The Instant Expert's Guide to Luchino Visconti

As BFI Southbank launches a season of his films and his 1960 masterpiece, Rocco and His Brothers, gets a nationwide revival, Cinema Paradiso's latest Instant Expert's Guide reflects upon the craft and the contradictions of Luchino Visconti.

Almost half a century after he died, the jury is still out on Luchino Visconti. The Italian aristocrat who lived in luxury was also a committed Communist and some critics find it hard to reconcile those contrasting aspects of his lifestyle and personality with his shift from grittily realistic depictions of everyday life to opulently operatic studies of decadence and decay. Some even consider this artistic evolution to be a betrayal.

Yet, common themes link the neo-realism of Visconti's early years and the grandiloquence of his later excursions into mise-en-scène melodrama. Regardless of the setting, the action in a Visconti picture tends to focus on families. Moreover, his narratives explore how the rigid traditionalism of the old aristocratic order disguised a moral flexibility that was suppressed as people of all classes scrambled for status and certainty as much-vaunted progress spawned the confusion, mistrust, and fear that left precarious societies susceptible to dictatorship.

There will always be those who consider Visconti's mature work to be overwrought and pretentious. Yet he remained a realist. Admittedly, he operated on a grander scale, as he switched from recording the world around him to critiquing the follies of history. He witnessed much during an eventful life that was always rooted in privilege. But he never lost sight of the lesson learned during his youthful visits to the theatre and the opera that the performing arts should be as intoxicating as they are illuminating and that cinema should, even at its most serious, appeal to the senses and the soul as much as to the intellect.

Count Your Blessings

There aren't many film-makers who can trace their lineage back to the ducal rulers of a medieval city state. But the Viscontis ruled Milan from 1277-1447 and remained a force within the city and in the wider country after the Italian peninsula was unified in the 1860s. Indeed, Giuseppe Visconti di Modrone, Duke of Grazzano Visconti and Count of Lonate Pozzolo (who was known as 'Zizi') was reported to have been the lover of Queen Elena, while serving as chamberlain to her husband, King Victor Emmanuel III.

He was also married to Carla Erba, the heiress to the vast Erba Pharmaceutical fortune, and the father of seven children. The middle child was born on 2 November 1906 in the house of his maternal grandmother, Anna, on Via Marsala. As he later wrote, 'I was born in November; November 2nd to be exact. At eight in the evening, they told me, under the sign of Scorpio. The zodiac signs are like ghosts: I don't believe in them but they scare me.'

Count don Luchino Visconti di Modrone. was baptised into the Roman Catholic faith and remained devout throughout his life, even though he didn't always agree with the Church's teachings on social, moral, and political matters. Along with siblings Guido, Anna, Luigi, Edoardo, Ida, and Uberta, he was raised at the family's 14th-century Milanese seat, the Palazzo Visconti di Modrone in Via Cerva. However, the children also spent time on the country estate, Grazzano Visconti Castle, which was near Vigolzone in the Emilia-Romagna.

From an early age, Luchino was taught the value of the arts. His grandfather, Duke Guido, had been a major backer of Milan's opera house, La Scala, although rumour had it that he invested in order to indulge his penchant for cross-dressing as a ballerina and dancing with the corps de ballet. The family retained a box, however, and Luchino would often accompany his parents to productions. Consequently, he got to meet composer Giacomo Puccini, conductor Arturo Toscanini, and writer Gabriele D'Annunzio, while he also took private cello lessons with maestro Lorenzo De Paolis.

Having known each other as children and having married at 20 and 19 respectively, Giuseppe and Carla liked to write and star in plays staged in the small theatre at the Palazzo Visconti. The children often joined in the fun and got to witness the eccentric conceit that their father oversaw at Grazzano, where he created a medieval hamlet and recruited peasants from Piacenza to dress in folkloric costumes of his own design and run the workshops and stores that he had established for his own amusement.

Despite living in the lap of luxury and being educated at private schools in Milan and Como, Luchino had a rebellious streak. Looking back, he recalled: 'What still amazes me is how my father, but especially my mother, managed to divide their time between business, social life, and family. There is not a moment of our life back then that is not tinged, in memory, with the image of my vigilant mother. Here is another mystery of that time: thinking back on our days as children gives me a sense of easy and happy freedom, and yet I realise that it was terribly busy, rigidly divided, planned, controlled.'

He ran away from home on four occasions and, when he failed to settle at a boarding school run by the Calasanzian Order, Giuseppe dispatched Luchino to a cavalry college in Pinerolo in order to learn discipline. He was further unsettled when his parents divorced in the 1920s and Luchino sided with his mother when his father sued to retain control of her fortune. When not living at Carla's house in Milan, the younger children summered at Villa Erba in Cernobbio on Lake Como. However, Luchino also spent time with Giuseppe at the palace on the Via Salaria in Rome, which he would inherit when his father died in December 1941.

