Ingrid Thulin – The Magnificent 60s

The Damned / Gotterdammerung / Twilight of the Gods (1969) **

Ponderous, gratuitous, offensive. Let’s start with the pedophile, spoiled grandson Martin (Helmut Berger) of industrialist patriarch Joachim (Albrecht Schonhals). We already guess he has this kind of predilection for young girls as that’s suggested during a game of hide-and-seek at the family mansion and by a scream in the night that is ignored. He keeps a mistress Olga (Florinda Balkan) and is drawn to the young girl in the apartment next door, bringing her the kind of expensive present that her impoverished mother believes she must have stolen. So we know what he’s all about. It’s discreetly enough stated without the inclusion of a scene which I doubt would pass the censor these days and should the young actress be still alive in these MeToo times might be considering legal action for being taken advantage of.

Although the storyline is similar to the director’s earlier The Leopard (1963) of the powerful – there a wealthy landowner, here an arms manufacturer – trying to hold onto their status in times of change (then the invasion of Sicily by forces wanting to unite Italy, now the rise to eminence of Hitler), there’s little of the cinematic flair of the latter. Long scenes are played out at dinner tables or in bedrooms. And most of that is machination, someone or other wanting to take over the family firm or be the power behind the throne.

You need some knowledge of German history to understand the significance of some events. Hitler, then the German Chancellor, burned down the Reichstag (the German Parliament) in 1933 in a ruthless bid for power. Hitler employed two factions, the predominantly working class brownshirts (the SA) and the mainly middle class blackshirts (the SS), the former a paramilitary organization committed to actions against Jews and backing his early bid for power. In 1934, in the Night of the Long Knives, the SS obliterated the SA.

The first section of the picture straddles these two events with a Succession-style drama. In reaction to the burning of the Reichstag, Joachim replaces Herbert (Umberto Orsini), his top executive and outspoken anti-Nazi, with boorish nephew Konstantin (Reinhard Koldehoff) who is a high-ranking member of the SA.

This doesn’t sit well with Friedrich (Dirk Bogarde), who expected preference. Urged on by lover Sophie (Ingrid Thulin), Joachim’s widowed daughter-in-law, and Aschenbach (Helmut Griem), Joachim’s nephew and an ambitious high-ranking SS official, Friedrich kills Joachim but pins the blame on Herbert who has to flee.

Konstantin is thwarted because although technically in charge it’s now Martin who owns the business and nudged by Sophie gives Friedrich the top management role. So Konstantin resorts to blackmail, having uncovered the pedophile. In steps Sophie who uses Aschenbach to thwart him again. Though there’s not much need because Konstantin is eliminated as one of the SA members executed in 1934 at some kind of gathering where the attendees all appear to have homosexual tendencies.

Aschenbach and Martin nurse grievances. Aschenbach feels Friedrich isn’t ostentatious enough in support of Hitler and Martin is furious that Sophie manipulated his difficulties with Konstantin to Friedrich’s benefit. So the SS man and the dissolute conspire. In the way of this kind of heightened melodrama it’s revealed that Friedrich killed Joachim. That doesn’t send Friedrich to trial, instead wins him a get-out-of-jail-free card by turning into a radical Nazi.

Martin, meanwhile, is also a member of the SS. He rapes Sophie, Friedrich loses his way and in one of those moments Francis Ford Coppola would appreciate Martin kills them on their marriage day.

There are a couple of oddities. It’s hard to believe a young girl – we’re talking a 7-8-year-old – would actually manage the mechanics of hanging herself. And when Friedrich is drawn into joining the slaughter of the SA members, there is over-emphasis on his perceived sensitivity when previously he had cold-bloodedly despatched Joachim.

So glorified soap opera with too much virtue signalling for its own good. Excepting Herbert and wife Elizabeth (Charlotte Rampling) and another grandson, who play minor roles, there’s not a single character to care for.

Despite the unusual backdrop, there’s nothing particularly unusual about the succession/inheritance scenario. The tough self-made millionaire or latest head of a wealthy family seeks to maintain power and guard against diminishing its status and lineage by ensuring the correct successor is groomed and that capital is not dissipated through unsuitable marriage or indulging weaker offspring. Thomas Mann, who fled the Nazis in the 1930s, covered this ground more successfully in his debut novel Buddenbrooks, although admittedly with less decadence.

Setting The Damned against the rise of the Nazis is an attempt to give it more artistic status than it merits because it’s really not much more than a standard study of ambition and ruthlessness.

The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse (1962) **

Hollywood isn’t known for its sensitivity, and this is one of those major misjudgements. An incredibly rich family, ripe with entitlement, find World War Two tough going, in the main because as in Counterpoint (1968), they consider themselves exempt. Being Argentinians, they are neutral.

