As The Night Porter returns to blu-ray, we look at the sordid world of the brief Naziploitation craze it accidentally helped spawn, and its most outrageous imitator.
Naziploitation was a genre that could only thrive in the days when censorship loosened and social taboos were broken. It arguably began with the sleazy Love Camp 7, a 1967 film from exploitation veteran Bob Cresse that set the template, using the idea of a Nazi prison camp for women who were forced to work as prostitutes servicing the soldiers of the Third Reich to justify a kinky, BDSM narrative. This would be a continuing theme throughout the genre, and if anything was the more respectable side; certainly, if you compare it to the concentration camp-set movies like Ilsa, She Wolf of the SS and SS Experiment Camp, where women and men were subjected to all manner of atrocities and medical experimentation, they seem almost wholesome. Almost. But the ‘naziploitation’ film was, in general, the genre that really pushed at the limits of acceptability, taking one of the darkest eras in human history and sexing it up with naked girls, bondage, torture and grotesque atrocities – at a time when the actual events being portrayed were only three decades old and many of those who survived the real-life horrors were still living. The genre was essentially a variation on the women-in-prison film, itself a format that had been around since the 1950s but really found its feet in the 1970s, when the sex ‘n’ violence possibilities of a story of confined women without men could be fully explored (the other major variant on the women-in-prison film to take off in the 1970s was the ‘nunsploitation’ film, which again – perhaps understandably – appealed mostly to Italian filmmakers).
It’s interesting that the further we get from World War 2, the more sensitive people seem to be about Nazi imagery, and you can’t imagine any films – be they sleazy soft porn or serious-minded arthouse productions – daring to explore and exploit the sexual decadence and fetishism involved in Nazi imagery. This whole genre – which not only took in films but also had a thriving pulp-fiction side – is probably now seen as more dubious than it was at the time, a mark of our increased sensitivity to any offensive material and the current obsessive belief that Nazis lurk around every corner. But even at the time, these films were seen as wildly offensive. The entire genre came and went in a few years – most of the copycat films were made in Italy between 1975 and 1977 before the genre effectively fizzled out. Perhaps, even for the notoriously tolerant Seventies exploitation audiences, they were a step too far. Unsurprisingly, few sneaked past the British censors, and those that did were the tamest softcore efforts, like Erwin Dietrich’s Frauleins in Uniform or Red Nights of the Gestapo, both standard sex romps with a wartime setting – and even they had the sort of Swastika-heavy poster art that would attract numerous complaints today. Tinto Brass’ sumptuous Salon Kitty caused a great deal of tabloid fury, even in a heavily cut version, and when the likes of The Beast in Heat, SS Experiment Camp (complete with its provocative artwork) and Gestapo’s Last Orgy appeared on VHS in the UK, they immediately found themselves at the top of the Video Nasty hit list.
Of all the films loosely connected in this sub-genre, Liliana Cavani’s 1974 film The Night Porter is by far the most respectable – and by far the best. If any film could be said to sum up the difference between 1970s cinema and everything that came before and after, then The Night Porter would be a good contender. It’s a head-on collision between arthouse, exploitation and mainstream cinema, featuring two big-name stars in the sort of morally ambiguous and difficult roles that most Hollywood performers would run a mile from today, and with a taboo-shattering central theme. This is very much a film that could only have emerged in that decade (or at least the first half of it), when censor-baiting and boundary-pushing films from respectable and serious filmmakers seemed to appear every few months.
It’s also a film that has been badly misrepresented by its public image. If you see a still from this film – or you see a VHS, DVD or Blu-ray sleeve, for that matter – you’d be forgiven for imagining that it is awash with eroticised Nazi imagery. That’s not actually true. It’s notable that most of the striking, provocative and, for many, outrageous imagery you’ll see from this film is all taken from a single scene – an admittedly powerful, unforgettable and iconic moment, but far from representative of the film as a whole.
In fact, The Night Porter is a dark, painful story of sexual obsession and madness – the collision of two damaged people who come together in the most extreme of circumstances and are unable to shake the experiences from their psyches; in that sense, it is as much about the horrors of war and their ongoing effect as anything. Dirk Bogarde is Max, an SS officer at a concentration camp who becomes erotically obsessed with prisoner Lucia (Charlotte Rampling), who he plucks from the prisoners to become his lover – a role that she initially recoils from, but finally begins to embrace, becoming part of the Nazi machine and arguably complicit in their crimes.
Years later, Max is working as a hotel porter and meeting with fellow ex-Nazis to plan a defence/cover-up for any war crimes trials that might happen. When Lucia and her classical conductor husband coincidentally check into the hotel, the past is brought back for both of them, and soon they are rekindling their affair. As Max’s former colleagues try to convince him to give her up (as a witness, she is of great danger to them), the pair lock themselves away in a more and more desperate attempt to block out the outside world.
This is an astonishing film, with genuinely breathtaking performances from Bogarde and Rampling – the latter showing remarkable bravery is a genuinely difficult role. It’s deeply uncomfortable viewing, even for viewers used to seeing cinematic taboos challenged, and it asks us some uncomfortable questions about obsession, love, madness, victimhood and guilt. Director Liliana Cavani gives the film a cold, distant feel and manages to make the central characters seem sympathetic. As we’ve seen in countless conflicts since WW2, war can turn even the most decent of people into monsters as political leaders effectively dehumanise the enemy, and the film understands and sympathises with the characters without excusing their actions. It’s all too easy to portray Nazi soldiers and collaborators as irredeemable monsters, but the uncomfortable truth – and we see this being played out right now across America – is that it is very easy to push otherwise normal people to the point where they see their enemies (or, more accurately, the people their leaders have told them are enemies) as subhuman and to justify whatever is done to them as for the greater good.