As Adam Low revealed in The Life and Times of Count Luchino Visconti, which was made for the BBC's Arena programme in 2003, the young nobleman was under no pressure to find work. Although he served in Reggimento Savoia Cavalleria from 1926-28, Visconti was more interested in racing than manoeuvres. 'For eight years I was totally absorbed in horses,' he later recalled. 'It was my great passion and I thought of nothing else.' He had his moments as a gentleman jockey, but was even more successful as a trainer, winning the prestigious Gran Premio Milano at San Siro with Sanzio in 1932. Being a man of leisure, however, Visconti was also able to travel and the course of his life was changed during a sojourn in Paris.

A French Education

'When I was in Paris,' Visconti once confided, 'I was a kind of imbecile.' He had been so seduced by the French capital that he decided to open a shop selling self-designed chintz fabrics. As he could afford to move in the best circles in the cultural centre of the Western world, he became friends with polymath Jean Cocteau, fashion illustrator Christian Bérard, and model Princess Natalie Paley. Visconti also had an affair with Coco Chanel, who was played by Barbora Bobulova in Christin Duguay's Coco Chanel (2008), Audrey Tautou in Anne Fontaine's Coco Before Chanel, and Anna Mouglalis in Jan Kounen's Coco Chanel and Igor Stravinsky (both 2009).

Visconti also formed an attachment to the German photographer, Horst P. Horst, whom he had met at the home of art patron Marie-Laure de Noailles (who was a direct descendant of the Marquis De Sade). Her husband, Charles, had funded Man Ray's film, Les Mystères du Château de Dé (1929), as well as Cocteau's Le Sang d'un poète (aka The Blood of a Poet) and Luis Buñuel and Salvador Dalí's L'Âge d'or (both 1930).

Gossip about Visconti's affair with Horst reached the ears of Prince Hugo of Windisch-Graetz, who immediately terminated the Italian's engagement to his daughter, Princess Irma. However, Horst offered a new distraction by persuading Visconti to work on a short film. This appears to have been lost, but the new interest in cinema was furthered when Chanel introduced Visconti to director Jean Renoir. He was working at the time on Toni (1935), which followed the fortunes of an Italian migrant worker in southern France. Filmed on location with a largely non-professional cast, this would exert a huge influence on what would become known as neo-realism.

Some scholars claim that Visconti worked as an assistant on the picture, which was based at Marcel Pagnol's studio near Marseille. Others insist that he didn't team up with Renoir before A Day in the Country (1946), on which he served alongside Jacques Becker and Henri Cartier-Bresson. Either way, Visconti was clearly in Renoir's orbit at this time and his association with the Popular Front had a profound influence on his prodigy's politics, as Visconti abandoned his support of Fascist leader Benito Mussolini and became a lifelong Marxist.

Following a brief visit to Hollywood in 1937, Visconti returned to Rome to focus on writing screenplays. Around this time, Il Duce's film-loving son, Vittorio, made a deal with American producer Hal Roach to make four opera films, Rigoletto, Aida, La Traviata, and Tosca. The latter was going to be directed by Augusto Genina, but he dropped out and Renoir agreed to take over the project, with Visconti among his assistants.

Having lost his mother in January 1939, he was glad to have a project to focus on. But Renoir remained in France to complete La Règle du jeu (1939) and he only returned to Cinecittà as the diplomatic situation in Europe started to worsen. When war broke out in September, Renoir was removed from the picture, which would be completed by Carl Koch. Delays meant it would only be released in 1941, the year that Visconti's father died. Brother Guido inherited the title, but he was a professional soldier and he was killed in action at El Alamein in North Africa.

To this point, Visconti had spent the war at his father's palazzo. When this became his own property, he started giving sanctuary to members of the Communist Resistance by hiding them among his household staff. Following the king's flight in 1943, Visconti left for the mountain town of Settefrati, where he assumed the nom de guerre, Alfredo Guidi. Persuaded it was safe to return to the capital, he joined actress Maria Denis in helping partisans, as well as escaped British and American prisoners.

On 15 April 1944, however, Visconti was arrested and taken to the notorious Pensione Jaccarino prison. He was held for 12 days before being transferred to San Gregorio. Having been interrogated by collaborationist governor Pietro Koch, he was sentenced to death by firing squad, only to be spared following the last-minute intervention of Marie Denis.

When Koch was captured and put on trial, Visconti testified against him while making the war crimes documentary, Giorni di gloria (aka Days of Glory, 1945), which culminated in footage of the execution on 4 July 1945 of Koch and Pietro Caruso, the head of the Fascist Police of Occupied Rome. But this shocking record of justice in action was not Visconti's first film, as he had made his mark two years earlier with one of the most remarkable debuts in screen history.