Unfortunately, it just so happens, with that wealthy person’s penchant for flaunting their wealth in the world’s richest cities, they end up in Paris on the eve of war, ignoring the warning of family patriarch (Lee J. Cobb) who is convinced the titular “four horsemen of the apocalypse” (war, conquest, death and pestilence, in case you don’t know your Bible) are on the march. Not that we see much of that in the French capital, except in newsreel, details of the war delivered in snippets of dialog (“haven’t you heard about Dunkirk?”), and street-loads of refugees.

Because, don’t you know it, our major players, the Desnoyers and Laurient families, are largely immune. Man-about-town and Argentinian art connoisseur Julio Desnoyers (Glenn Ford) – ignoring the entreaties of his father Marcelo (Charles Boyer) to scarper – is making a move on married Frenchwoman Marguerite Laurient (Ingrid Thulin), bored by newspaper editor husband Etienne (Paul Heinreid) who spends way too much time worrying about impending war.

Julio is so rich that even after the German invasion sends the poor of the city – and its Jewish population – racing about terrified for their lives, he can swan around, enjoying fine food in top-class restaurants much as before and even has the temerity to tell a high-ranking German General von Kleig (George Dolenz) that his wealth makes him immune. The general reckons that his rank gives him any woman he wants. “She’s mine,” is Julio’s rather misogynistic retort when the general attempts to appropriate Marguerite.

Meanwhile, though Julio is still slow to catch on, his sister Chi Chi (Yvette Mimieux) has only gone and joined the Resistance and Etienne has also upset the new masters, so Julio has to go begging cousin Heinrich (Carl Boehm), who has exploited his German origins to achieve military high rank, to provide them with a get-out of-jail-free card.

When Etienne is released, Marguerite is initially inclined to stick with Julio until guilt gets the upper hand. Julio, with no lover to keep him happy, eventually throws his lot in with the Resistance, but there’s no happy ending for anyone.

Director Vincente Minnelli (Two Weeks in Another Town, 1962) is terrific at marshalling his set pieces, using widescreen to excellent advantage, cramming extra bodies in at the edges, but since these sequences tend to be little more than extended talk-fests – the activities that got Chi Chi and Etienne imprisoned are ignored – no amount of directorial skill in the world is going to salvage a movie so weighted down with dead wood.

Glenn Ford (Rage, 1966) does his very best to give the viewer something to hold onto. He avoids every shade of angst in his determination to have as much as fun as possible regardless of any situation. He’s scarcely had the chance to be so carefree on screen and he is at his charming best, and he does lift what is otherwise a somber encounter.

Ingrid Thulin (Return from the Ashes, 1965) has her moments, especially when her diplomatic skills prevent a party being ruined, and she enjoys some flighty repartee with Ford, but once the romance gets heavy her personality undergoes a U-turn and she’s holding onto angst for dear life. And there’s a twist in her character that makes no sense. When Etienne emerges from prison a broken man, she gives him both barrels, and declares her love for Julio only for shortly after to recant and dump Julio. Seems mighty insensitive and bordering on cruelty to deal her husband such a blow when he has been tortured by the Nazis. Though she might not have been so forgiving had she worked out just why Etienne was freed and Chi Chi not.

After the colossal success of Ben-Hur (1959), which set the roadshow ball rolling, MGM was on a remake crusade. As well as Ben-Hur, it had remade Cimarron (1960) – the original 1931 version an Oscar-winner and hot box office. The fact that that flopped didn’t deter the studio. The silent version of The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse (1921), set against the background of World War I, transformed Rudolph Valentino into a superstar and netted MGM a fortune. The new version sank like a stone, perhaps because it was too wordy for roadshow, or perhaps, more likely, Judgement at Nuremberg (1961) had taken a bolder look at World War Two.

A mis-hit.

REVIEWED PREVIOUSLY IN THE BLOG: Glenn Ford in Experiment in Terror (1962), Love Is a Ball (1963), Advance to the Rear / Company of Cowards (1964), Fate Is the Hunter (1964), The Money Trap (1965), Is Paris Burning? (1966), Rage (1966), The Last Challenge / The Pistolero of Red River (1967), A Time for Killing (1967), Day of the Evil Gun (1968), Heaven with a Gun (1969; Ingrid Thulin in Return from the Ashes (1965); Yvette Mimieux in The Time Machine (1960), The Wonderful World of the Brothers Grimm (1962), Diamond Head (1962), Joy in the Morning (1965), The Reward (1965), The Caper of the Golden Bulls (1967), Dark of the Sun (1968), The Picasso Summer (1969); Vincente Minnelli directed Two Weeks in Another Town (1962) and Goodbye Charlie (1964).

