Les Nuits chaudes de Berlin

A visually impressive movie, very arty and with many subtle undertones. Packed full of pulchritudinous young females in various stages of undress and very risque in its day, the film is, however, very ponderous in places, particularly during the first hour.

Basic plot summary: In 1939 Berlin, the Nazi authorities take over the famous Salon Kitty brothel and pack it with new girls of good Aryan stock and impeccable National Socialist credentials. Their mission is to spy on their military officer clients and report back to their controllers about anyone who seems to be wavering from the Party line. All goes well until one of the girls, Marguerite, falls in love with a Luftwaffe pilot who has turned his back on Hitler and all he stands for.

'Salon Kitty' was Tinto Brass' movie immediately prior to his infamous attempt at a big budget porn crossover 'Caligula'. While it isn't as notorious as that much talked about film, it is no slouch in the outrageousness department itself! Camp cult legend Helmet Berger (Visconti's 'The Damned', Franco's 'Faceless') plays Wallenberg, a ruthlessly ambitious Nazi who sets up Salon Kitty, a high class brothel to entertain his fellow officers. Unbeknown to Madame Kitty (Ingrid Thulin, who played Berger's mother in 'The Damned') Wallenberg has the place bugged and uses the information for blackmail purposes. The beautiful Margherita (Teresa Ann Savoy, who like many of the cast went on to appear in 'Caligula') one of the patriotic party members Wallenberg recruited to work in the brothel eventually discovers this and plots, with Kitty's help, to bring down the dangerous megalomaniac before he destroys them all. This ludicrously over the top sexploitation classic features nudity galore, 'Cabaret' style musical numbers, and many flamboyant sequences. You're either into this kind of movie or you're not, and if you are it is one of the most entertaining of its kind. Also stars b-grade buff faves John Steiner ('Tenebre') and John Ireland ('Satan's Cheerleaders').

Outrageous, unsettling, exploitative and courageous, it is also slightly overlong. The current running time at well over two hours is due to the more contentious material being put back in but maybe some other scenes might have been cut to compensate. I love the film, the scenes of debauchery and nudity, male and female, the decadent singing and dancing and the glorious sets by Ken Adam but it is a slight story and as the end draws near it begins to stumble and repeat itself. Always preferable to the much lauded Cabaret there is a real sense of foreboding, of a major calamity and despite the roars and champagne popping at news of the invasion of Poland and later the fall of Paris, we can't help waiting for the biggest crash when the nasty, ugly men in the wonderful costumes get their comeuppance.

I'm not really sure what I was hoping for when I rented this movie, but I know I certainly wasn't hoping for what I got here. To be sure, the art direction is extremely good. And sure, there is gobs of nudity and sex almost bordering on hard-core. But despite all this, the movie is BORING, especially at the almost ungodly length of over 2 hours with the recently issued director's cut! While there is an interesting idea with the plot premise, it goes all over the place. Characters come then go offscreen for long periods of time so they aren't really developed, and the little plot there is would probably (at best) barely cover an hour if all the redundant footage was cut out. All the same, pretty amazing Germany would get involved in a coproduction of this nature, and I guess it might be considered an interesting footnote in that it served as a warm-up for Brass' equally bizarre later film CALIGULA.

An SS officer (Helmut Berger) uses a notorious upscale bordello off the Kurfurstendanstrasse with loyal party prostitutes to spy on its clients for the State. As the war progresses it becomes a place with growing suspicion and paranoia.

Tinto Brass's notorious erotic movie is based off a real bordello that was for a while operated by none other than the high ranking Nazi Reinhard Heydrich. The film of course focuses on nudity and the erotic, but it is also very stylish looking with some wonderful Art Deco sets designed by none other than the great art director famous for his James Bond films, Ken Adam, with costumes designed by Ugo Pericoli and Jost Jacob. In many senses the brothel acts as an analogy and a microcosm on how the war progressed for Germany making it one of the more intelligent Nazisploitation films. Of course it fetishises the Nazis and becomes quite bizarre in places as the film develops.