Don't listen to the negative reviews

I wanted to like it more than I actually did... But much of the humor totally escaped me and I walked out only mildly impressed.

The film creates a perfect balance between action and depth of basic needs, in the midst of an infertile atmosphere.

Very good movie overall, highly recommended. Most of the negative reviews don't have any merit and are all pollitically based. Give this movie a chance at least, and it might give you a different perspective.

This movie shows us that once a Nazi always a Nazi, but Nazis, like all humans make certain concessions to their lust for pleasure, especially the pleasure to be had from a woman, especially when she is at their mercy. From the woman's point of view her gratitude for the mercy the Nazi has shown her, knows no bounds and she is ready to place herself, once again, but this time voluntarily at his mercy, when she meets him after the war and she suffers the consequences. These actually could have been good, that is she could have ended up having a happy marriage with the Nazi who had rescued her. But loyal Nazis still thrived even after the war and a pure blood German living with a Jewess was intolerable in their scheme of things. Their pursuit of the couple creates the tension that makes this movie an excellent thriller. This added to raising the question of how we are to relate to Nazis who had mercy on their subjects, makes this movie great.

A former top Nazi hides out by being a night porter in a hotel, but is recognised by one of the very inmates he has abused, but rather than turn-him-in she decides to continue their abusive master-and-servant relationship.This is the kind of movie which I came to very cold and so much the better for it. Despite the passing of the years and the shocking things (real and fiction) that have passed before my eyes, this stays and haunts you. Might even have changed me a bit.(If only in the possibility of cinema.) Maybe the only film ever made which dares takes on damaged people and explore their lives without aiming for simple exploitation or entertainment. Hearing the testimony of real holocaust survivors should tell us one thing: We don't know how it would affect us.Nor do we know how people feel after trauma. Or what their reaction to extreme circumstances may be. Or even our own if we ever were in a concentration camp or raped. We guess, but we may be wrong.The acting here is superb. Leads Rampling and Bogart at the top of their game. Subtle and yet somehow believable in their reactions to each other.Sadly it has been marketed now as a "come and be shocked" ghost train ride with every twist and turn now public knowledge. It really spoils it, because the audience are being manipulated into the expected and then having their expectations reversed. Without it the power is diminished.This is a film from an era when film-makers were totally brave and fearless. Big name actors rarely took chances like this again. And you can see why.

After a chance meeting at a hotel in 1957, a Holocaust survivor (Charlotte Rampling) and the Nazi officer (Dick Bogarde) who tortured her resume their sadomasochistic relationship.This film deals with the psychological condition known as Stockholm Syndrome in the most extreme way possible. It also borders on the offensive. Some would say it crosses over into the offensive...For example, film critic Roger Ebert calls it "as nasty as it is lubricious, a despicable attempt to titillate us by exploiting memories of persecution and suffering." Ebert is flat wrong. He can take the moral high ground, but this is the same guy who wrote "Beyond Valley of the Dolls"...

The Night Porter - it's the kind of movie if you ask your mom or dad about it (or if you're my mom and dad's age you just remember it) they'll put it as 'that Nazi movie with Charlotte Rampling' or 'wow, hot stuff' (if they're a particular kind of parent, besides the point). It's not a film that won a lot of awards when it came out - matter of fact it might have not gotten great reviews overall, despite this getting a low-key Criterion DVD release some years ago - but it can be worth a try so many years later. Why not with actors like Dirk Borgarde and Charlotte Rampling (also of Luchino Visconti's The Damned)? Or with the premise, which just the first part sounds good enough for a movie: an once-Nazi commandant at a camp is a night porter at a hotel in Vienna, and a woman comes with her husband, played by Rampling, and they recognize each other instantly, but neither saying a word. It's mutual shock as she was in the camp herself. But the catch? This is where it gets interesting and kinky and starts to go over into potential Natzi-sploitation territory (for those who know the sub-genre it's from the 70's, stuff like Ilsa: She Wolf of the SS, s*** like that), as Borgarde's character during Lucia's time in the camp picked her out as his own. By that, I mean, a dominant/submissive relationship, and leading on to her even "performing" for other Nazi soldiers. This is all seen in flashback, of course, and intertwined with a story of Borgarde having to deal with the other ex-Nazis that are still around the area - and hey, what's that girl doing here anyway?Liliana Cavani's direction in the first half of the film is mostly very delicate and dramatically so intriguing. We get both the Porter and Lucia's points of reference on what happened, how startling to jump from "modern" day (of 1957) to being in a cramped space being photographed with a 16mm camera naked in a line-up with the rest of the Jewish people, and then later into the bedroom as Maximilian and Lucia got deeper into their bondage territory. Why would Lucia go for it to start with and, more importantly to what happens in the film, goes with it again when the characters meet once more and reignite the old "spark" as it disturbingly was? Maybe some attention, some form of psychological game that made things a little more tolerable past the potential death in the camps and then, in Vienna, the... I don't know what. Control, it would appear, is a supremely powerful instrument, and in sex, oh man.There are good erotic moments, of the raw, rough 70's sort (NOT porno, must make that clear), mostly when Maximilian and Lucia do suddenly get back into their "NO - YES" mode of love-making, particularly in one very long shot where Cavani shows the characters, like uninhibited beasts, on the floor of the hotel room. There are others, in the second half of the film, that veers on the unwatchable - not for being filmed too poorly, just as being too hard to take. For those interested in BDSM it is a kind of essential film, of its or any time, in how it takes on what could make this relationship tick in the scope of Nazis. For those who just want to see good acting, there's that too, especially from Rampling as she almost 'becomes' her former, younger self in the third act when she stays inside the hotel room (sometimes, shockingly for me, chained to a bed). It's certainly got some problems with minor performances, and a side bit with a gay character who dances in one sequence in the camp for the Nazis is bizarre - almost TOO bizarre. But for what it was, and is, it can be revisited and admired, and when it really sticks to its guns as a drama it is convincing and not campy. Probably the most "serious' Nazisploitation flick then?