Oscar Profile #282: Luchino Visconti

Formally known as Count don Luchino Visconti di Modrone, the multi-talented Italian theatre, opera and cinema director as well as screenwriter was born on November 2, 1906 in Milan, Italy, one of seven children of the Duke of Modrone, the head of one of Northern Italy’s richest families. A descendant of the 13th Century ruling dynasty of Milan, Visconti received an aristocratic education exposing him to art, music and theatre at an early age. He studied cello with cellist and composer Lorenzo de Paulis. His circle of friends included composer Giacomo Puccini and conductor Arturo Toscanini.

Visconti began his film career in 1935 as assistant to the legendary Jean Renoir, having met him through mutual friend Coco Chanel. His first film as writer and director was 1943’s Ossessione, an uncredited adaptation of The Postman Always Rings Twice, but filmed with neorealist liberties that offended both the Catholic Church and Mussolini’s fascist regime. Mussolini had the film confiscated and burned, although Visconti had made a private copy which he kept hidden. Visconti was thrown in jail and scheduled to be executed but was saved by the arrival of the American troops. The film was not shown in the U.S. until after Visconti’s death in 1976.

Visconti contributed to the 1945 documentary Days of Glory for which he wrote and directed the sequence on the Caruso trial. He then and wrote and directed the 1948 neorealist masterpiece La Terra Trema (“The Earth Trembles”) but spent most of the remainder of the decade in the theatre where he toiled until 1960, making just three films in the 1950s, Bellissima with Anna Magnani, Senso with Alida Valli and Farley Granger and White Nights with Maria Schell, Marcello Mastroianni and Jean Marais.

More prolific in the 1960s, he began the decade with the award winning Rocco and His Brothers with Alain Delon and Renato Salvatori and The Leopard with Burt Lancaster, Claudia Cardinale and Delon and ended it with The Damned with Dirk Bogarde, Ingrid Thulin and Helmut Berger, his companion from 1964 until his death in 1976 in a Golden Globe nominated performance.

Visconti received his only Oscar nomination for his screenplay for The Damned. He received a BAFTA nomination for his direction of 1971’s Death in Venice. The director would make just three more films, 1972’s Ludwig starring Berger as the 19th Century King Ludwig II of Bavaria, fow which Berger would win the Italian equivalent of an Oscar; 1974’s Conversation Piece with Burt Lancaster and Berger and 1976’s The Innocent with Giancarlo Giannini and Laura Antonelli which would be released after his death.

Visconti suffered a stroke in 1972 and was told to give up smoking, but he wouldn’t. He suffered another stroke four years later and died on March 17, 1976 at the age of 69.

ESSENTIAL FILMS

OSSESSIONE (1943)

This unauthorized and uncredited version of James M. Cain’s The Postman Always Rings Twice was the first Italian neorealist film but no one outside of Italy would see it until years later as it was confiscated and burned by Mussolini’s fascist regime and Visconti arrested and sentenced to be executed for the film’s subversive look at Italian life during the war. Saved from his fate by the arrival of the American troops, the Italian neorealist movement would be known instead for Rossellini’s war trilogy- Rome Open City, Paisan and Germany Year Zero, Vittorio De Sica’s Shoeshine and Bicycle Thieves and Visconti’s own 1948 film, La Terra Trema.

ROCCO AND HIS BROTHERS (1960)

The New York Times’ Bosley Crother compared Visconti’s emotionally riveting film to John Ford’s masterful The Grapes of Wrath, high praise indeed and richly deserved. Visconti’s film is about a poor family from Southern Italy who struggle to make it in the industrial north. It stars Alain Delon as the eldest of five brothers, Renato Salvatore as the self-destructive one, Annie Giradot as a tragic Milan prostitute and Katina Paxinou as the mother of the boys. Claudia Cardinale has a supporting role as the finance of the third brother. The film won numerous awards around the world beginning with the FIPRESCI Prize at the Venice Film Festival along with a special award to Visconti.

THE LEOPARD (1963)

Visconti’s film of Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa’s novel of the same name is about a Sicilian prince played by Burt Lancaster who in the wake of the 1860 uprisings in Sicily sees a changing Italy but refuses to play a part in the new democracy, leaving the future to his nephew (Alain Delon) but enjoying the moment as he dances with the nephew’s fiancé (Claudia Cardinale) imagining a world he will never see. A big hit in France on its initial release, the film was initially panned in the U.S. by critics who found Lancaster all wrong for the part. The film’s reputation, however, has grown over the year thanks in large part to Martin Scorsese’s championing of the film which he considers one of the greatest ever made.

THE DAMNED (1969)

The first film of Visconti’s German trilogy, followed by Death in Venice and Ludwig, this condemnation of a German industrialist family’s collaboration with the Nazis was the only film to earn Visconti an Oscar nomination for his screenplay. The film begins the introduction of Helmut Berger performing in drag as Marlene Dietrich. Berger, Visconti’s partner in real life, plays an amoral sexually deviant playboy who has sex with his underage cousin, a young Jewish girl and eventually his own mother (Ingrid Thulin). The Night of the Long Lives at which the SA leaders are massacred by the SS gangster style while engaging in a homosexual orgy is another unforgettable sequence.

DEATH IN VENICE (1971)

Visconti’s film of Thomas Mann’s novel changes the central character from author to composer allowing for generous dollops of Mahler on the soundtrack. The British loved the Italian-French production, giving it seven BAFTA nominations including Best Picture, Actor (Dirk Bogarde) and Director and giving it four technical awards. Oscar only nominated it for Best Costume Design. Bogarde has one of his best roles as the dying composer who is obsessed with the beauty of an adolescent youth (Bjorn Andrésen) vacationing with his family on the same beach as the composer. They never meet, but there is a sort of acknowledgement by the boy as the old man breathes his last breath. Silvano Mangano plays the boy’s mother.