Salon Kitty

The plot lacks coherence, but you probably wouldn't watch a movie like this for the story anyway. Salon Kitty commits a more unforgivable sin: it's kind of boring.

Centered around Ken Adam's flamboyant production design, Salon Kitty works more as an exercise in extravagance and style than a coherent film. While flesh-obsessed director Tinto Brass does sprinkle some chillingly effective images throughout his onslaught of garish eroticism, his unrelenting fetishization of Nazi iconography eventually becomes more humorous than menacing. Part Wertmüller, part Visconti, and part Russell, Brass may be forever linked to the overwrought epic Caligula, but his prodigious talents at least place him in the conversation with these other great transgressive filmmakers.

Nazi criticism ....no respect for women....utterly in a word....disgusting

Nazi Germany, late-1930s. Germany is gearing up for war and one of their projects is to set up a brothel, where military officers and politicians can relax. SS Untergruppenfuhrer Helmut Wallenberg is tasked with the role of recruiting the girls - they must all be ardent National Socialists - and setting everything up. He views the brothel as a means to spy on senior officers and politicians, especially in order to weed out any traitors, and bugs the rooms. This has tragic consequences for one of the girls. Better than I expected. I was expecting a no-discernible-plot, heaps-of-gratuitous-nudity exploitation-type movie and this was better than that. There is a fair degree of nudity but it is fairly tame. Not very exploitative at all, especially compared to some movies in that genre. Plot is decent - it is coherent and not too holey. Just that it has a plot was a good start! Some engagement with the characters too. However, there are still many reminders that this is a B-movie. Continuity leaves a lot to be desired: eg a man's scar shifts from one side of his back to the other in one scene! Props are pretty basic: eg this movie contains the worst, most assymetrical, swastika flag yet seen. Performances are largely a bit hammy, but not too bad. The SS 2nd in command is ridiculously badly played though - the actor shouts every line at the top of his lungs! Very over-the-top.

Popularly aligned with the nazisploitation genre, perhaps unfairly, this is the film that firmly cements Tinto Brass as the European Russ Meyer, a man who knows what to do with a camera but is assessed on what he chooses to focus it on. A decent enough "other side" wartime drama told with a deft hand.

You can't expect something profound from Tinto Brass, though I am still shocked by Helmut Berger's nudity.

A very bold piece in the '70s. Directed by the famous Italian erotic Cinema film-maker Tinto Brass who was trying to tell you a 'story' here. After watching this, perhaps it helps you better understand why his later work didn't give a damn about 'plot' at all.

Directed by Tinto Brass, (Dropout (1970) La vacanza (1971), Caligula (1979)), this is an erotic drama which is based on a real life incident that took place in Nazi Germany during World War 2. It plays like a softcore-porn version of Caberet (1972), but it has some staggering sets by Ken Adam, and even a compelling story which moves it along, which is uncommon for a film like this, but Brass has a good visual eye. Salon Kitty was a brothel used in Berlin, and taken over by the SS security branch, the Sicherheitsdienst. Where it's used for espionage purposes, the brother is ran by Madame Kitty Kellerman (Ingrid Thulin), but the Sicherheitsdienst wire the place with microphones, and the prostitutes are replaced by trained spies, all of whom are instructed to get any information they can from members of the Nazi party and foreign dignitaries who visit Salon Kitty. The operation is seen to by SS Officer Helmut Wallenberg (Helmut Berger), who has kept Madame Kitty secret from what they are doing, that is until prostitute Margherita (Teresa Ann Savoy) finds out what's really going on. It's a very lurid film, but it's brilliantly filmed, despite it's subject matter. But, Brass has fun with the proceedings, but he also aimed to keep it historically accurate, but this also put Brass in good stead to do Caligula (1979) and further success, or so he thought at the time.

the version I reviewed is 129 mins

Nothing was that appealing, mixture of sexual orientation and focused in the internal collision among the nazi is the base line of the movie.