Greg: I must admit, it’s no ‘Dawn of the Dead’, which also troubles my top five all-time favourite movies!
Sam: How bizarre you are.
Greg: The 1978 original with David Emge, I must stress. Ye-es, I’m quite hard to pigeonhole… Give me zombies in a mall or a stuck-up composer prancing around cholera-stricken Venice, and I’m entertained.
Sam: I quite like ‘JAWS’. It shares some thematic similarities to ‘Death in Venice’ – a suppressed threat to a tourist trap.
Greg: Is that the one with the big fish and the three chaps in a boat? Anyway, back to ‘Death in Venice’: it’s incredibly slow, but there is at the same time so much going on, it’s so rich with detail it’s almost unbearable. Every time I watch it I see new things. Apart from ‘A Bridge Too Far’ (sorry, Dirk!) it’s the Bogarde film I’ve seen the most. How about you?
Sam: It’s up there with ‘The Servant’ for me, and ‘The Night Porter’.
Greg: Both very art-house. Pinter. James Fox. Charlotte Rampling. Nazis.
Sam: We musn’t get into them now or we’ll be here all night. But they are two excellent studies of complex men. ‘Victim’ comes a close fourth.
Greg: He plays a homosexual in that one.
Sam: He does indeed, and Sylvia Syms is in it as his wife. But wrapping up ‘Death in Venice’, it’s true it may not be ‘Dawn of the Dead’ or even ‘JAWS’, but it has a similar running time – just over two hours – so it’s hardly a bum-numbing epic.
Greg: Two hours goes by surprisingly quickly when not much happens. Some people just don’t know a masterpiece when it’s under their noses, I suppose.
Sam: Did you watch the new Blu-ray transfer of it from Criterion? It’s reviewed by another Entertainment Focus writer who calls it “one of the most painfully slow films you will ever see.”
Greg: Oof!
Sam: Anyway, the transfer offers a newly-restored print with a loving colour grading. It shines, more than ever, as a very serious art film about human mortality. And in that regard, it’s totally timeless – unlike the feeble mortals it depicts.
Greg: Well, I have given my Criterion laserdisc a spin this week old chap! It’s been lovely to sit and talk about this remarkable film, now half a century old! And I think it’s right that it’s still considered a cinematic masterpiece. For my money, it is Bogarde’s best work, but also Visconti’s. It’s a shame that Bogarde, who had his centenary earlier this year [2021], is beginning to be forgotten. Or at least is no longer a household name.
Sam: But then it’s almost fifty years since he stopped making movies, and twenty-five or so years since he last had a book published. He’s been gone for more than two decades, Greg. But it’s those who enjoy the nostalgia, like us, who keep his memory and legacy alive. And for the reasons we’ve given, we’ll always hold dear old Dirk Bogarde close to our hearts.
Greg: Do you promise me you’ll read some more volumes of his autobiographies? You won’t regret it!
Sam: I will do. It’s ‘An Ordinary Man’ next…
Greg: Lovely stuff! Same again…?
We hope you enjoyed this discussion. Criterion’s Blu-ray edition of ‘Death in Venice’ is available to purchase from Amazon.
