In a Glass Cage.

A modern cult classic, In a Glass Cage (1987), directed by Spaniard Agustin Villaronga, is a variation on the themes of sadomasochism and the relationship between sex and Thanatos under fascism first explored by Liliana Cavani in the influential The Night Porter (1974). As in that excellent film, in which concentration camp survivor Charlotte Rampling checks into a Vienna hotel and has a torrid affair with the night porter (Dirk Bogarde), a former S.S. officer with whom she had been forced into a sadomasochistic relationship in the camps thirteen years earlier, In a Glass Cage concerns a Nazi who, years later, becomes involved with someone with whom he had had a bizarre sexual relationship in a concentration camp. In this instance, however, the man (Klaus/Gunter Meisner) is a pedophile and the former victim, a young boy.

The film begins with Klaus, a doctor who has been performing medical experiments on and sexually abusing children in the camps, jumping off a building in a suicide attempt, but ending up paralyzed instead. Fast-forward years later to Spain where the evil doctor, now in hiding, is confined to an iron lung under the care of his wife and daughter. A mysterious, beautiful boy (Angelo/Davis Sust) arrives and insists on becoming Klaus's nurse, revealing his true identity--as one of the boys that he had sexually molested and tortured--only to the doctor. What follows is a series of shocking scenes in which the boy gradually starts to act out the same sexual power games of torture and murder that the doctor performed in the camps. Angelo starts off innocently, merely jerking off on the doctor's face, the only part of his body that is not encased in the iron lung. But soon things become more sinister as he brings home young boys and kills them in front of Klaus, a captive audience, according to the notes that the doctor kept of the terrible experiments he conducted during the war. Much of the film is comprised of these gruesome rituals shot with very young actors, a fact that caused the work to be banned in Britain and other countries.

In a sequence reminiscent of Dario Argento, Angelo (think Tennessee Williams' l'angelo della morte) murders the doctor's wife, hanging her, in a horrific scene, over the balcony of the cavernous house. The boy then dumps her body on top of the transparent iron lung, making Klaus spend the night face to face with his dead wife. Although deeply disturbing and even revolting, the movie, besides being stylistically rigorous and beautifully shot in shades of blue and grey, is a serious study of the horrors of fascism, the power relations inherent in sex, and the sexual dynamics between sexual predator and victim. Although Hollywood usually shies away from such extreme subject matter, for another take on the same theme check out the less disturbing but equally interesting Apt Pupil (1998), based on the Stephen King story and directed by Bryan Singer. Both films seen together underscore and update the implicit relationship between homosexuality and fascism that Visconti first posited in The Damned (1969).