In 1974 an infamous film, which happens to be one of the great cinematic meditations on love, was released. It is called The Night Porter, and it was intended to be nothing more or less than a study of the uncivilized drama of perverse, inexpungible passion. The film was denounced as sadomasochistic Nazi porn. Its plot was, to be sure, disturbing, and the viewer had to conquer a significant degree of discomfort and even outrage to consider charitably and lucidly the film’s primary theme, which perhaps explains its reception and subsequent reputation. The extreme mise en scène of the movie disrupted audiences’ relationship with its astonishing story, and allowed them to evade the excruciating questions that it broached. This was particularly true of American audiences, to whom the film was repeatedly mis-explained by American critics. The Night Porter tells the story of Max, a former Nazi official who worked in a concentration camp, and Lucia, a former inmate of that camp. Lucia was imprisoned because her father was a socialist, and in the camp she and Max developed a sexual relationship. We learn all this in flashbacks. The movie begins in Vienna about ten years after the war’s end. Max works as a night porter in a hotel, where one day Lucia and her husband, a celebrated American conductor, coincidentally arrive to stay. Max is now a member of a ghastly ring of former Nazis who endeavor to obliterate evidence of their past crimes by assiduously collecting and destroying incriminating documents and murdering witnesses who could testify against them; they hold mock trials for one another as test runs to see if sufficient evidence has been eliminated for the members to survive a real trial if one were to be held. In the lobby of the hotel Lucia and Max suddenly recognize each other, and in that electrifying moment the respective lives they have carefully built since the war’s end are over. Max does his best to hide Lucia from the Nazi ring — she was a witness to the camp’s atrocities — to keep them from murdering her. Lucia abandons her husband and moves into Max’s dank apartment. While he is at work one night, one of the Nazis comes to visit Lucia and tries to persuade her to testify against Max at his upcoming mock trial, which she refuses to do. Police come to the hotel asking questions about Lucia, whose family is looking for her, and Max eventually quits his job and moves into the apartment with her. They appear unable to be apart. His former comrades keep watch, attempting to kill the two lovers when either one is so much as seen from the window. Trapped inside, Max tells Lucia that she is free to call the police, who can secure her safe escape, have him arrested, and return her to her husband. She chooses to stay. The two remain barricaded inside until they run out of food. In the final scene of the film Max, dressed in his Nazi uniform, and Lucia, wearing a nightgown similar to the one he had smuggled into the camp for her, walk fatalistically outside onto a nearby bridge, where they are shot dead. It is a bizarre, tragic, and beautiful tale, and it cannot be adequately told without also describing the sweat and blood which give it life. These are made manifest primarily via the physical proximity of the lovers, and how that proximity, or its negation, works on them — the way they tremble, screech, beg, and collapse, the way their eyes glimmer or are held captive. Torrents of understanding and desire are exchanged in their tormented, silent stares. The film depicts the resurrection of a great damned love in the aftermath of atrocity. It is not bewildering that audiences just thirty years after the war recoiled from the film. The macabre brutality of The Night Porter must have been even rougher to endure in 1974 than it is now. The horrors of the Holocaust had not yet faded from living memory. There were people in those theaters who had memories of the sadistic universe in which Lucia and Max met. The movie takes place in a past peopled with demons of the sort that anyone alive today in the West never knew (though their contemporary counterparts thrive in Moscow, Damascus, and Beijing), and it was made and screened in a world in which those demons still lingered. Viewers who watch the movie today are twice removed: from the reality of The Night Porter, and from the context of the people who made it, and the viewers they expected to watch it. Yet The Night Porter was not the only film about the evils of World War Two that was released in the 1970s, and it is not remotely the most sexually explicit. The less said about the nauseating “Naziploitation” genre, such as Don Edmonds’ Ilsa, the She Wolf and Tinto Brass’ Salon Kitty, the better. But the confluence of debauchery and atrocity made it also into the mainstream, notably with Lina Wertmüller’s Seven Beauties, which was nominated for four Academy Awards. Bruno Bettelheim imperishably explained what was wrong with Wertmuller’s campy and cynical film in an essay called “Surviving”: “I believe that Seven Beauties is a somewhat uneasy, indirect, camouflaged — and therefore more dangerous, because more easily accepted and hence more effective — justification for accepting the world that produced concentration camps.” Still, the acidity of the reception that greeted The Night Porter was particularly pronounced and widespread. In the Chicago Sun-Times, Roger Ebert wrote that the film was “a despicable attempt to titillate us by exploiting memories of persecution and suffering.” In The New York Times, Vincent Canby called the film “a piece of junk.” Time Out said it was “an operatic celebration of sexual disgust.” In the longest of the reviews, which appeared in The New Yorker, Pauline Kael declared that “the film’s porno-profundity is humanly and aesthetically offensive. The offense is mitigated by
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