Salon Kitty | |
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Directed by | Tinto Brass |
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Story by |
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Based on | Salon Kitty by Peter Norden |
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Starring | |
Cinematography | Silvano Ippoliti |
Edited by | Tinto Brass [2] |
Music by | Fiorenzo Carpi |
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Release date |
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Running time | 130 minutes [2] |
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Salon Kitty is a 1976 erotic- war-drama film directed by Tinto Brass. The film was co-produced by Italy, France and West Germany. It is based on the novel of the same name by Peter Norden, [4] covering the real life events of the Salon Kitty operation, under which the Sicherheitsdienst took over an expensive brothel in Berlin, had the place wire tapped, and replaced all the prostitutes with trained spies, in order to gather information on various members of the Nazi party and foreign dignitaries.
It is considered among the progenitors of Nazisploitation genre. [5] [6] [7]
In the U.S., the film was edited to lighten the political overtones for an easier marketing as a sexploitation film and released under the title Madam Kitty with an X rating. Blue Underground Video, for the uncut version, has surrendered the X rating for an unrated DVD and Blu-ray release.
Wallenberg (Helmut Berger), an ambitious Nazi SS commandant, devises a plan to select a special group of female informants in order to plant them as prostitutes in a high class brothel on the eve of World War II in order to collect intelligence on various important members of the Nazi party and foreign dignitaries who frequent the establishment. The selected SS auxiliaries are then group tested with SS men to assess their suitability. The brothel is then purged of its regular girls and Kitty (Ingrid Thulin), the owner and Madam of the brothel, is forced to comply and allows her original girls to be deported as the building gets wiretapped with listening devices and other surveillance equipment, after which the new girls proceed to spy on their illustrious clients. However, when one of the informants named Margherita (Teresa Ann Savoy) discovers that the surveillance project resulted in the execution of her lover, Luftwaffe pilot Hans Reiter (Bekim Fehmiu), she enlists Kitty to help her take down Wallenberg. Margherita entraps Wallenberg via a recording where he tells her that he has the dirt on all the top Nazi hierarchy and intends to bring them all down. As a consequence, Wallenberg is executed for treason.
The film also includes a large number of uncredited actors.
Salon Kitty was filmed mostly at Dear Studios in Rome, with some additional location filming in Germany. Production designer Ken Adam had recently suffered a nervous breakdown while working on Barry Lyndon , and he described his participation in this film as creatively regenerative. He has stated that the production was enjoyable, and that he feels Salon Kitty is "underrated." [8] Adam based his design of Wallenberg's apartment on his own memories of his family's apartment in World War II-era Berlin. Wallenberg's enormous office, though a set, allegedly features a real marble floor, as it was cheaper to use real marble than create a mock-up version. [9]
Costumes and uniforms for the film were designed by Ugo Pericoli and Jost Jacob, and were constructed by Tirelli Costumi of Rome. Adam credited Jacob with the design of the 'kinky' uniforms that Wallenberg wears throughout the film. [9]
Salon Kitty was released in Italy on March 2, 1976. [2]
In a review at the time of the UK release, the Monthly Film Bulletin found the film to contain "a script that does nothing more than pile up the perversions as fast as possible (the characterisation hardly rises above the stock Nazi heavy while the motivation is consistently, and laughably, crude)" and hoped that "Italian directors will soon examine their recent track record of the atrocities of Nazi Germany ( The Damned , The Night Porter , and now Salon Kitty) and abandon the subject for a long while to come." [10]
Ingrid Lilian Thulin was a Swedish actress and director who collaborated with filmmaker Ingmar Bergman. She was often cast as harrowing and desperate characters, and earned acclaim from both Swedish and international critics. She won the Cannes Film Festival Award for Best Actress for her performance in Brink of Life (1958) and the inaugural Guldbagge Award for Best Actress in a Leading Role for The Silence (1963), and was nominated for a Best Supporting Actress BAFTA for Cries and Whispers (1972).
Salon Kitty was a high-class Berlin brothel used by the Nazi intelligence service, the Sicherheitsdienst (SD), for espionage purposes during World War II.
Giovanni "Tinto" Brass is an Italian film director and screenwriter. In the 1960s and 1970s, he directed many critically acclaimed avant-garde films of various genres. Today, he is mainly known for his later work in the erotic genre, with films such as Caligula, Così fan tutte, Paprika, Monella and Trasgredire.
Sir Kenneth Adam was a German-British movie production designer, best known for his set designs for the James Bond films of the 1960s and 1970s, as well as for Dr. Strangelove and Salon Kitty.
Helmut Berger was an Austrian actor, known for his portrayal of narcissistic and sexually ambiguous characters. He was one of the stars of European cinema in the late 1960s and 1970s, and is regarded as a sex symbol and pop icon of that period.
