The jewel in the crown, in terms of American appreciation of Dirk Bogarde, at least by the decadence-loving cognoscenti, is Liliana Cavani's remarkable "Night Porter," wherein Bogarde plays an ex-Nazi "doctor" who had, in the war, been given to performing creatively lethal experiments on his charges at a concentration camp. Generally speaking, when an actor plays against his own sexual preference, there is something unconvincing -- he can't fully commit to it, in one way or another. You can't see their eyes appreciating, let alone sexually worshipping, the physical subtleties of lovers that they wouldn't choose in real life. Bogarde, however, so convincingly plays his delirious enslavement to the fragile Charlotte Rampling (as an ex-inmate of the same camp) it is difficult to believe that off camera he preferred men.

His love isn't a healthy love, but it is electrified by the weakness he feels in it. Few other actors, if any, could so perfectly convey such a sincere, trembling obedience to helpless, fetishistic love with a stiff upper lip.

A Bogarde Web site includes the following excellent analysis of the film (quoted from an article whose source I've been unable to pin down): "Cavani ... incorporates sexual psychology into a rhapsodic view of human obsession tending towards mysticism ... the contract of love entered upon by Bogarde and Rampling -- psychotic, born of weakness rather than strength -- is a contract of death. It awaits only their reunion to be completed ... But, in the very midst of depravity, there is ecstasy and tenderness and the selflessness that is also found in 'normal' love." (In other words, it could never be a Julia Roberts vehicle.)

Toward the end of his life, Bogarde moved with Anthony Forwood to Provence, where he began to write well-received books. He was knighted in 1992 and suffered a stroke in 1996 that required that his final years be spent under 24-hour care. He was most vocal, toward the end of his life, on the issue of voluntary euthanasia, of which he became a staunch proponent after witnessing the protracted death of Forwood in 1988. He made particularly interesting remarks in an interview to John Hofsess, London executive director of the Voluntary Euthanasia Society:

"My views were formulated as a 24-year-old officer in Normandy ... On one occasion the Jeep ahead hit a mine ... Next thing I knew, there was this chap in the long grass beside me. A bloody bundle, shrapnel-ripped, legless, one arm only. The one arm reached out to me, white eyeballs wide, unseeing, in the bloody mask that had been a face. A gurgling voice said, 'Help. Kill me.' With shaking hands I reached for my small pouch to load my revolver ... I had to look for my bullets -- by which time somebody else had already taken care of him. I heard the shot. I still remember that gurgling sound. A voice pleading for death ...

"During the war I saw more wounded men being 'taken care of' than I saw being rescued. Because sometimes you were too far from a dressing station, sometimes you couldn't get them out. And they were pumping blood or whatever; they were in such a wreck, the only thing to do was to shoot them. And they were, so don't think they weren't. That hardens you: You get used to the fact that it can happen. And that it is the only sensible thing to do."

Bogarde never shied away from speaking his mind. In his 1983 autobiography, "An Orderly Man," he expressed his dismay about what had become of the film world:

"Now the cinema is controlled by vast firms like Xerox, Gulf & Western and many others who deal in anything from sanitary-ware to property development. These huge conglomerates, faceless, soulless, are concerned only with making a profit; never a work of art ... It is pointless to be 'superb' in a commercial failure; and most of the films which I had deliberately chosen to make in the last few years were, by and large, just that. Or so I am always informed by the businessmen. The critics may have liked them extravagantly, but the distributors shy away from what they term 'A Critic's Film,' for it often means that the public will stay away. Which, in the mass, they do: and if you don't make money at the box-office you are not asked back to play again."

It is a tragedy that our film world today produces no Bogardes, nor the heady, depraved scripts worthy of one. Hopefully, cinéastes will keep Bogarde's better films in circulation, so that future generations can experience the sexual chill of those wet brown eyes and that one renegade eyebrow that mocks everything sacred while the rest of his face lies perfectly still.

Author's note: Much of the biographical information for this article was pirated from the lovingly assembled Dirk Bogarde Homepage.

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