The Night Porter (Liliana Cavani, 1974)

Charlotte Rampling and Dirk Bogarde in The Night Porter

Cast: Dirk Bogarde, Charlotte Rampling, Philippe Leroy, Gabriele Ferzetti, Giuseppe Addobbati, Isa Miranda, Nino Bignamini, Marino Masé, Amadei Amodio. Screenplay: Liliana Cavani, Italo Moscati, Barbara Alberti, Amedeo Pagani. Cinematography: Alfio Contini. Art direction: Nedo Azzini, Jean Marie Simon. Film editing: Franco Arcalli. Music: Daniele Paris.

I don't mind if a movie is offensive as long as what it makes me think and feel is more significant than what offends me. But Liliana Cavani's The Night Porter, celebrated and damned for its offensive central story, the doomed love affair of a former SS officer and the concentration camp survivor whom he loved and abused, doesn't have enough substance to its characters to make its offensiveness meaningful or even credible. Despite performances of deep conviction by Dirk Bogarde as Max and Charlotte Rampling as Lucia, we still know them by their labels: ex-Nazi and masochistic victim. We can only infer why they were drawn together in the camp and why they remain drawn together years later, when he has become a night porter in a Viennese hotel that's a hotbed of decadent characters and she has married a celebrated orchestra conductor. What causes Lucia to give up this apparently successful marriage to degrade herself with this creep? And what's with this assortment of ex-Nazis who are destroying old records and eliminating witnesses to their wartime crimes -- other than, of course, a plot device that puts the lives of Max and Lucia in jeopardy. Why is there a long sequence about the ballet dancer who used to perform shirtless for the SS and now seems to be restricted to private performances for Max, who works the lights for the performances? Is it to evoke the homoerotic element of Nazism, itself a wrongheaded and offensive trope? Nothing in The Night Porter holds up to very close scrutiny. And yet it's a hypnotically watchable film that dares you to take it seriously as it unrolls, but just left me feeling jaded and unsatisfied when it was over.

Le Trou (Jacques Becker, 1960)

Jean Keraudy, Marc Michel, Philippe Leroy, Raymond Meunier, and Michel Constantin in Le Trou

Cast: Michel Constantin, Jean Keraudy, Philippe Leroy, Raymond Meunier, Marc Michel, Jean-Paul Coquelin, André Bervil, Eddy Rasimi. Screenplay: Jacques Becker, José Giovanni, Jean Aurel, based on a novel by Giovanni. Cinematography: Ghislain Cloquet. Production design: Rino Mondellini. Film editing: Marguerite Renoir, Geneviève Vaury. 

All prison break movies have to be judged by the standard set by Robert Bresson's 1956 masterpiece A Man Escaped. Most of them are found wanting, but Jacques Becker's last film, Le Trou, though it lacks Bresson's moral intensity and political significance, makes a good try at it. What Becker's film has going for it is a fine ensemble of actors, including one of the men who participated in the attempted prison escape in 1947 on which José Giovanni based the novel that Becker turned into a film. Under a screen name, Jean Keraudy, Roland Barbat not only plays the prisoner Roland Darbant but also introduces the film as a "true story." This touch of documentary realism gives Le Trou a solid grounding, and Becker uses it to great effect, especially in a long take in which the prisoners break through the subflooring of their cell into the basement beneath. For a long time we see them hammering away almost ineffectively at the concrete, but just as we fear that this is going to be like watching paint dry, the seemingly impervious substance begins to chip away, revealing the larger rocks and looser material underneath. It's a tour de force of sorts, because the concrete must have been poured especially for the filming and designed to resist the hammering just enough to build suspense. What plot there is other than the elaborately detailed escape focuses on Claude Gaspard (Marc Michel), a young prisoner who is moved into the cell after the other four have already made their plans for the escape. Initially they mistrust the newcomer, but he earns their acceptance -- up to a point. The film eschews a music soundtrack, relying instead on the sounds of the prison for atmosphere. There are some darkly comic moments, as when two of the prisoners, having made it into the basement, have to hide from guards making their rounds. We don't see how they do it at first, but then it's revealed that one of the prisoners is standing on the shoulders of the other, dodging the patrol behind a convenient pillar, around which they just barely manage to make their way as the guards circle it. In hindsight, there are lots of things to cavil about, such as how the escape plan was devised and the necessary tools acquired -- matters that A Man Escaped details more interestingly -- but Le Trou holds up well while you're watching it, relying on solid characterization and vivid details to disarm skepticism.