Death in Venice

Pros: Beautiful images, great performance by Bogarde, beautiful Bjorn Andresen, and thundering music by Mahler
Cons: Philosophical theme of Mann's novelette pretty much lost; some will find script slow and boring

Usually, when I sit down to write a review, I've already decided what overall rating I plan to give the film. For this film, however, there is so much that can be said about it, positive and negative, that I'm having difficulty, at the moment, deciding ...

Pros: Interesting to watch Dirk Bogarde's portrayal of a man's disintegration.
Cons: Vastly over-rated.

I first became aware of the film "Death In Venice" through a 1970's Monty Python sketch in which the Film Directors Fraud Squad arrests a Japanese director for impersonating Luchino Visconti. Inspector Leopard then summarizes the director's films while...

Pros: the Dirkster looks cool with make-up on!
Cons: they don't talk an awful lot...very avant-garde cinema

The year was 1971, and Dirk Bogarde was desperate for some cash-- his country home in France was in need of some olive trees and olive trees cost money. Death In Venice is one of those movies Dirk did to fund his gardening habit.

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Pros: Phenomenal acting, beautiful filmmaking style
Cons: No plot and little action, if you consider that a "con"

A film that not only does full justice to the book it adapts, but quite possibly improves upon it.

It is a rare adaptation of a book to the screen that even begins to approach the original work, but Visconti's "Death In Venice,"...

Pros: cinematography, art design, originality
Cons: very slow, dubbed, story might offend some

For anyone who felt that 2001: A Space Odyssey had too much action and moved too quickly, there is hope for you. Another art film exists that is even more glacially paced.

Death in Venice may be the slowest moving film that I...

Pros: The Mahler soundtrack is lovely
Cons: Everything else is appalling, acting so understated it's under the floorboards and no-one for the audience to empathise or even get interested in

Plot? Dirk Borgarde and his ridiculous moustache follow a teenage boy and his family around the increasingly diseased Venice of sometime in the middle of the last century. Supposedly a composer, Gustav, suffering from nervous exhaustion brought on by the...