The First Neo-Realist

Despite supporting the Resistance, Visconti wrote for Cinema, the movie magazine that was edited by Vittorio Mussolini. Among his colleagues were Gianni Puccini, Antonio Pietrangeli, and Giuseppe De Santis and they teamed with Visconti on the screenplay for Ossessione (1942), which was based without credit on James M. Cain's The Postman Always Rings Twice, a 1934 pulp novel that had been given to him by Jean Renoir.

Alberto Moravia and Antonio Pietrangeli also contributed to the script, which centred on a roadside tavern in the Po Delta run by the boorish Giuseppe Bragana (Juan de Landa) and his younger wife, Giovanna (Clara Calamai). She becomes smitten with Gino Costa (Massimo Girotti), a drifter who bonds with Giuseppe over their military service. However, they cannot resist becoming lovers, although their romance starts to fray after they conspire to murder Giuseppe.

Photographed by Domenico Scala and Aldo Tonti with a grainy grit that reflected the poverty of the setting and the carnality of the affair, Ossessione was made to show Italians what they had become after a decade of Fascism. Vittorio Mussolini supposedly stormed out of the premiere declaring, 'This is not Italy!' and the film was banned by the authorities. Indeed, it was somewhat fortunate that some prints survived a cull. But, while these restrictions meant that its wider impact was not immediate, the stark potency and visceral sensuality of the imagery was readily evident to those working in the Italian film industry. Visconti later wrote: 'From Ferrara, I sent the first shots of the film to my editor, Mario Serandrei. After a few days, he wrote to me saying how much he liked the scenes and he added: "I don't know how to define this kind of cinema other than as 'neo-realistic'".'

The term stuck, while Visconti latched on to the Renoirian formula that would inform his best work, as he focussed on what one critic called characters 'caught in the mesh of their past, dissatisfied with their present and unable to assume responsibility for the future'. As we have already seen, his own future was in doubt for much of the final phase of the war. He later recalled, 'They arrested me in my house one, night. I told them they were crazy, but they took me from one prison to another. Finally, they wanted to shoot me. Thank God, the Americans arrived just in time and saved me.'

Consequently, Visconti got to see Ossessione play in Rome in May 1945 and enjoy reviews that favourably compared his interpretation of Cain's tome to Tay Garnett's The Postman Always Rings Twice (1946), which starred John Garfield, Lana Turner, and Cecil Kellaway. However, copyright issues kept his film out of the United States and Visconti occupied himself with stage projects while he sought inspiration for a follow-up. Eventually, the Community Party agreed to finance a documentary trilogy about the realities of sea fishing, farming, and sulphur mining. While in Sicily researching the first topic, however, Visconti was so taken by the villagers of Aci Trezza that he wrote a dramatic scenario for them based on Giovanni Verga's 1881 realist novel, I Malavoglia (aka The House by the Medlar-Tree). At the heart of the story was Ntoni Valastro (Antonio Arcidiacono), whose time on the mainland had alerted him to the exploitation of the wholesalers purchasing his fishing family's catch. When he rebels and buys his own boat to boost his income, however, Ntoni gets caught in a sea storm and is ostracised by his neighbours.

Enacted in a dialect that even required subtitles on the mainland and with cinematographer Aldo Graziati following the neo-realist style, La terra trema (aka The Earth Trembles, 1948) was feted alongside Roberto Rossellini's Rome, Open City (1945) and Vittorio De Sica's Bicycle Thieves (1948) for revolutionising screen storytelling. Blending naturalism and beauty and considered audaciously political for its time, the picture introduced another recurring Visconti theme: the clash between reverence for an established tradition and the iconoclasm of modernity. He would also return to generational conflict in exploring how idealists striking out against injustice need to temper their radical fury with considered pragmatism.

In order to complete the shoot, Visconti had been forced to sell some family jewels and an apartment in Rome. He had enjoyed working with non-professionals and had done so again in making the 1951 short, Appunti su un fatto di cronaca (aka Notes on a News Story), which examined the rape and murder of 12 year-old Annarella Bracci in the Primavalle district of Rome. But he was also keen to collaborate with Italy's biggest star. Anna Magnani had almost been cast in Ossessione, in which he was well served by Clara Calamai, who had called him 'a medieval lord with a whip'. However, she readily signed on to play Maddalena Cecconi in Bellissima (1951), a satire on the Italian film industry that was scripted by Cesare Zavattini, the theoretical father of neo-realism who had also written Shoeshine (1946), Miracle in Milan (1951), and Umberto D. (1952) for Vittorio De Sica.

