LUDWIG

Italy, 1973,136 minutes, Colour.
Helmut Berger, Romy Schneider, Trevor Howard, Gert Frobe, John Moulder Brown, Helmut Griem.
Directed by Lucchino Visconti.

Ludwig should have been much better than it is coming from Lucchino Visconti. He produced this immediately after his success with Death in Venice (1971). Critics found this film far less successful and it went back for re-editing. It seems that forty minutes or so was cut out.

Ludwig is similar to many of Visconti's themes over the last fifteen years -a rich and powerful family, inbred and some members close to insanity as in The Leopard; Sandra; The Damned; social class and the passing of an age as in the same three films; the preoccupation with a bizarre, artistic personality who retreats from reality and decays, as in Death in Venice. Ludwig is not entirely successful in communicating this, but the interesting ingredients are there. The acting is good. However, Helmut Berger is in danger of being cast only as a sickly, perverted character - The Damned; The Secret of Dorian Grey; The Garden of the Finzi- Contini. Trevor Howard blusters as Wagner and John Moulder Brown - Deep End; The Finishing School; Vampire Circus; King, Queen, Knave - once again plays a madman. The beauty of Bavaria and Ludwig's buildings and Wagner's music form a background to a strange, unhealthy world of a hundred years ago.

1. What are the most interesting features of this film?
2. Why was Visconti interested in portraying the life and times of Ludwig?

3. How successful was the structure of the film? (Reduced by about forty minutes, it has eliminated, so it is said, autobiographical comments by the central characters. Would this have improved the film?).

4. How did Helmut Berger portray Ludwig? Was it the portrait of the man or merely a sketch? Why?

5. What kind of a person was he - from his coronation at nineteen years to his death at forty-one years? Was he groomed 'to be king , to understand his responsibilities? Preoccupation with himself, the influence of his mother, of his chaplain - Fr. Hoffman?

6. Was Ludwig a ruler? What were his main interests? Patronising the arts? Building? Did he understand what was going on around him?

7. How unhealthy was the world in which he lived - inbred, decaying, hedonistic, artificially controlled? Could he have escaped from this?

8. Why did he build? Did they reflect him at all - their grandeur, baroque style, gardens, halls of mirrors? Did the film effectively utilise the buildings?

9. Why did he degenerate so quickly? what impression did this have on the audience?

10. How remote had he become at the end? Were his ministers right to take over? Was this treason, and did Ludwig understand what was happening?

11. The mystery of his death? Does the film suggest what happened?

12. How well did Visconti reconstruct the period? How did this enhance the film? Did you enjoy the music - Wagner, Offenbach, Schumann? How did this add to the beauty of the film?

13. What comments on monarchy, power, the nineteenth century did the film make?

14. what is the value of this kind of historical film? What does it indicate to a modern audience?