Death in Venice: not as great as we thought - but it still matters to me

Writing about how films introduced me to classical music has got me pondering – not for he first time – why so many of us fell hook, line and sinker for Death in Venice when it was released in 1971, and why its critical reputation has suffered so badly since. Once upon a time, it featured regularly in lists of all-time great films – now it’s lucky to make it into a Top 100 of specifically foreign movies.

There were many reasons for its initial success. It was massively civilised, sophisticated and European.  It wasn’t American (the only American character in the film is a doddery old hotel guest warning people against eating the strawberries because they might be bad for them – a sort of proto-health nazi). There’s no violence in it. Very few viewers would not have fancied a fortnight’s holiday at the Grand Hotel des Bains in the heyday of Edwardian opulence (it opened in 1901). 

Dirk Bogarde’s performance had BAFTA written all over it. The young Swede playing Tadzio managed the neat trick of being almost supernaturally beautiful without looking like the kind of boy any red-blooded kid would feel compelled to duff up – i.e. he didn’t come across as a precious woofter. Visually, it was possibly the most beautiful colour film to appear up to then. The score was achingly lovely – apart from theAdagietto, there was more Mahler (a sublime excerpt from the Third Symphony) and a poignant Mussorgsky lullaby (sung by Masha Predit, a Russian singer who just happened to be a guest at the hotel when Visconti started filming). 

And Venice – even in the grip of pestilence – looked absolutely ravishing. Silvana Magnano as the boy’s mother was stunningly attractive. There were some splendid bit-part performances – the disgusting, heavily made-up old man on the vaporetto, the dentally-challenged, strolling troubador on the hotel balcony, the pompous hotel manager spouting nonsense about the likely duration of the Scirocco, the worried little English travel agent who finally tells the composer that cholera has broken out in Venice, and the oily barber who, having turned von Aschenbach into a parody of the revolting old roué we met at the start of the film, tells him, “Now, the Signor may fall in love whenever he pleases” (brilliant sequence, this).

The beach scenes alone are worth the price of admission.

But the years – and repeated viewings - have revealed flaws that I (and many others) were prepared to overlook in the first flush of enthusiasm.

It’s a film about a paedophile masquerading as a film about the nature of beauty. Tadzio (played by an 18-year old Swedish actor trying to pass for 14) is meant to symbolise the sort of natural, accidental beauty that makes the composer question his whole approach to Art (explored in a series of overwrought flashbacks where a colleague mocks von Aschenbach’s belief in the importance of order and hard work in the creation of beauty - in effect, the traditional Classical v. Romantic argument, or between the Dionysian and Apollonian approach to existence). 

We can’t  get round it, as the critic Lawrence J. Quirk tried to, by pointing out that stills of the youth “could be extracted from the frame and hung on the walls of the Louvre or the Vatican”, and that Tadzio is meant to represent beauty in the realm of Michaelangelo’s David or Da Vinci’sMona Lisa. Visconti starts off down that route, but spoils it all about half way through by turning the kid from an unselfconscious Platonic ideal of Beauty into a teasing little tart who positively eggs his pathetic pursuer on. (The director compounds the felony by inserting some homo-erotic tussling in the sand featuring Tadzio and a companion near the end.) The physical nature of von Aschenbach’s infatuation is compounded by the fact that Dirk Bogarde is just too young for the role (he was 50 when the film was released), and therefore young enough to act on his impulses. Von Aschenbach needs to be an old man with a weird but essentially pure infatuation – not a randy, middle-aged sex tourist drooling over an under-aged boy. 

(Thomas Mann’s original novella was based on s personal experience: according to his wife, her husband had been similarly smitten by a 13-year old Polish lad in a sailor suit while holidaying in Venice in 1911, but without going so far as to follow him around the streets of the city. Mrs.

 Mann’s uncle, a law professor in Leipzig, was understandably outraged when he heard about the writer’s infatuation – he’d have been even more perplexed if he’d seen a photograph of the boy, Baron Wladyslaw Moes, who, to put it charitably, was no Adonis.)

And then there’s the performance of Dirk Bogarde to consider (his young co-star couldn’t act at all, but I doubt Visconti picked the Swede for his acting ability). Bogarde, actually, just wasn’t that good in the role. Him being too young to play von Aschenbach wouldn’t have mattered as much if he could play old – but he just couldn’t. Every bit of business meant to suggest old age comes across as nothing more than that - an unconvincing bit of business. Not for one moment do we forget that this is a famous middle-aged actor giving a “look at me, am I not giving a simply wonderful performance” sort of performance. (He was better in at least half a dozen other parts.)

But on a personal level, none of that matters much to me. Apart from considerably broadening my musical horizons, the film also introduced me to what, from the moment I arrived there for the first time thirty-nine years’ ago, has been my favourite city. There is nothing – absolutely nothing - new to say about Venice, except, perhaps that, taken as a whole, it is the greatest collective work of art man has produced (but I bet that’s also been said many times before). And whatever Visconti got wrong in what is still an extraordinarily accomplished piece of film-making, I have to thank him and his brilliant cinematographer, Pasqualino de Santis, for drawing me to the place that has given me more aesthetic pleasure over the years than any other.

And, as if that wasn’t enough, it also started me off an an intensive drawing spree for at least eighteen months.

I wonder if everyone has a work of art - film, poem, novel, paining - that had an effect on their lives out of all proportion to its actual artistic merit?