Nazi exploitation is a subgenre of exploitation film and sexploitation film that involves Nazis committing sex crimes, often as camp or prison overseers during World War II. Most follow the women in prison formula, only relocated to a concentration camp, extermination camp, or Nazi brothel, and with an added emphasis on sadism, gore, and degradation. The most infamous and influential title is a Canadian production, Ilsa, She Wolf of the SS (1974). Its surprise success and that of Salon Kitty and The Night Porter led European filmmakers, mostly in Italy, to produce similar films, with just over a dozen being released over the next few years. Globally exported to both cinema and VHS, the films were critically attacked and heavily censored, and the sub-genre all but vanished by the end of the seventies.
Helmut Dantine was an Austrian-American actor who often played Nazis in thriller films of the 1940s. His best-known performances are perhaps the German pilot in Mrs. Miniver and the desperate Bulgarian refugee in Casablanca, who tries gambling to obtain travel visa money for himself and his wife. As his acting career waned, he turned to producing.
John Steiner was an English actor. Tall, thin and gaunt, he attended the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art and performed on-stage for the Royal Shakespeare Company, but was best known to audiences for his roles in Italian films, several of which became cult classics.
Teresa Ann Savoy, FRSA was a British actress who appeared in a number of Italian films.
Maria Christina "Tina" Aumont was an American actress. She was the daughter of French actor Jean-Pierre Aumont and Dominican actress Maria Montez. She made her acting debut in the British film Modesty Blaise (1966), but later had a prominent career as a leading lady in Italian films.
Fräulein Devil, also known as Captive Women 4, Elsa: Fraulein SS and Fraulein Kitty, is a 1977 French Nazi exploitation film.
Dan van Husen was a German actor. He started his career in the 1960s, playing in a number of Spaghetti Westerns, and also performed in Italian and German films by renowned directors including Frederico Fellini and Werner Herzog and in German TV series. Starting in the 2000s he performed in Hollywood films, and in 2008 had a role in a Dutch World War 2 movie, Winter in Wartime.
Maria Michi was an Italian supporting actress who worked with Roberto Rossellini on his two early neorealism masterpieces: Rome, Open City and Paisà.
Bekim Fehmiu was a Yugoslavian theater and film actor. He was the first Eastern European actor to star in Hollywood during the Cold War, and one of the internationally best-known ethnic Albanian actors.
SS Girls is a 1977 Italian Nazisploitation comedy film by director Bruno Mattei. The film is about a brothel where traitors of the Nazi high command are eradicated. To help the brothel out, a Nazi commander, involved in intelligence work, enlists the aid of scientists who train various prostitutes to sexually satisfy the desires of the Nazi Forces high command and root out any traitors in the Nazi military Forces or the Nazi SS Forces.
Nazi Love Camp 27 or The Swastika on the Belly is a 1977 Italian Nazi exploitation film by Italian director Mario Caiano and starring Finnish actress Sirpa Lane. In between brutal depictions of a brothel in a concentration camp and a high-class brothel for leading Nazis, the film partially focuses upon the Lebensborn program and, albeit being generally categorized among erotic films, it is one of the few Nazisploitation films to contain scenes that have been considered hardcore pornography.
Monica Swinn, is a Belgian actress, best known for her roles in European softcore pornographic films of the 1970s, particularly those of the sexploitation and horror film genres. She acted in 20 of Jesús Franco's films, which occasionally featured her in hardcore lesbian scenes with Lina Romay and another Franco regular, Alice Arno; different versions of films such as Female Vampire (1973) had to be produced because of their explicit scenes. She tended to play characters with a sexual vulnerability, usually maids, prisoners or isolated aristocratic women, although two of her lead roles were as a sadistic wardress in Franco's women in prison film Barbed Wire Dolls (1976) and as a nightclub singer and Madam for the SS in Alain Payet's Nazisploitation film, Hitler's Last Train (1977). According to Swinn herself she was typecast, recalling after reading a typical Franco script: "I'd mull over the previous scenes and think to myself, "This can't be the same character. How many films am I really making here?".
Le deportate della sezione speciale SS is a 1976 Italian erotic-drama film directed by Rino Di Silvestro. The film is considered the first Italian Nazi exploitation film, after the "auteur" progenitors such as Liliana Cavani's art film Il portiere di notte and Tinto Brass' exploitation film Salon Kitty.
Malisa Longo is an Italian actress, model and writer.
Senso '45 is an Italian erotic drama film written and directed by Tinto Brass, based on the novella Senso by Camillo Boito, which also inspired Luchino Visconti's 1954 film.