The Night Porter is a controversial 1974 film by Italian director Liliana Cavani, starring Dirk Bogarde and Charlotte Rampling. 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.
more
| Release date: | October 1, 1974 |
| Directed by: | Liliana Cavani |
| Rated: |  |
| Runtime: | 122 Minutes |
| Producer: | Robert Gordon Edwards, Esa De Simone |
| Editor: | Franco Arcalli |
| Music by: | Daniele Paris |
| Cinematography: | Alfio Contini |
| Screenplay by: | Liliana Cavani, Italo Moscati |