'My whole subject was Magnani,' Visconti later said of a story that was co-written by Suso Cecchi D'Amico and Francesco Rosi and followed the efforts of a stage mother to live out her own dreams of movie stardom through her young daughter. Making knowing use of the Cinecittà studio complex, Visconti delights in exposing behind-the-scenes secrets, as Maddalena becomes increasingly desperate to land Maria (Tina Apicella) a role in the new film by Alessandro Blasetti, who made a guest appearance. But Visconti also lingers on the family's daily struggle and his insights into instant fame and celebrity culture are as pertinent today as they were seven decades ago.

The critics were lukewarm about this sentimental comedy, however, and it was not a commercial success. But Magnani won the coveted Nastro d'Argento award for Best Actress and she reunited with Visconti on an episode in Siamo donne (aka We, the Women, 1953), a severally directed anthology in which Magnani plays herself getting into an argument with a taxi driver over her lap dog. These multi-storied collections were very popular in Europe in the 1950s and 60s and it's a shame more of them are not available on disc. Perhaps the success of Yorgos Lanthimos's Kinds of Kindness (2024) will lead to a revival of interest?

After exploring other stylistic approaches (see below), Visconti returned to neo-realism for a final time for Rocco e i suoi fratelli (aka Rocco and His Brothers, 1960). Written by the director with Suso Cecchi D'Amico, Pasquale Festa Campanile, Massimo Franciosa, and Enrico Medioli, the action follows Rocco Parondi (Alain Delon), as he leaves the Sicilian town of Lucania to live with his brother, Vincenzo (Spiros Focás), in the Lambrate district of Milan. Accompanying him are siblings Simone (Renato Salvatori), Ciro (Max Cartier), and Luca (Rocco Vidolazzi), along with their widowed mother, Rosaria (Katina Paxinou). However, they get a reality check when Vincenzo's fiancée, Ginetta (Claudia Cardinale), refuses to have anything to do with the clan and the siblings are forced to find jobs.

Turning around the rivalry between Rocco and Simone for a prostitute named Nadia (Annie Girardot), the drama bristled with the trials and tensions of everyday life. However, the graphic nature of the content prompted the Milanese authorities to refuse shooting permission, while the Vatican threatened to confiscate prints unless cuts were made. Indeed, it was only after the picture was lauded abroad that it came to be regarded as a companion piece to Federico Fellini's satire on upper-class ennui, La dolce vita, which was released the same year.

In addition to winning the Special Jury Prize at the Venice Film Festival, Rocco and His Brothers also earned Visconti the Nastro d'Argento for Best Director. It has since been seen as an unofficial sequel to La terra trema, as it sought to explore the price that Italy had paid for failing to rectify its North/South divide. Echoing Yasujiro Ozu's Tokyo Story (1953) in its discussion of the divisions between families and generations, the film proved to be the meeting point of the neo-realist and the operatic elements of Visconti's aesthetic. It was described as his 'most difficult child' by biographer Gaia Servadio. She continues, however, 'he loved it best: too much went into it, too many ideas and material to make it into a totally successful film, but it is a grand statement'.

All the World's a Stage

Visconti had loved the theatre since childhood and he remained fascinated by plays and operas to the end of his life. When asked what medium he preferred, he responded, 'When I'm directing an opera, I dream about a film, when I'm working on a film, I dream about an opera, and when I'm doing a play, I'm dreaming about music. Working in another field is a change, a rest...You must always work with pleasure. The work is bad if you do not do it with pleasure.'

The first of his 40-odd stage plays was Jean Cocteau's Parenti terrible, which he staged in Rome in 1945. Although he had eclectic tastes, Visconti became known to Italian theatregoers for introducing the work of such American playwrights as Tennessee Williams, Erskine Caldwell, and Arthur Miller. Perhaps most notably, his production of A Streetcar Named Desire at the Teatro Eliseo on 21 January 1949 starred Vittorio Gassman as Stanley Kowalski, Rina Morelli as Blanche Dubois, Vivi Gioi as Stella, and Marcello Mastraoianni as Mitch. This was one of several dramas Visconti directed for the Rina Morelli-Paolo Stoppa Company up to 1960. Having debuted Jean-Paul Sartre's Huis-Clos in 1957, Visconti went to Paris in 1965 to pair Annie Girardot and Michel Auclair in his take on Miller's After the Fall.

Visconti also directed a handful of ballets. But his most celebrated stage collaborations were with Maria Callas, whom he had first seen perform as Kundry in Richard Wagner's Parsifal in Rome in 1949. Such was his obsession with Callas that Visconti followed her from theatre to theatre until he finally accepted the invitation to direct her in Gaspare Spontini's La vestale (1954) at La Scala. They reunited at the same venue for Vincenzo Bellini's La sonnambula, Giuseppe Verdi's La traviata (both 1955), Gaetano Donizetti's Anna Bolena, and Christoph Willibald Gluck's Iphigénie en Tauride (both 1957).

