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Plot synopsis:
It is 1957, Maximilian Theo Aldorfer, a former Nazi SS officer who had posed as a doctor in order to take sensational photographs in concentration camps, and Lucia Atherton, a Holocaust survivor, had an ambiguous sadomasochistic relationship. Flashbacks show Max tormenting Lucia, but also acting as her protector.
Lucia, now married to an American orchestra conductor, meets Max again by chance. He is now a night porter at a hotel in Vienna, and a reluctant member of a group of former SS comrades who have been carefully covering up their pasts by destroying documents and eliminating witnesses to their wartime activities. Max has an upcoming mock trial at the hands of the group for his war crimes. The group's leader, Hans Folger, accuses Max of wanting to live 'hidden away like a church mouse'. Max wishes to remain hidden, but he voices support for the group's activities. Memories of the past punctuate Max and Lucia's present with urgent frequency, suggesting that Lucia survived through her relationship with Max - in one such scene, Lucia sings a Marlene Dietrich song, "Wenn ich mir was wünschen dürfte" ("If I could make a wish"), to the 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 her, a reference to Salome.
Because she could testify against him, Lucia's existence is a threat to Max. He goes to see a former Nazi, Mario, who knows Lucia is still alive; Max murders him to protect his secret. After Lucia's husband leaves town on business, Max and Lucia renew their past lovemaking in Max's apartment. Max confesses to Countess Stein, another guest at his hotel, that he has found his "little girl" again. The Countess tells him that he is insane; Max replies that they are both 'in the same boat'. Meanwhile, Folger has Max spied on by a youth who works at the hotel.
Max is interviewed by the police about Mario's murder. He spends days with Lucia in his apartment, and sleeps little. Folger, who wants Lucia to testify against Max, visits and informs her that Max is ill. He suggests that Lucia must also be ill to allow herself to be in this position, but Lucia sends him away, claiming to be with Max of her own free will.
The SS officers are infuriated at Max for hiding a key witness. Max refuses to go through with the trial, calling it 'a farce', and admits that he works as a night porter due to his sense of shame in daytime. He returns to Lucia, telling her that the police questioned him and others at the hotel about Lucia being missing, and that no suspicion fell on him. Eventually, Max quits his job, devoting all of his time to Lucia. The SS officers cut off the couple's supply of food from a nearby grocery store. Max barricades the door to the apartment, and he and Lucia begin rationing. Max seeks help by phoning one of his old hotel friends, who refuses, and imploring his neighbor, but she is prevented from providing aid by Adolph, the youth who had spied on Max earlier. Max retreats again to the apartment, where Lucia is almost unconscious from malnutrition. After one of the SS cuts off the electricity in Max's apartment, Max and Lucia, respectively dressed in his Nazi uniform and a negligee resembling the one she had worn in the concentration camp, leave the building and drive away; they are soon followed by a car driven by Max's former colleagues. Max parks his car on a bridge, where he and Lucia walk along the sidewalk as dawn breaks. Two gunshots ring out, and the doomed lovers fall dead.

Tags: pornographic, cruelty, murder, bleak, flashback, sadist

Review:
These aesthetic qualities produce a sense of doom and sadness, yet also show beauty and love amidst the hopelessness.Dirk Bogarde gives a really masterful performance as Max, a former Nazi SS man who bears a huge burden of guilt.
Another character, an Italian who survived awful times, appears like a dog who has been beaten and fears another whipping."The Night Porter" can be slow-moving, yet this is punctuated by some very vivid scenes.
She immediately recognizes Max (Dirk Bogarde), her cruel S&M-master, and he (now a night porter in a hotel) recognizes her (Charlotte Rampling) as well.
Although it is neither violent nor vulgar, the situation is disturbing and violent -actually it's something we DON'T see with our eyes: a psychological violence.Some years after the end of Second World War, a woman meets in a hotel her jailer during her concentration camp period.
Charlotte Rampling also had this totally unhinged quality and the two really work off each other's energy to bring together something genuine and not often captured on film.The Night Porter rocked my world and deeply moved me.
It's very hard to obtain just one feeling towards the film since it has so many layers and creates so many emotions.The lead a night porter who used to be a Nazi officer in charge of a concentration camp encounters his past when one of his previous captives checks into his hotel.
The movie is about what the night porter does to protect his love from danger and might I say it's quite poetic.Fabulous performances from both Dirk Bogarde(my favorite actor of all time) and Charlotte Rampling.
What really struck me about the story was not the sadomasochistic aspect which I actually found to be rather minor, (He slaps her around a bit and there is a scene where she is chained to a bed), but rather the tenderness and love shown by Max. He calls her "his little girl" throughout the movie and indeed that seems to be the most accurate description of his feelings.
