Kill James Bond! - S4E27.5: The Night Porter

Episode Date: December 5, 2025

This is a preview of a bonus episode! Find the rest, along with our backlog of hundreds of bonus episodes, on our reasonably-priced Patreon! ------ Rounding out our little tasting course of 3 movies dealing directly with the Holocaust, November brings us what will surely be the easiest movie we've ever had to talk about. The year is 1957. Dirk Bogarde is Max, a former concentration camp officer, living in hiding working as a night porter at a hotel in Vienna. His friends are all also Nazis, obsessed with regaining their former station, conducting private trials on each other to try to finally stop feeling guilty about their acts. Max's solitude is obliterated when a former victim of his checks in to the hotel. CONTENT WARNING: Just about all of them. Maybe give this one a miss if you're not sure ----- Friend of the show Bella, a refugee evacuated from Afghanistan in 2021, is raising money for her gender confirmation surgery! Anything you can give would be hugely appreciated! https://www.justgiving.com/crowdfunding/team-bella ----- FREE PALESTINE Hey, Devon here. In our home, we talk a lot about how insane everything feels, and agonise constantly over what can be done to best help the Palestinians trapped in Gaza facing the full brunt of genocidal violence. My partner Rebecca has put together a list of four fundraisers you can contribute to- all of them are at work on the ground doing what they can. -Palestinian Communist Youth Union, which is doing a food and water effort, and is part of the official communist party of Palestine https://www.gofundme.com/f/to-preserve-whats-left-of-humanity-global-solidarity -Water is Life, a water distribution project in North Gaza affiliated with an Indigenous American organization and the Freedom Flotilla https://www.waterislifegaza.org/ -Vegetable Distribution Fund, which secured and delivers fresh veg, affiliated with Freedom Flotilla also https://www.instagram.com/linking/fundraiser?fundraiser_id=1102739514947848 -Thamra, which distributes herb and veg seedlings, repairs and maintains water infrastructure, and distributes food made with replanted veg patches https://www.gofundme.com/f/support-thamra-cultivating-resilience-in-gaza ----- WEB DESIGN ALERT Tom Allen is a friend of the show (and the designer behind our website). If you need web design help, reach out to him here:  https://www.tomallen.media/ Kill James Bond is hosted by November Kelly, Abigail Thorn, and Devon. You can find us at https://killjamesbond.com , as well as on our Bluesky and X.com the every app account

Hello and welcome to another bonus episode of Kill James Bond. I am November Kelly. I am joined as always by my friends Abigail Thorne and Devon. Hello. Hello. And I'm scared. I'm really scared. A little bit nervous going.

into this one. Yeah, yeah. I think what I've done is I've made a risky decision and done a movie that I like, that I value, that I'm interested to talk about, and with which I am profoundly uncomfortable. Yes. And I think there's a decent chance that you,

the listener, will be as well. So on that basis, just to kind of assume, as with the zone of interest, comedy podcast that we're doing. Comedy podcast. We just assume that trigger warning for everything, right? like we're going to be talking about

a lot of state violence, a lot of sexual violence. You may want to sit this one out if this is sort of touching a sort of raw nerve for you, but it's a film partially about touching raw nerves. I don't know what you two are worried about. Don't worry because next episode is going to be really funny.

Okay, okay. Yeah, what I did is I took the opportunity to pick two films for our comedy podcast and I went here's the film or one of the films that makes me most uncomfortable to watch and then here's a film that makes me cry a lot.

So I'm excited to present both of those to you in succession, and then we'll do a fun. If I knew this was going to be so miserable, I never would have started Holocaust season. I think the thing that I want to do with this movie is sort of end prematurely Holocaust season. Not to say we'll never do more Holocaust movies, just that we don't want to do.

A little mini Holocaust season. It's a little short course, three strains of how to make a Holocaust film. And I picked the sort of weirdest one last. So I picked the film, The Night Porter by Lillianna Kavana. And the first thing to know about this movie is every particularly American critic despised this film. Absolutely hated it. It got at the time, even in a kind of critical reappraisal decades later,

it still kind of gets the reputation as being exploitative kind of pornographic. sort of Nazi aesthetic, commodifying the Holocaust. I don't think it is. I mean, we'll talk about why. But I think it's really, it's a really important film. It's a really discomforting film. And I think it has more in common with stuff like the Quilla Memorandum or even judgments at Nuremberg than it does with the stuff that it gets lumped in with.