Return from the Ashes (1965) ****

When your starting point is an arcane French inheritance law and the plot revolves around swindling a concentration camp survivor you are immediately on “icky” ground. Throw in a relationship between an adult male and the step-daughter of his deceased wife and the audience might already be backing off.

So it’s a tribute to the acting and that each character is not so much unlikeable as both vulnerable and predatory that this turns into a very involving drama. On the eve of World War Two in Paris Dr Michele Wolf (Ingrid Thulin) buys the love of penniless Polish chess player Stanislaus (Maximilian Schell) but at the cost of abandoning her step-daughter Fabi (Samantha Eggar). For him, love is contingent on wealth, but he marries Michele, a Jew, in a (failed) bid to save her from the clutches of the Nazis. Fabi, shorn of maternal love finds turns to a paternal variation, but is capable of coming up with an ingenious murder plot.

Just quite how hollow Michele has become is demonstrated in a brilliant opening scene set after the end of the war. In a railway carriage, a bored small boy endlessly kicks a door. Pretty much for 90 seconds we either see or hear that door being kicked. Foolishly, his hands wander from the window to the door handle. Next thing, he has fallen out. Cue screams, chaos, shocked passengers racing out of the carriage.

But when the conductor turns up to investigate the incident he finds Michele still sitting in her seat, oblivious to any death, even that of a child. When she returns to Paris, she takes a room in a hotel under a pseudonym, fearing that her ravaged looks make her unattractive, guilty at surviving (by volunteering to work in the camp brothel) when all her relatives were wiped out, unaware that she has unexpectedly inherited all their combined wealth.

So the story begins in a different way. When Stanislaus meets her accidentally under her false name, he immediately assumes she is just a dead ringer for his deceased wife and enrols her in a scheme to win the millions currently held in escrow under this inexplicable French law.

Since she continues to play the part of a different woman, she hears the truth about her relationship with Stanislaus, that although he committed the only unselfish “gallant act” in his life in marrying her nonetheless his prime reason was money. Already Fabi, in full femme fatale mode, is planning to rid the couple of Michele once the money has been legally acquired.

To his credit, Stanislaus initially balks at this notion, but when Michele reveals her true identity and scuppers his relationship with Fabi while at the same time trying to win back the affection of her step-daughter, matters take a deadly turn.

For the most part what we have is a menage a trois, equal parts driven by money and love, but in each instance propelled by innermost desire. Stanislaus is adept at pulling the wool over Michele’s eyes, she only too willingly blinding herself to his sexual deception. But Michele is equally willing, even when she knows his true feelings, to use her money to win him back while Fabi, aware that for her lover money will always trump romance, is determined to use her body to achieve the same effect.

What makes this so compelling is that, unusually, it avoids sentiment. It would have been easy to load each character up with such vulnerability that an audience would not condemn them. Instead, in addition to their individual weaknesses, we are shown their inherent predatory natures.

What makes it so enjoyable is the acting. So often Maximilian Schell is called upon to play stern characters, often typecast from his accent as a villainous German of one kind or another (Judgement at Nuremberg, 1961, The Deadly Affair, 1967), rather than allowing him to invent a more rounded character as he did in Topkapi (1964). This is a wonderfully involving performance, the wannabe chess grandmaster who uses his considerable charm to buttress his fears of poverty, and is only too aware of his failing, full of joie de vivre, bristling at being a kept man yet at the same time only too ready to financially exploit the situation.

Where in The Collector (1965) Samantha Eggar was constrained by circumstance and in Walk, Don’t Walk (1966) saddled with an initially cold character, here she is permitted greater freedom to develop a conflicted personality, loving and deadly at the same time, drawn to and hating her step-mother, attracted by the thought of the money that would secure Stanislaus but repulsed by the cost.

Ingmar Bergman protégé Ingrid Thulin (Wild Strawberries, 1957) is given the least leeway, another of the tormented characters in her intense portfolio. Herbert Lom (Villa Rides, 1968) puts in an appearance as a friend trying to warn her off Stanislaus.

Director J. Lee Thompson (The Guns of Navarone, 1961) takes the bold approach of allowing characters and situation to develop before moving into thriller mode. There are a couple of quite superb scenes, running the opening segment close is the much-vaunted scene of Fabi in the bath (“No one may enter the theater once Fabi enters her bath” was a famous tagline). It is brilliantly filmed in film noir tones, bright light slashed across eyes rather than through windows, and Johnny Dankworth provides an interesting score. Julius J. Epstein (Casablanca, 1942) wrote the screenplay based on the bestseller by Hubert Monteilhet.