"The kind of acting I used to do no longer exists because your prime consideration is the budget, running time, the cost - and whether they'll understand it in Milwaukee." ~ Dirk Bogarde

Italian writer/director Liliana Cavani had made documentaries on the Nazis at the start of her film career and had been told stories by women survivors of the concentration camps. She visited Dachau, a German camp in the early 60s, and while waiting for the weather to clear for more filming she noticed a woman laying roses in the mud. She questioned her and discovered she was an American who was imprisoned there during the war and she was marking the spot on the anniversary of the death of her Nazi lover. The story stayed with her and 10 years later she used it as the starting point for her remarkable and difficult examination of a side issue of the camp system – the intersection of power, sex and death.

Max (Dirk Bogarde) is a desk manager living a banal and boring life at a middling hotel in Vienna, a dozen years after WWII. Lucia (Charlotte Rampling) is the wife of a visiting guest conductor and the pair check in, but Max and Lucia’s eyes meet and a shared past comes flooding back in memories of their time when they were lovers in a camp during the war. Max is anxious to hide his past, but is also being ‘tried’ by a small group of his former SS colleagues, in order to find any surviving witnesses or incriminating evidence against him for his war crimes, and to thereby cleanse his record to keep both him and his colleagues safe. Max and Lucia resume their loaded relationship and Max’s Nazi associates decide the safest thing to do is to silence the lovers.

Cavani keeps the focus tight on the pair and their rekindled relationship, with the central thrust being the ripples of compulsive behaviour that have again touched two damaged individuals. Cavani and co-writer Italo Moscati keep conflict at the heart of the piece - conflict between the lovers, between the members of the Nazi group and conflict with the past. In flashbacks we are privy to the baggage the central characters carry - Max is an observer in the camps, a documentarian with a camera and his eye catches a pretty teenager, Lucia. Max saves Lucia from the gas and the price is extracted in sex that takes on an extreme nature. Max needs the diversion to distract him from the horrors he is party to inflicting on the prisoners and Lucia needs it to save her life. The relationship is dysfunctional and disturbing, but given its birthplace how could it be other?

The set design and cinematography is dark, flat and drab as if the washed out colour reflects the washed out souls of the protagonists. The only spark and stab of life occurs when they use each other for pleasure – but it’s a pleasure both born of and dependent on pain, and the pair are drawn to each other as if there’s an invisible cord they can’t sever. Cavani spares nothing in showing how degraded the pair could be and offers no easy solutions or salves to mitigate the discomfort, showing it in a quasi-documentary, non-judgmental way. Bogarde and Rampling are superb as the codependent pair who create a world for two that most others would recoil at yet it’s hard to think there’s not an element of satire in the flashback camp scenes of the Nazis having their downtime – Rampling doing her best Marlene Dietrich in her Nazi sex-kitten regalia only two years after Bob Fosse’s Cabaret skewered similar cows. If the floor show is a distasteful one, what of the horrors outside the walls?

The post war era is rich ground in which to investigate notions of paranoia, suspicion, betray and Cavani makes the most of it in the personal sphere with Max and Lucia but also in a wider sense with the members of Max’s group. Cavani finds pathos in the dancer who performs for max as he danced in the camp shows, and desperation is never far from the surface. Cavani show how ruthless Max can be when he disposes of a threat – and the threat of violence to cover the sins of a violent past in omnipresent. Desperation and violence is a language Max and Lucia speak fluently so is it any wonder it infects every part of their being. Enough so that Lucia can’t help herself in dropping her respectable life as a top conductor’s wife to pursue Max once more in this compulsive l’amour fou - with Max no less compelled than to grab on to the one spark in his miserable life that makes him feel anything beyond the disgust for himself that he plainly wallows in. When Max and Lucia are around each other it’s as if there’s a perfume of poison that only they can smell, and they are drawn to it inexorably. All the way, straight down the line baby.

The idea of investigating a codependent, dysfunctional, sadomasochist relationship spawned from a Nazi concentration camp would not have been top of mind in the early 1970s, in an era when the world was still struggling with the Nazi legacy. Liliana Cavani made the brave choice to examine a shadowy niche surrounding sex and power in an extreme environment, a dirty window into damaged people. Max is unredeemable - he’s a man who has done unspeakable things and abused his power and people along the way and Bogarde is superb in the role, never shying from its ugliness or its self-loathing. Charlotte Rampling is perfect as Lucia; brittle, flighty and conflicted and doomed – hard to believe Mia Farrow (who is a fine actress) was once a front runner for the part. It’s the star pair who own the film, albeit with solid support from the lesser roles in Gabriele Ferzetti, Isa Miranda and Amedeo Amodio as the dancer.

The film is art house and not mainstream, and its reception fell between those two arcs – some arthouse lovers embraced it, warts and all, and mainstream audiences recoiled. The Night Porter was released at the tail end of an era where the standard Hollywood ‘Nazis are bad'  WWII blockbusters had dominated cinema, like The Dirty Dozen, The Great Escape, Patton or the quirky Kelly’s Heroes model held sway. Hollywood had embraced black comedy in war via the latter, and with Altman’s M*A*S*H but wasn’t ready to do sadomasochistic sex in a Nazi hat. European cinema had looked at more problematic aspects of the war in a mature way, especially Renais’ astonishing Hiroshima Mon Amour or the thoughtful and serious Garden of the Finzi-Continis from Vittorio De Sica. The Night Porter was bold and controversial but it gave us an alternate lens to view the era through, and that tradition continues with Glazer's superb The Zone of Interest  in 2023, showing that not all angles of examination of the Nazi horrors are exhausted. But, fair to say that there was never a war film like The Night Porter until Cavani came along. Jaw dropping still, and essential.