“The Night Porter,” (1973) January 7, 2016, DVD. Part two of our “45 Years” Charlotte Rampling anticipatory mini-series, and certainly an odd one. Actually, it’s one I’d consciously avoided for many years, but Bronwen wanted to see it. Max (Dirk Bogarde) is a former SS officer, concentration camp torturer living as a hotel night porter in late ‘50s Vienna, a city teeming with ex-Nazis and their sympathizers and collaborators as well as those attempting to ferret out, charge and convict those genocidal murderers. Into his hotel comes Lucia (Rampling), now the wife of an American opera conductor, and his former victim/lover in a sado-masochistic camp triste. Flashbacks and present action explicate their original and later relationship even as Max’s SS colleagues attempt to disrupt their “love” and purge the crime of guilt from their midst through a truly perverse and cathartic set of secret trials. It is graphic –not pornographic—about the twisted connection they are both locked in and profoundly operatic musically and in general tone. The acting is fine, if highly theatrical. Rampling does most of her work with her face and body; the film leaves the explication to Bogarde. It is also cruel, often dismal, occasionally slow, and not one that will ‘uplift the soul’. The film is by Liliani Cavani and, by way of contrast, the DVD includes an earlier postwar documentary by her about the courageous anti-fascist/anti-Nazi women of the Italian resistance that details both their remarkable behavior and the price they paid.