshing. True, it has its psychological intensity, what with the physical and mental decline undergone by its hero (a deeply romantic, and possibly insane, Bavarian royal of the 19th century, whose reign saw his little kingdom swallowed up by the new Prussian-led German state). And at four hours long, it's hardly a sprightly jog through the park. Yet the film is lush, lavish, and entertaining - its long runtime absorbing due to the hero's wildness (he represents all the opposite tendencies of the aristocracy when compared to the melancholy, savvy, and dignified Burt Lancaster in The Leopard: self-indulgence, withdrawal into fantasy, irresponsibility).

Rocco and His Brothers

Among other things, Rocco and His Brothers is the story of a face. Not the face you see above, which a woman’s decorated hand is reaching to caress. That face belongs to Spiro Focas, cast as Vincenzo Parondi. Vincenzo’s visage, along with the rest of him, has already settled into lifelong complacency when the rest of the Parondis show up in Milan to pester their urban relation for support. (Incidentally, the owner of those feminine fingers – Nadia, played by Annie Girardot, will see her own expression shift from hearty cynicism to fragile vulnerability through passionate romanticism, ragged humiliation, coarse self-hatred, and back to the beginning again). Nor is it the face of Alain Delon (playing Rocco himself), which usually broadcasts arrogant assurance but here displays a touching and sweet naivete, broken up by intense disappointment and flickers of hatred (though traces of compassion never leave his brooding eyes or bashful smile). And it isn’t even the memorable face of Katina Paxinou, the Greek actress who portrays Rosaria, the fiery Sicilian mama of the titular brood, I have in mind.

The Leopard

If Italian films from the forties and fifties were dominated by a hard-bitten look at the present, with a transforming Italy moving from fascism and war through poverty and ruin to the cautious construction of a modern postwar world, then Italian cinema of the sixties can be seen as one long, mournful elegy for the lost past, in a variety of different keys. At the dawn of the decade, neorealism had already been relegated to the past, but that movement's overarching social critique and devotion to intense observation of daily life continued to inform works crafted by the best Italian directors. These qualities were put to work in a series of wildly different yet equally powerful films, which together paint a coherent picture of a nation caught in the whirlwind, its people having severed their roots once and for all, yet unable to establish connections to the new world being born around them.