Films and Filming – Sept 1973

The Night Porter

AMONG ITALY’S women directors (who include Lina Wertmuller, Elda Tattoli , Dacia Maraini), Liliana Cavani is the best known outside of her own country. Her television series on Saint Francis, later re-edited into a feature film (Lou Castel played the saint) is still considered superior to other treatments of the same subject. A film about Galilee, shown in Venice in 1968, was less happily received. Her subsequent pictures, The Cannibals and The Guest, won more favourable acclaim at international festivals. The Guest (L’Ospite), made for Italian television, for which Cavani wrote her own script, was the result of an interest which had been aroused when she attended a screening of The Cannibals given for the inmates of one such ‘home’ in Tuscany. The more documentary part of the film, showing life in the hospital and the agony of a woman patient, was particularly impressive. Less convincing was the part of the picture in which the woman evokes a romantic fantasy in period costume in which the man of her trauma is identified with a young man who is a patient in the hospital. Cavani obtained fine acting from Lucia Bose as the woman and from Peter Gonzales (who was the young Fellini in Roma) as the boy.

Cavani’s new film, The Night Porter, just completed in Rome, is another original script, a story about a group of exNazis who gather in a Vienna hotel in the late 1950s, determined to eradicate their guilt complexes. Charlotte Rampling plays the role of a woman who as a girl had had a relationship with a young Nazi in a concentration camp. Dirk Bogarde is the Nazi who reappears in her life as the night porter of the Vienna hotel. Cavani says that this is her most personal film to date.