| The Night Porter | |
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Italian promotional poster |
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| Directed by | Liliana Cavani |
| Produced by | Robert Gordon Edwards Esa De Simone |
| Written by | Liliana Cavani |
| Starring | Dirk Bogarde Charlotte Rampling Philippe Leroy Gabriele Ferzetti Isa Miranda |
| Music by | Daniele Paris |
| Cinematography | Alfio Contini |
| Distributed by | The Criterion Collection |
| Release date(s) | France: 3 April 1974 United States: 1 October 1974 |
| Running time | 118 minutes |
| Country | Italy |
| Language | English Italian [1] |
The Night Porter (Italian: Il Portiere di notte) is a controversial 1974 film by Italian director Liliana Cavani, starring Dirk Bogarde and Charlotte Rampling.
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Dirk Bogarde plays Maximilian Theo Aldorfer, a former Nazi SS officer, and Charlotte Rampling plays Lucia Atherton, a concentration camp survivor who had an ambiguous relationship with Aldorfer. Flashbacks show Max tormenting Lucia, but also acting as her protector. In an iconic scene, Lucia sings a Marlene Dietrich song to the concentration camp guards while wearing pieces of an SS uniform, and Max "rewards" her with the severed head of a male inmate who had been bullying the other inmates, a reference to Salome.
Thirteen years after World War II, Lucia meets Aldorfer again; he is now the night porter at a Vienna hotel. There, they fall back into their sadomasochistic relationship.
The film depicts the political continuity between wartime Nazism and post-war Europe and the psychological continuity of characters locked into compulsive repetition of the past. On another level it deals with the psychological condition known as Stockholm Syndrome. It also raises the issue of sleeper Nazi cells and their control, and possibly a hint at what could have spurred on the logical later 1960's reaction of the Red Army Faction (aka Baader-Meinhof). Simplistically it works on the level of two people in an uneasy yet inextricably bounded relationship but also that is very much in the context of the greater political malaise of the War and the many years following. It should also be noted that Cavani herself met several women who had survived the horrors of Concentration camps, and Lucia (Rampling) is not branded as Jewish particularly probably to depict the plight of all women, and doubtless the pun on her name meaning light and St Lucia being the patron saint of the blind was deliberate also. Max (Bogarde) quite clearly has some sort of guilt complex being afraid of the light, and wanting to live like a churchmouse: there are also allusions to sexual ambivalence from the start from his relationship with the naked male balletist.
In responses to The Night Porter, Cavani was both celebrated for her courage in dealing with the theme of sexual transgression and, simultaneously, castigated for the controversial manner in which she presented that transgression: within the context of a Nazi Holocaust narrative. The film has been accused of mere sensationalism: film critic Roger Ebert calls it "as nasty as it is lubricious, a despicable attempt to titillate us by exploiting memories of persecution and suffering."[2] Given the film's dark and disturbing themes and a somewhat ambiguous moral clarification at the end, The Night Porter has tended to divide audiences. It is, however, the film for which Cavani is best known.
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