Callas credited Visconti with teaching her how to act, while he adored hearing her sing. Their association is referenced in three documentaries available from Cinema Paradiso: Gérald Caillat's Passion Callas (2006), Tony Palmer's Callas (2007), and Tom Volf's Maria By Callas (2017). But he doesn't merit a mention in Pablo Larraín's Maria (2024), which is currently in cinemas with Angelina Jolie in the title role. Maybe it's because he was supposed to have yelled at her whenever she asked a question, 'Sing - which is the only thing you are able to do.'

He regularly graced the Spoleto Festival after debuting there with Macbeth in 1958. As in his films, Visconti demanded realism from his opera casts. Gestures were restrained to ensure characters behaved 'like people' and, occasionally, he staged solos with the singer facing away from the audience. Among his best-known productions were Verdi's Don Carlos (1958) at London's Royal Opera House, to which he returned in 1964 for a black-and-white version of the same composer's Il trovatore. Two years later, he invited Leonard Bernstein to conduct Verdi's Falstaff at the Vienna State Opera, although the geometrical costumes designed for Simon Boccanegra (1969) at the same venue raised eyebrows.

Visconti's lifestyle was also called into question. 'He ate off gold plates,' mocked Salvador Dalí, who designed sets and costumes for Visconti's 1948 production of William Shakespeare's As You Like It. 'He was a Communist who only liked luxury.' Others derided him for 'voting left and living right' in noting that Count Luchino kept four butlers and five cars at his Roman palazzo. Despite holding Marxist views, however, Visconti was never a member of the Communist Party. 'I do like to live comfortably,' he once said, 'but that does not prohibit me from having ideas about social reform. I don't have to wear a burlap bag and live in a stable to feel that way, do I?'

Although he always urged compatriots to vote Communist at election time, Visconti's only passion was his work. But he always insisted that his plays, operas, and films carried a message. 'In the end,' he told a journalist, 'if I have nothing to say in a film, I don't make a film. I don't give a damn just to work. For me, things must be completely hot or completely cold, never tepid.'

Italian History Lessons

Visconti's love of opera was evident from the opening scene of Senso (1954), as the camera roves around the Teatro La Fenice in Venice during the fourth act of Il trovatore. Set in Hapsburg-occupied Venetia in 1866, this adaptation of a novella by Camillo Boito required the assistance of Suso Cecchi D'Amico, Carlo Alianello, Giorgio Bassani, and Giorgio Prosperi to transform into a compelling tussle between love and loyalty involving Austrian officer Franz Mahler (Farley Granger), Italian freedom fighter Roberto Ussoni (Massimo Girotti), and Countess Livia Serpieri (Alida Valli). Unfortunately, Tennessee Williams and Paul Bowles got involved with new passages of dialogue when a bowdlerised version was released in the US as The Wanton Countess.

Frustrated by his failure to cast Ingrid Bergman and Marlon Brando, Visconti proved a hard taskmaster for Farley Granger, whose lines were dubbed in post-production by Enrico Maria Salerno. Indeed, they had a falling out before the picture wrapped and Visconti had to make do with a body double. He and assistants Franco Zeffirelli and Francesco Rosi also had to cope with the death of cinematographer G.R. Aldo and the abrupt departure of his replacement, Robert Krasker, which allowed camera operator Giuseppe Rotunno to step into the breach. Miraculously, the imagery remained consistently lustrous, thanks in no small measure to Ottavio Scotti's production design and the costumes of Piero Tosi and Marcel Escoffier, who produced Valli's gowns.

Such opulence riled certain critics, who accused Visconti of betraying neo-realism by apeing Hollywood gloss. He dismissed the criticism, although he was nettled that the government took such exception to the depiction of the Venetians fighting for independence that they supposedly bribed the jurors at the Venice Film Festival to ensure the picture missed out on the top awards. An unrepentant Visconti declared, 'If you are a man, you must have an opinion. You must have a belief...Art must be useful.'

The Christian Democrats could do nothing, however, to prevent Il gattapardo (aka The Leopard, 1963) from taking the Palme d'or at Cannes. Adapted by Suso Cecchi d'Amico, Enrico Medioli, Pasquale Festa Campanile, and Massimo Franciosa from a novel by Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa, the action was set in the Bourbon Kingdom of the Two Sicilies during the Risorgimento campaign to unite the separate states of the Italian peninsula into a single sovereign country under the leadership of Piedmont. As Giuseppe Garibaldi and his redshirts threaten the old order, Don Fabrizio Corbera, the Prince of Salina (Burt Lancaster) expresses his disapproval of nephew Tancredi Falconeri (Delon) supporting the cause and flirting with his goddaughter, Angelica Sedara (Claudia Cardinale).