Some time after World War 2, a survivor of a Nazi concentration camp, Lucia (played by Charlotte Rampling), stumbles across the Nazi officer who tormented her, Max (Dirk Bogarde).
Now you're a lowly night porter for a swanky hotel in West Berlin.Thus starts the story of Maximilian Aldorfer (Dirk Bogarde) a man who lurks in the shadows along with a small cabal of surviving Nazis.
It a film that attempts cultural literacy but makes the fatal mistake of being alienating, unpleasant and ultimately wearisome to watch.The Night Porter (1974) is not so much a movie as it is a forceful invitation into the minds of two severely damaged people.
It was groundbreaking in terms of its examination of sadism/masochism and the Nazi issue works well as a psychological backdrop.I think that by far the most interesting question that the film leaves us with is not what happens at the end, but rather who is the captive in their rather strange relationship.People have said that this film explores the connection between perversion and fascism but I find that a superficial summary.
While this film takes place 12 years after the war, and has frequent flashbacks to life in the concentration camps, it is a psychological study of sadomasochism and the "Stockholm syndrome." Two-time Golden Globe nominee Dirk Bogarde (The Patricia Neal Story, Song Without End) is a former Nazi guard (Max) who is in hiding as a night porter, when he is placed in the proximity of Charlotte Rampling (Swimming Pool), a woman (Lucia) he loved in the camp.Bogarde is magnificent, and can say more with his facial expressions than many actors can say with words.While Max and Lucia are renewing their old relationship, a group of Nazis are trying to eliminate all traces of evidence from the camps.
In my opinion The Night Porter, Liliana Cavani's most original and complex film, is the most intense entry in Italy's nazi/sex-cycle of the seventies.
To begin with, this art-house lunacy about a Nazi commander's S&M relationship with a beautiful Jewish prisoner(Charlotte Rampling, the only worthwhile element in a way-overlong two-hours) that is resumed some 30-years-later when they accidentally meet at an elegant party, and resume their affair (get out the jelly jar, whips & chains, broken glass, etc.) was laughed off the press-screening at Embassy.
"The Night Porter" really isn't as shocking as his reputation suggests,but still there is a good amount of sleaze featured here.I've heard that the main source of inspiration for Liliana Cavani was her interview with a real concentration camp survivor who was forced into a sadistic relationship with one of her captors.Dirk Bogarde is excellent as a Max,a former SS officer!The film is well-made and a little bit disturbing-I'm fairly sure that it influenced an infamous "Ilsa-She Wolf of the SS".Check it out,but be prepared for some rather unpleasant stuff!.
I was expecting to see a dark, artistic movie with strong S/m elements.Instead, I wasted almost 2 hours of my life suffering through mediocre acting, nonsense dialogues and a childish plot.The 2-bit S/m elements are some slapping, some shouting, chaining the woman to the bed and some Nazi camp humiliation flashbacks.
After a chance meeting at a hotel in 1957, a Holocaust survivor (Charlotte Rampling) and the Nazi officer (Dick Bogarde) who tortured her resume their sadomasochistic relationship.This film deals with the psychological condition known as Stockholm Syndrome in the most extreme way possible.
There is a lot of meaning behind the strange behavior and the sexuality, but the film doesn't try to hammer the point, nor does it turn into exploitation.The performances of Dirk Bogarde and Charlotte Rampling are outstanding.
Unable to break away and incapable of denying the reality of her past lover, the doomed Lucia repeats her shame with Max in Rampling's exquisite performance that is pathetic and magnetic on screen.Written and directed by women, this unusual film examines topics of victimization, obsession, and guilt as a sick, extreme form of love, a subject a head of its time in 1974.
Instead of hating him, his victim finds herself falling for him, and the two embark on a painful, sadomasochistic relationship years before FIFTY SHADES OF GREY made the whole thing popular.I admit this whole set-up isn't really my cup of tea and I prefer films where the Nazis are being shot at rather than presented as broken, sympathetic people.
Still, THE NIGHT PORTER is undoubtedly a well-shot movie, and Dirk Bogarde (VICTIM) is always fine playing these dark characters with their hidden secrets.
Yet, in this case the setting and characters are even more controversial (and thus more cult-like) : Dirk Bogarde (a former concentration camp guard) who recreates his sexual relationship with the now adult prisoner Lucia (a very convincing Charlotte Rampling).
1974 English/italian drama..Post world war II a group of nazi officers are surviving in Vienna and eliminating the past records of their war sins..Max, a night Porter of a hotel and member of this SS group comes across a Holocaust survivor young girl Lucia he fell in love in the concentration camp.
