This unabashed work of pure sensation is set in Germany during the rise of Nazism, but it is less concerned with historical drama than with revealing a land gone completely mad. The Essenbeck family of industrialists join with the Nazi regime to consolidate their economic power, but their greed may break them apart, if the insanity of the times doesn't do it first. Visconti refuses an understated vision of Nazi Germany; rather, he allegorizes the period's brutalities with a series of nightmarish set pieces-a birthday party, a family dinner, an SS gathering, a horrific recreation of the 1934 “Night of Long Knives” massacre-more suited to expressionist painting than film. Damned on its release for being too “decadent,” the film is that, and then some; but to critique it for such excesses would be like finding similar fault with Macbeth, the Ring cycle, or the tableaux of Bosch. For an artist such as Visconti, the theatricalities of past centuries illuminate the horrors of this one.