After Laurence Olivier, Spencer Tracy, Anthony Quinn, and Gregory Peck had all been considered for Salina, Burt Lancaster signed up for the role, with Corrado Gaipa being hired to dub his dialogue into Italian. Despite initial friction, director and star formed a firm bond that would lead to them reuniting later in Visconti's career. Chosen instead of Warren Beatty, Alain Delon landed a Golden Globe nomination. But the acting was highlighted less in the reviews than the visual splendour of Giuseppe Rotunno's photography, Mario Garbuglia's sets, and Piero Tosi and Umberto Tirell's costumes, most notably in the extraordinary 46-minute ball sequence (featuring a newly discovered Verdi waltz) that was filmed at the Palazzo Valguarnera-Gangi in Palermo, which alone makes this essential viewing for all Cinema Paradiso members.

Despite sharing Salina's lament at straddling two worlds and being ill at ease in each, Visconti also recognised the validity of Tancredi's contention that 'For things to remain the same, everything must change.' But his grandfather and father had been witnesses to the fact that unification had not delivered the promised benefits, particularly for the impecunious south, while Visconti himself had seen how the House of Savoy had been powerless either to bring the country together or prevent it from succumbing to Fascism. Indeed, several scenes drew on the director's own family memories and its apt that patrician Palermitani were cast as their own forebears and tutored in the manners of the period by society jeweller Fulco di Verdura. This almost fetishistic attention to detail amused Lancaster, who recalled Visconti personally stuffing a mattress that would not be seen on screen so that the actor would understand how lumpily uncomfortable it was.

Visconti also insisted on the tunics of Garibaldi's followers being dyed 20 times before he approved the shade of red. Such perfectionism was funded by the $5 million invested by Twentieth Century-Fox. However, Visconti was furious when the studio ignored his protests at several scenes being removed from the shorter US print. One critic lambasted Visconti for being an antiquarian rather than an artist, prompting him to snap back that he told 'stories of live men, of men who live among the things, not of the things themselves'. Lancaster was in no doubt, however, that Visconti was 'the best director I've ever worked with...an actor's dream'.

The German Trilogy

Having applied his unique blend of aristocratic background and Communist conviction to produce incisive studies of the Italian psyche, Visconti turned his attention to Germany in a triptych that some believe represents his finest work. He had personally witnessed the rise of Nazism and based La caduta degli dei (aka The Damned, 1969) on the Krupp family of industrialists that had flourished under the Third Reich. However, there are also elements of Hamlet and Macbeth in a narrative that was alsos influenced by Die Nibelungen, hence the use of Gotterdammerung as the European title.

While Baron Joachim von Essenbeck (Albrecht Schoenhals) is celebrating his birthday, news comes of the Reichstag fire in Berlin. Realising that newly elected chancellor Adolf Hitler will exploit the situation to reinforce his grasp on power, Joachim replaces the anti-Nazi head of the family steelworks (who is married to his niece, who is played by Charlotte Rampling) with his unscrupulous nephew, Konstantin (Reinhard Kolldehoff). This goes down badly with Friedrich Bruckman (Dirk Bogarde), an ambitious executive who is romancing Joachim's widowed daughter-in-law, Sophie (Ingrid Thulin). Consequently, on the advice of SS bigwig Aschenbach (Helmut Griem), Friedrich murders Joachim and Sophie uses her influence over decadent son, Martin (Helmut Berger), to entrust control of the company to her lover.

Scripted by Visconti in conjunction with Nicola Badalucco and Enrico Medioli, this set-up is deliciously complex and convoluted and the director conspired with production designer Vincenzo Del Prato and cinematographers Armando Nannuzzi and Pasqualino De Santis to turn what is essentially a dynastic soap opera into insightful socio-political analysis. One critic rightly noted that the feature had a 'sinister beauty' to go with its historical acuity. Dirk Bogarde remembered arriving at Cinecittà and being astonished by the scale of the Essenbeck mansion. Yet Visconti was dissatisfied with the luxuriantly carpets and had them replaced with wooden flooring that would click under the Nazi jackboots.

In addition to winning another Nastro d'Argento for Best Director, Visconti also shared an Oscar nomination for Best Original Screenplay. Helmut Berger received Golden Globe recognition amongst the Most Promising Newcomers, although Bogarde resented Visconti tweaking the storyline at his expense to showcase his new lover. But the film caused sufficient controversy Stateside to draw an X certificate because of its nudity. Moreover, 12 minutes were removed from the Night of the Long Knives sequence, as they were deemed salacious and incendiary.