It seems an idiotic and offensive subject for a movie: a relationship between a concentration camp inmate and a nazi war criminal, revisited ten years after the war, when the criminal is in hiding.In "The Night Porter", the flashbacks to the Holocaust are pretty unconvincing, especially after such painfully realistic films like "Schindler's List" and "Son of Saul".The hotel where most of the movie takes place seems to be run by a cabal of hiding nazis, and people who want to help them stay hidden.A bit past the half way point we get the source of the movie's famous image: Rampling, bare breasted, dressed in Nazi attire: the cap, the long gloves, suspenders and trousers.
Director Liliana Cavani, who also co-wrote the screenplay, managed to incite a mild uproar from the critics by using a Nazi concentration camp as a backdrop for this kinky relationship, yet the irony of emaciated prisoners of war watching passively while the officer flirts with his pretty, wide-eyed captive is intriguing (at first).
Anyway, apart from the film needing some shortening in the last section, it is a perfect tale of a nazi commandant and inmate meeting up years later, remembering their time together in flashbacks and then inevitably, actually re-enacting it and realising that their bond is so profound it might as well be called love.
THE NIGHT PORTER, is a doomed love story in its kernel while being notorious for its sadomasochistic exploitation between not any random two, but Max (Bogarde), a former Nazi SS officer and Lucia (Rampling), his prisoner in the concentration camp.
Dark, depressing, and, at times, deeply disgusting, Liliana Cavani's The Night Porter (1974) is undoubtedly one of the most emphatic examinations of sadomasochistic love in all cinema.Charlotte Rampling plays the challenging part of a sexually depraved Holocaust victim with such remarkable poise and conviction that it never really comes across as a performance.
It's a role that a lesser actor could have made appear vulgar, but, vintage Bogarde, we get to vicariously experience the masochistic pain and suffering that his character goes through every time he abuses his helpless victim.The Night Porter is certainly not a movie for the faint hearted and the only way to appreciate is to watch it with an open mind, by letting go of bigotry, conservatism and prejudice.
A former top Nazi hides out by being a night porter in a hotel, but is recognised by one of the very inmates he has abused, but rather than turn-him-in she decides to continue their abusive master-and-servant relationship.This is the kind of movie which I came to very cold and so much the better for it.
Yet they often are simply strange such as the S.S. man who performs a homo-erotic ballet routine for his fellow Nazis or Lucia's erotic song and dance number replete with Nazi regalia, which is a sequence that really accentuates the Nazi erotica angle which is understandably problematic for some.The film benefits considerably for having Dirk Bogarde and Charlotte Rampling in the central roles.
They were sharp,smooth,whatever is necessary for the scene.I recommend people to watch this film because like i sad before, you probably look at the SS the way this movie shows.
*WARNING!* - Don't let this DVD's tantalizingly provocative cover art of a young Charlotte Rampling in leatherette, Nazi gear fool you - 'Cause, believe me, when it comes to the likes of kink and depravity (with a bitter slice of S&M thrown in for good measure), The Night Porter plays it way too safe, and, unfortunately, doesn't deliver the wallop that it most certainly should have.Yes. This train wreck (of a Romeo & Juliet story) did contain some interesting and intriguing moments, but, overall, its unconventional storyline was set (throughout its entire 2-hour running time) at a very low simmer and never once did it reach the boiling point, as far as I'm concerned.Perhaps, now 40 years later, The Night Porter is about due for a remake....
Directed by Liliana Cavani and dealing with some rather esoteric S&M, (the presence of Dirk Bogarde should give you an idea), it's more hothouse than art-house.Bogarde plays a former concentration camp guard now working as the eponymous night porter at a Vienna hotel, (it is set in 1957), and Charlotte Rampling is the former prisoner who stumbles across him again and is not adverse to continuing the sadomasochistic relationship they once shared.
When Lucia Atherton happens to come and stay at the hotel, the pair recognise each other instantly; but this new chapter to their relationship is never going to run smoothly with Max's former Nazi compatriots, who are currently destroying documentation and witnesses to the fact that they were once members of the Nazi party.The first forty minutes are ridiculously boring, as the film pulls its plot together by way of some really boring scenes.
When they meet much later on, and much deeper into their newfound relationship these years later, they enjoy the dynamic that comes with it: one half of the twosome allows themselves to be chained up and spoon fed under these controlled conditions, whereas the other needs to constantly be aware that their identity and history are both at threat of being exposed in an instant.Dirk Bogarde plays Maximilian, or "Max" to most around him; the said character in charge of a group of staff at a Vienna hotel in 1957 whose job it is to meet, greet and help new arrivals of an often affluent nature.
He too is dissatisfied at Max's presence in his own life when Lucia comes along.Issue and controversy will always come with a film such as The Night Porter.
