Directed by Tinto Brass
Written by Ennio De Concini, Maria Pia Fusco and Tinto Brass
Starring:
- Helmut Berger as Helmut Wallenberg
- Ingrid Thulin as Kitty Kellermann
- Teresa Ann Savoy as Margherita
- John Steiner as Biondo
- Sara Sperati as Helga
- Maria Michi as Hilde
- Rosemarie Lindt as Susan
Release Date: March 2, 1976
Rating: 
Tinto Brass’s Salon Kitty transmutes the symbols of Nazism into erotic, glitzy pop art, a melodrama in which sexual spectacle and ideological critique collide. The lavish, lubricious sets invite our voyeurism, yet the obedience of the bondage girls—indoctrinated by the Führer—punctures our arousal with awareness. Brass forces us into dual roles: transfixed spectators and moral critics. Here, aestheticized atrocities are weaponized, satirical, and caustically anti-Nazi, proving that eroticism and social commentary can collide in gleaming, lurid brilliance.
The damned Wallenberg (a wickedly serpentine Helmut Berger) is a ruthless SS commander who handpicks a squad of young German women to staff the sumptuous brothel run by the stylish Kitty (Ingrid Thulin). These Hitler-loyal girls become sexual spies, bait meant to lure traitors into orgasmic traps. Brass cuts the whole thing with feverish energy, but the plot refuses to click into real narrative unity. It’s hot, it’s sleazy, it’s vicious in its fetishization of power—but Brass’s fixation on provocation keeps the film from ever delivering a true dramatic payoff. The only climaxes he nails are the sexual ones. Yet buried beneath the chaos is genuine artfulness: Brass’s avant-garde delirium exposes the patriarchal rot of Wallenberg’s system, setting off a gutsy feminist revolt powered by Margherita’s frustrated longing (played with subtle fire by Teresa Ann Savoy) and Kitty’s own haughty defiance of Nazi tyranny.
The subversive rampage is easily the film’s crown jewel—loosely ripped from the real Salon Kitty operation on the brink of World War II—yet its hypersexual sheen turns everything that matters into background noise. There’s no solemnity, no historical weight; instead, Brass serves up a kitschy, farcical circus coated in sudsy melodrama. It plays like a supercharged soap opera on fascist steroids, and I’d be lying if I claimed it didn’t work. Brass held my undivided attention for every tawdry, lurid, unapologetically degenerate minute.