Nevertheless, The Damned was hailed a success (Rainer Werner Fassbinder declared it his favourite film) and Visconti decided to abandon long-gestating plans for a four-hour adaptation of Marcel Proust's À la recherche du temps perdu - even though he hoped to line up Alain Delon or Dustin Hoffman for Marcel, Laurence Olivier or Marlon Brando for Charlus, and Helmut Berger for Charlie Morel - in order to retain his Germanic focus with a take on Thomas Mann's 1912 novella, Morte a Venezia (aka Death in Venice 1971). Once again, Visconti wrote his own screenplay, this time with Nicola Badalucco.

Some time in the early 1910s. composer Gustav von Aschenbach (Dirk Bogarde) checks into the Grand Hotel des Bains on the Venice Lido. He has come to recuperate and wishes to be left alone. However, while sitting in the hotel lobby, he catches sight of Thaddeus Moes (Björn Andrésen), a blonde Polish adolescent who is holidaying with his mother (Silvana Mangano) and sisters. Over the next few days, Aschenbach becomes so fixated on Tadzio that he fails to heed warnngs of a cholera epidemic sweeping the city.

Delicately conveying the internalised passions and insecurities of a repressed intellectual, Visconti won the Nastro d'Argento and the David Di Donatello Award for Best Director. He was also nominated for a BAFTA, along with Bogarde, on the night that cinematographer Pasqualino de Santis, production designer Ferdinando Scarfiotti, sound creators Vittorio Trentino and Giuseppe Muratori, and costumier Piero Tosi all received golden masks, The latter would also garner an Oscar nomination for a sombre and elusive Mahler-scored film that was respectfully rather than enthusiastically reviewed.

'He concentrates every second, oh, Christ, every split second,' Dirk Bogarde later complained. 'You're supposed to do your job absolutely perfectly, because he does his perfectly.' However, Visconti comes across very badly in his dealings with Björn Andrésen in Kristina Lindström and Kristian Petri's The Most Beautiful Boy in the World (2021), a sobering documentary that undoubtedly sullies the Italian's reputation. Openly gay by this time, Visconti was aware that his sexuality clashed with his faith. 'I am a Catholic,' he stated while promoting his film. 'I was born a Catholic, I was baptised a Catholic. I cannot change what I am, I cannot easily become a Protestant. My ideas may be unorthodox, but I am still a Catholic,'

Down the years, his lovers included King Umberto II, Horst P. Horst, Franco Zeffirelli, Udo Kier, and Helmut Berger. The latter took the title role in the final film in the German trilogy, Ludwig (1973), which Visconti (who was a distant relative) scripted with Enrico Medioli and Suso Cecchi D'Amico. Running for almost four hours, the drama opens in 1864 with the coronation of 18 year-old King Ludwig II of Bavaria. Despite his realm being under threat from the unification plans of Prussia, Ludwig prefers to spend his time commissioning fabulous palaces and championing composer Richard Wagner (Trevor Howard). As his mental health begins to decline, Ludwig seeks the counsel of his cousins, the Empress Elisabeth of Austria (Romy Schneider) and her sister, Sophie (Sonia Petrovna).

Having previously played the role in Ernst Mareschka's Sissi (1955), Sissi: The Young Empress (1956), and Sissi: Fateful Years of an Empress (1957), Romy Schneider excels as the troubled Elisabeth, who was also brilliantly played by Vicky Krieps in Marie Kreutzer's Corsage (2022). This saw Manuel Rubey essay Ludwig, who was portrayed by László Gálffi in Tony Palmer's Wagner (1983), which was headlined by Richard Burton. Impressive though the performances are, however, it's Visconti's measured approach to his recurring themes and the way in which he ties them to the Bavarian locations and Mario Chiari's production design and Piero Tosi's Oscar-nominated costumes, that gives the tragedy an additional layer of potency and poignancy.

Although Visconti suffered a stroke during production, on 27 July 1972, critics were rather aggressive in their assessment. The New York Review of Books went so far as to brand the film 'an unconscious parody of Visconti's own embattled romanticism, a diatribe against "privileged liberty", an old morality play in which the free soul is the damned soul - a dyspeptic Visconti, as it were, lecturing himself.' Later verdicts on the director's preferred cut have been more positive. Visconti won the David Di Donatello Award for Best Director again. But health issues would continue to dog Visconti (who smoked 120 cigarettes a day) for the last three years of his life.

Conversation Pieces

Not all of Visconti's films can be apportioned convenient categories and, frustratingly, these are the ones that are the hardest to see. Despite switching Fyodr Dostoevsky's short story from St Petersburg to the port of Livorno, Le notti bianche (aka White Nights, 1957) is not currently available on disc, even though Marcello Mastroianni and Maria Schell are touchingly well matched as the potential couple kept apart by her fidelity to the memory of Jean Marais.