This film is, certainly, a bleak tale. But unexpectedly, it’s presented in a highly approachable manner – subject matter aside – resulting in a compelling tragedy that is unlike anything else you might see. in the wrong hands, this could have been a rather grubby affair, but Cavani (who was no stranger to difficult subjects, and had already tackled wartime subjects in her 1960s TV work) approaches the story with just the right level of sensitivity without shying away from the more painful moments. Clearly not for all tastes, The Night Porter is, nevertheless, a masterpiece that will haunt you for a long time after you see it, and one that deserves more respect than it tends to get. That’s especially true is you look at the films that it helped inspire; in terms of production quality, sincerity and intelligence, it stands head and shoulders above even the best of them.
The Night Porter was perhaps too intimate a story to be copied by many of the Italian Naziploitation films that were soon to follow – the sexual politics and kinky fantasies of Salon Kitty or the brutal tortures of Ilsa were both more attractive for sensation-hungry audiences and a lot easier to imitate. But one film did attempt to drag in a similar narrative, before drowning it in torture, perversion and some genuinely shocking violence. To call Gestapo’s Last Orgy ‘respectable’ feels a bit of a stretch, but compared to the other movies emerging at the same time, it at least wraps its unsavoury nature in a rather more refined covering. In fact, you could be forgiven for mistaking this for a serious, perhaps even arty film if you only saw the opening moments, which are beautifully shot and constructed, as a former concentration camp commandant drives back to the scene of the crime as the soundtrack of his trial for war crimes lays in his head. This is not the low-rent grubbiness of Deported Women of the SS, Women’s Camp 119 or Nazi Love Camp 27 – this seems altogether classier. Admittedly, that’s not saying much.
Gestapo’s Last Orgy – which is one of the worst titles of the entire sub-genre, and barely any better if we literally translate from the Italian L’ultima orgia del III Reich – is probably the most polished production outside the arthouse movies. All the stranger, then, that the film is also probably the most gleefully tasteless of them all, a film that has little in the way of narrative but instead moves from atrocity to atrocity, showing scant restraint along the way. The fact that all this is so well shot seems to make it all the more unpleasantly effective – while the aforementioned low rent affairs are essentially too camp (so to speak) to be really offensive, this film has a veneer of class that makes the relentless horrors on display all the more unsavoury.
The Commandant is Conrad von Straker (Marc Cloud, aka Adriano Micantori), and his journey is to reunite with former camp inmate and lover Lise Cohen (Daniela Levy, aka Daniela Poggi) at the site where the concentration camp that he ran and she was interred in stood. The film then flashes back to show the story of their wartime lives. A prison of four thousand women, few of whom escaped alive, Straker’s camp is a cross between a brothel and an extermination camp – when the Jewish female inmates are not being used as sex toys by German soldiers, they are being tortured, abused and murdered by Starker and his sadistic female counterpart Maristella Grecco.
Once Straker notices that Lise refuses to beg for her life -in fact, she wants to die – he becomes obsessed with her, and the film has become an especially sadistic version of The Night Porter, as he attempts to break her spirit through torture. Through a series of convoluted events, she then becomes Straker’s lover, turning her back on fellow inmates and friends.
Gestapo’s Last Orgy is a strangely fascinating film. You have to wonder what was going through the mind of director Cesare Canevari – whose other works are a forgettable series of spaghetti westerns, crime films and sex dramas – as he shot this. There are moments of such astonishing repulsiveness that you can barely credit them being in such a handsome film – the throwing of a menstruating woman to a pack of dogs, the burning alive of a woman during a cannibal orgy and the dipping of another woman in a pit of lime. The female cast is naked for much of the film and of course, there are numerous rape scenes. It’s all so relentlessly horrible that you can only marvel at it, especially as at no point does it pander to the audience – despite ticking all the soft porn boxes in terms of naked girls, it seems designed to repulse rather than entertain or arouse. Yet it lacks the moral and intellectual centre of a film like Pasolini’s Salo, a film loosely connected to this genre by nature of its central theme and the time it was made, but perhaps too far removed in style to actually be considered part of it. In the end, Gestapo’s Last Orgy feels like someone has taken the flashbacks of The Night Porter and fashioned them into a full-length story – something that few people were really asking for – losing whatever message it might have under a welter of shocking imagery.
The Naziploitation genre is one that is rarely discussed today – they seem to have become the last taboo of cinema, something that you can’t even discuss critically for fear of being branded the sort of person who gets off on such things. An actual Nazi, in fact. Yet the genre remains one of the more fascinating moments of the 1970s, not so much because of the actual films – though it did spawn far more interesting titles than you might think, and with The Night Porter and, I’d argue, Salon Kitty, genuine world cinema classics – but because of what they say about censorship, societal shifts and the brief flowering of unfettered bad taste into the mainstream. It’s notable that the genre rose to prominence at the same time that British punks were wearing Swastikas as a way of pissing off the older generation (and, as it turned out, subsequent generations too); these films also often feel like deliberate provocations, an attempt to test the limits of acceptability. The most interesting of the sleazier films – that’d be Love Camp 7, Ilsa and SS Experiment Camp – have an almost gleeful camp sensibility (though I’m willing to accept that in the case of SS Experiment Camp and others like the often-hysterical Beast in Heat, this might be accidental) and seem closer in spirit to the works of John Waters than they are celebrations of Nazi atrocities. In the end, these films all make Nazis look like impotent, pathetic, sex-crazed hypocrites who are less master race and more masturbating race. They belittle the Nazis relentlessly, and no one watching these movies is going to come away doing anything but mocking the concept of the Aryan Superman. Whatever cynical motives might have inspired these productions, furthering the cause of fascism isn’t one of them.
DAVID FLINT
The Night Porter 4K restoration is on Blu-ray and Digital 30 November from CultFilms
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