Or with the premise, which just the first part sounds good enough for a movie: an once-Nazi commandant at a camp is a night porter at a hotel in Vienna, and a woman comes with her husband, played by Rampling, and they recognize each other instantly, but neither saying a word.
Control, it would appear, is a supremely powerful instrument, and in sex, oh man.There are good erotic moments, of the raw, rough 70's sort (NOT porno, must make that clear), mostly when Maximilian and Lucia do suddenly get back into their "NO - YES" mode of love-making, particularly in one very long shot where Cavani shows the characters, like uninhibited beasts, on the floor of the hotel room.
Night Porter, The (1974) * (out of 4) Controversial Italian film about a former Nazi (Dick Bogarde) working as a night porter who runs into a former victim (Charlotte Rampling) he knew at a concentration camp.
As for the acting by the two main performers, Dirk Bogarde and Charlotte Rampling, it is just top class, no more to say.The movie starts on a bleak day in Vienna in the 1950's.
It focuses right away on the character of Max (Dirk Bogarde), who works as a night porter at a fancy hotel.
Way back in the mists of time, in the early 1970's, there were some directors (both male and female) who made sincere efforts to make films that dealt with themes of fringe-sexuality and dark nihilism, but create  them with seriousness, mood, and poignancy: in other words, they tried to raise the fringes up to the level of High Art. Along with films like "Last Tango in Paris", "The Night Porter" is a story about a very implausible encounter between 2 people who willingly descend into self-destructive behavior and death.
When, more than a decade and a half later, Lucia turns up at the hotel where Max now works as a night porter, old pains and pleasures are reignited.Liliana Cavani's film is potent, powerful stuff, a kaleidescope of human observations and ideas.
They reunite by chance in a Vienna hotel, where Maximilian works as a night porter, 13 years after the war.Their lives spiral out of control as they struggle to stay together, blocking out the outside world, along with its moral principles (what is considered normal, acceptable).What Lucia feels for Maximilian could be dismissed as a manifestation of Stockholm syndrome, but I believe one could view it entirely different.
The film is excellently photographed and edited There is much artistry in the acting, especially by Dirk Bogarde, who is able to genuinely convey strong mixed emotions An ex-Nazi scientist hides out as a porter in a German hotel after the War...
Dirk Bogarde is Max. The night porter in a seedy hotel who also happens to be a former SS officer.
By the time the film ended, there was no question in my mind that ex-Nazi Max and former prisoner Lucia were in fact hopelessly in love with each other and needed each other in a way that far transcended a more normal relationship.
The problematic role of Max is handled well by Dirk Bogarde, managing to evoke some sort of sympathy for the character, which is certainly not easily earned, considering his background as an SS officer at a concentration camp during the war.This is an odd, thought-provoking movie, that can be both frustrating and fascinating to watch, and is definitely not for everyone.
Liliani Cavani's 1974 film, set in 1957 Vienna, is a puzzling and uncomfortable study of a sado-masochistic relationship, and is worth seeing for the performances of Dirk Bogard as night porter/ex-SS officer Max, and especially Charlotte Rampling as former concentration camp inmate Lucia.
Max by chance gets reunited with concentration camp survivor Lucia (a very strong and fearless performance by Charlotte Rampling) and resumes the dangerous sadomasochistic affair that they started back in the 1940's.Director Liliana Cavani relates the absorbing story at a hypnotically languid pace, ably crafts a hauntingly bleak and melancholy tone, explores the severe emotional and psychological damaged wrought by the Third Reich with unflinching candor and directness, and follows the doomed romance between the deeply troubled main characters to its inevitably grim and tragic conclusion.
A former SS officer Max (Dirke Bogarde) goes into hiding as a night porter at a hotel.
He lives a gloomy, uneventful life until one day he sees a former concentration camp inmate, the beautiful Lucia (Charlotte Rampling), in the hotel lobby.
When I first saw Liliana Cavani's controversial film about sadomasochistic love affair between former Nazi officer Max (Dirk Bogard) and a concentration camp survivor Lucia (Charlotte Rampling)whom he used to abuse sexually and physically during the WWII, it had a shock value.
Well I haven't mention this yet so here it is: Max is a former SS Officer, the film begins when is 1957 and we are in Vienna where Max works as the night porter of a hotel.
While The Night Porter is not very close to be a must-see masterpiece for me it is really interesting, great in parts and with fine performances not only from its protagonists Dirk Bogarde and Charlotte Rampling so yes, check it out..
THE NIGHT PORTER is the story of a bizarre relationship between an ex-Nazi, Max,(Dirk Bogarde), and a stunning young woman, Lucia(Charlotte Rampling), whom he sexually abused her entire stay at an SS concentration camp.