Death in Venice

Director: Luchino Visconti

1971 / 130min / 35mm

Visconti’s faithful—and feverishly engrossing—adaptation of Thomas Mann’s 1912 novella stars a top-form Dirk Bogarde as Gustav von Aschenbach, a German composer on a doctor-prescribed holiday in Venice who becomes transfixed by a handsome Polish boy, Tadzio, whose family is staying in his beachside hotel, an obsession that causes him to linger in the city even as it’s devastated by a cholera epidemic. A seductive study in blighted desire, abetted by the music of Gustav Mahler and the Technicolor photography of Pasqualino De Santis.