In explaining his approach to the look and feel of the film, Visconti neatly summed up his entire oeuvre: 'It must look as if it were fake, but when you start to think it's fake, it must look as if it were real.' This aesthetic logic was also applied to his portmanteau contributions. Cinema Paradiso users can see 'Il lavoro' in Boccaccio '70 (1962), although the vignette about a wife (Romy Schneider) who insists that her husband (Tomas Milian) starts paying for her sexual favours after he's caught visiting prostitutes isn't one of Visconti's strongest works. The same has to be said of 'La strega bruciata viva' (aka 'The Witch Burned Alive') in Le streghe (aka The Witches, 1967). However, it does make a witty companion piece to Bellissima, as Silvana Mangano stars as Gloria, a screen diva who goes to a party at an Austrian chalet, where her fellow guests (including Annie Girardot and Francisco Rabal) get her drunk so that they can remove her make-up and see if she is as perfectly beautiful as her publicity suggests.

Sadly, neither of the films released either side of this anthology (which includes a cameo by Clint Eastwood) is currently on disc in the UK. This is particularly irksome in the case of Vaghe stelle dell'Orsa (aka Sandra, 1965), as it won the Golden Lion at the Venice Film Festival. Also known as Sandra of a Thousand Delights, this loose reworking of the Electra myth follows Sandra (Claudia Cardinale) and husband Andrew (Michael Craig) to her ancestral home in Volterra for a commemoration of her Jewish father. However, she and brother Gianni (Jean Sorel) believe that their new stepfather (Renzo Ricci) betrayed him to the Nazis during the war.

Echoes of Visconti's own family history reverberate around the story, whose use of domestic tensions to shed light on public events owes much to the insights Visconti had gained from a series of psychoanalytic sessions in Paris with Jacques Lacan. Memories and secrets also prove pivotal to Lo straniero (aka The Stranger, 1967), an adaptation of Albert Camus's celebrated 1942 novel, in which the death of his mother and the murder of an Arab man in 1930s Algiers impinge upon the relationship between middle-class clerk Arthur Meursault (Marcello Mastroianni) and Marie Cardona (Anna Karina). Accepting the stipulation of the author's widow that he remained faithful to the book, Visconti had hoped to reunite with Alain Delon. But Mastroianni reveals a darker side in portraying a man who has lost faith in the world and grown tired of life.

The same could never have been said of Visconti, who responded to the stroke that had confined him to a wheelchair by starting work on Gruppo di famiglia in un interno (aka Conversation Piece, 1974). Based on a short story by Enrico Medioli, the action concocted by Visconti and Suso Cecchi d'Amico was largely confined to a single building (which was constructed to the director's exacting standards by Mario Garbuglia). Without bothering to read the script, Burt Lancaster accepted the role of the ageing American professor who agrees to rent part of his Roman palazzo to Marchesa Bianca Brumonti (Silvana Mangano). However, she brings with her young lover Konrad Hübel (Helmut Berger), and her teenage daughter, Lietta (Claudia Marsani), and her scheming fiancé, Stefano (Stefano Patrizi), and their intrusively noisy antics soon begin to intrigue the reclusive academic. With Claudia Cardinale and Dominique Sanda cameoing as Lancaster's wife and mother respectively, this revisitation of perennial Viscontian themes would certainly have been better known had Audrey Hepburn accepted the role of the marchioness.

At least the director got to see the finished work, which wasn't the case with L'innocente (aka The Innocent, 1976), which was inspired by Gabriele D'Annunzio's 1892 novel, The Intruder. Once again boasting magnificent interiors by Mario Garbuglia and tactile photography by Pasqualino De Santis, the tale turns on a grotesque act of cruelty after the aristocrat Tullio Hermil (Giancarlo Giannini) embarks upon an affair with Teresa (Jennifer O'Neill) and drives wife Giuliana (Laura Antonelli) into the bed of the fecund Filippo D'Aborio (Marc Porel).

Visconti had hoped to cast Alain Delon, Romy Schneider, and Charlotte Rampling in his final exploration of family dynamics, the impact of environment on character, and the clash of the old and the new. But the strong cast still serves him well and it's a shame that the 69 year-old hadn't finished editing when he died of a second stroke at his home on the Via Salaria on 17 March 1976. Burt Lancaster, Claudia Cardinale, Laura Antonelli, Vittorio Gassman, and Helmut Berger were among the mourners at Sant'Ignazio di Loyola two days later. During his illness, this most influential director had written of his own inspirations, 'Stendhal would have wanted on his tomb the epigraph: This soul adored Cimarosa, Mozart and Shakespeare. My epigraph could be: Chekhov, Shakespeare and Verdi.'