Ludwig II of Bavaria, the supreme childish fantasist among kings—and one of the most harmless of all kings—is such an obviously magical, gaudy subject for the movies that many people may look forward with glee to Visconti's Ludwig. But it's well to bear in mind that though Ludwig is remembered because of the pleasures his candied-rococo follies give us, Visconti's follies are grimly humorless. Of the major filmmakers, Luchino Visconti is certainly the most estranged from the audience. Sometimes, in his films, the vital connection between the material on the screen and us disappears, and Visconti doesn't seem to notice or to care—he just goes on without us, heavily treading water. This happens for almost the entire duration of Ludwig, which is two hours and fifty-three minutes long. The subject is so juicy and frivolous that bravura pageantry on its own, without much drama, might be enough, but, incredibly, this movie about the king's obsession with a mock-heroic fairy-tale mode of life has no style.

The translated, partly dubbed dialogue is neither formal and elegant nor colloquial; it's like an earnest translation of a dowdy libretto, and it makes the actors sound like the talking dead. The early portions of the film are shot in badly lighted compositions resembling those wide-canvas nineteenth-century academic Russian paintings of a convocation of stiff, important people. The continuity is a splatter of choppy, confused scenes; there are constant amputations, so we don't find out why we have been watching a sequence but simply move on to something else, and the arbitrary compositions and abrupt closeups destroy the sense of what's going on. Visconti has been able to photograph Ludwig's actual castles and to reproduce interiors he couldn't shoot in, and yet we don't have a chance just to rove around and luxuriate in them. We always seem to be driving up to the carriage entrance; then we're stuck in a room without finding out how we got there. The film gets better-looking, and every now and then there's a great shot, which goes by infuriatingly fast. The rhythmless, disruptive cutting does the movie in, even more than Visconti's usual failing—his lack of dramatic drive.

Typically, his allegorical melodramas, such as Rocco and His Brothers and The Damned, are pushed to such heights that they turn into epics—witless but passionate and strangely self-absorbed. There can be a grandeur in their hollow heaviness and languid monotony; they have generally had style, even when we couldn't be sure of anything else about them. Visconti's first epic, the lyrical yet austere and socially conscious La Terra Trema, is beautifully proportioned; I think it's one of the best boring movies ever made…. Rocco suggested an operatic spectacle with a libretto by Dostoevski based on the Warner Brothers social-protest films of the thirties; Visconti gave us not characters but highly theatrical, reminiscent images—Annie Girardot's scrawny, glamorous prostitute was like a young Bankhead, her murder out of Wozzeck. The Damned was a mixture of Wagner and Thomas Mann and the classical Greek crazies. Elements got slammed together that didn't quite make sense together, but they made thunder, and a flowing style can connect a lot. When the Visconti style collapses, you look for the links; they're still buried in the director's mind—in his Jacobean nostalgia. (pp. 144-45)

It seems characteristic of the private nature of Visconti's fantasies that the only sequence in [Ludwig ] that has any kind of visual integrity is, at the end, the torchlight search for Ludwig's body, when a lake is dragged at night. Visconti is more carried away by the...