In the 1970s, many European intellectuals, particularly those on the left of the political spectrum, became obsessed with the rise of fascism. This was not hard to foresee, as the social turmoil of the 1960s and the economic decline of the 1970s seemed fertile breeding ground for dangerous ideologies. In such times, when political involvement could be associated with noble artistic passion, many filmmakers tried to warn contemporary generations of lurking dangers by depicting pre-war Europe and the circumstances that led to phenomena like Fascist Italy and Nazi Germany. Of course, there were also authors who jumped on the bandwagon for other, less noble, reasons. For them, the moral depravity of fascism could be explained to the audience by explicitly showing the sexual depravity of those times. This, naturally, made some of those films very popular with a teenage audience.
One such filmmaker was the Italian director Tinto Brass, who later made a career shooting expensive and stylish soft porn. Salon Kitty, his 1976 film, is very loosely based on the novel by Peter Nordern, a book that deals with a bizarre yet true story from the first years of WWII. In 1939, Walter Schellenberg, one of the heads of the Nazi intelligence service, set up an elite, exclusive brothel in Berlin with a clientele comprised of top Nazi officials and foreign diplomats. None of the customers knew that the girls employed there were all Nazi agents or that all the rooms were bugged. The most bizarre fact is that not even Kitty, the nominal madam of the brothel, was aware of the real purpose of that enterprise.
The screenplay by Tinto Brass, of course, simplifies the story and changes a few names. Schellenberg becomes Wallenberg (played by Helmut Berger), an ambitious Nazi official who wants to use the brothel to blackmail his way to the top of the Reich’s hierarchy. Kitty Kellerman (played by Ingrid Thulin), apart from being the madam, has a second job as a cabaret singer. Caught in the net of depravity is the sweet, innocent girl Margerithe (played by Teresa Ann Savoy) who has been thrown into the brothel. There she falls in love with a customer, Hans Reiter (played by Bekim Fehmiu), a disenchanted Luftwaffe pilot. When Margerithe discovers that her lover has been executed for defeatist speeches he made in the brothel, she finds out that the place is bugged. She informs the madam of the real situation, and both women decide to confront Wallenberg.
Those who tend to bash Roberto Benigni for exploiting the Holocaust as the topic of comedy would probably go bananas watching this film, which uses the darkest pages of European history for cheap sexploitation. But, although Salon Kitty happens to be nothing more than rather more stylish and expensive soft porn (though not very successful; some of the supposedly erotic scenes are quite unappealing), it does try to have more multidimensional characters and even something resembling dramatic conflict—this time between the power-hungry and unscrupulous Wallenberg and the hedonistic womanhood symbolised by Kitty. Unfortunately, Brass seems to overuse other cinematographic references, probably thinking he could repeat the successful interaction of Berger and Thulin in Luchino Visconti's The Damned. The most noticeable and irritating is Ingrid Thulin's unsuccessful attempt to imitate Liza Minnelli's musical numbers from Cabaret. All in all, Salon Kitty is a failure, albeit with some very interesting moments.
RATING: 4/10 (+)
(Note: The text in its original form was posted in Usenet newsgroup rec.arts.movies.reviews on May 9th 1999)
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