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Tinto Brass on the Nazi fetish, already with an eye on his most infamous title. "Haven't you learned anything from the Roman Empire?" The title is a popular Berlin brothel ca. 1939, Ingrid Thulin as the madam revels in the cabaret numbers, including a hermaphroditic costume in the opening titles and a Mae West routine where she strikes a match off a gilded gigolo's crotch. The place is seized by a SS officer (Helmut Berger) for an espionage mission, zealous fräuleins are recruited to get incriminating info from prominent johns in bugged rooms. (The goose-stepping courtesans are introduced in a slapstick dash of Olympian choreography, then tested in observation cells with misshapen prisoners.) "Good Aryan stock," the lithe informant (Teresa Ann Savoy) whose rigid ideology softens following a tender interlude with the disenchanted Luftwaffe pilot (Bekim Fehmiu). "A life of shit, vomit, jizz, pricks, cunts and idiots," nothing less for the farce of fascism. The theater of history and its genital contortions, Brass wraps his political cartoon in rancid lushness. (Ken Adam fresh off Barry Lyndon contributes to the joking gloss of respectability with glittering Art Deco sets for buzzing fly sounds to be dubbed over.) Visconti's The Damned is the main object of debasement, down to the reunion of its Oedipal stars, Bertolucci's The Conformist also figures in the zesty caricature. "Professor, is it true that Jesus Christ was the son of a Roman prostitute and a German mercenary?" "Oh, absolutely." The cavalcade of swastikas and garter belts builds to the image of the bare torso upon which Triumph of the Will is screened, cf. Oshima's The Man Who Left His Will on Film, a bite out of the priapic baguette triggers the foaming breakdown. Fassbinder in The Marriage of Maria Braun shares in the coda's detonating guffaw. With John Steiner, Stefano Satta Flores, Sara Sperati, Maria Michi, Rosemarie Lindt, Paola Senatore, and John Ireland.
--- Fernando F. Croce |