It gets talked about in the same breath as like Ilsa She-Wolf of the SS, right? And like Max Mosley and shit. Exactly. Exactly. Exactly. And we are going to talk about the kind of eroticization of the Nazis in this. But I think this movie is tackling that from a much sort of more thoughtful place. It's sort of, it's in conversation with stuff like the conformist as well. But so we begin with a rain-soaked Vienna, 1957. So it's almost 8 o'clock, but not quite. That's right. And Dirk Bogard, guy I love to see. Dirk fucking Bogart. Huge fan. I will say amazing performance in this.

Yeah. Really good. He's walking to work. He is walking to work where he is the night porter of a hotel. And we're sort of entering already into a kind of lost world here because we're on some Wes Anderson shit. We don't really have hotel porters in the same way. And in particular, we don't have uniformed hotel porters. He works in quite a nice hotel.

We can see that he's got a uniform with like a sort of a black tailcoat with crossed keys. as like in Sicily on the lapels. Yeah, or like he's any of the guys in Grand Budapest Hotel. Yeah. And we see him be sort of quite abrupt and quite authoritative with his co-workers. Mm-hmm. They've got a regular guest who's staying upstairs, who he calls the Countess, who's like sitting in bed in full glam and pink furs.

And he's like very abrasive with her, like giving her pink colors and just like telling her shut up, basically. Yeah, it's very. kind of like, what's the words? I'm not sure quite what I'm reaching for here, but he's very brusk with her. Yes, yes. You know, when she asks for sort of more painkillers, he's like, well, there's nothing I can do about that. And then in a sort of very exasperated way, he asks as she'll be expecting, the usual

assistance. Yes. And the usual assistance is the bellhop, sort of very, very muscular guy. A young man named Adolf, who's sleeping in another room, he's, in addition to being the bellhop, he's also kind of like sexual assistants. Yes, yeah. And so Max, Mac's, Dirk Bogart's character is sort of like pimping him for the hotel, as it were. And as we get from the usual assistants. Yeah, this is a sort of standing thing.

I mean, he goes and wakes this guy up out of bed as well. He's like, get up, get up. You've got to go pleasure the countess. Yeah, got to go. this old lady. Fuck this old woman. All right. And he's like, yeah, he is treating it in a sort of like standard Viennese guy mad about having

to get up to go to work, which is really amusing when he's thinking what he's going to do. Yeah. It's like, oh my God, all right, fine, fucking fine. But so we see Max at work where, as with all of this, he is very abrupt, very authoritative. And we only get really one or two scenes of this. There's before, very early in the movie, we get our first big sort of revelation. Yeah.

which is a group of guests bookend and one of them is impossibly beautiful woman Charlotte Rampling Yes, unbelievably beautiful Charlotte Rampling Last scene in Zardos Yeah, crazy God, you're so right, I forgot she was in Zardos Remember she was the doctor in Zardos?

You'll know her audience if you're not familiar but because she was the mother superior of a Beneguessera in June. Yeah, she was also in a film with Dirk Bogard about the rise of fascism called The Damned, which we will do at some point. Yeah, yeah, I've thought about watching now it's two and a half hours, and I couldn't find a time.

She looks like how, in this, how I want to look. She looks amazing. She looks amazing. It's just like so much jaw. The kind of jaw you can only get with like malnutrition for 10 years as a child. She and Max see each other and there is a look exchanged between them

and we focus, we hold on on her for this and it is like, it's like being struck by lightning, genuinely. It's in the sense that there is real kind of recognition and terror. There are a few people in the world. I think this is true for almost everyone. A few people in the world who, if I saw again, if I ran into again, it would be like this. It would be as a fronting.

Yep. Yep. And it's a really, really singular thing. And I think we'll get into exactly what we mean by that in due course. She seems to have a clearer picture of who he is than he does immediately. He can't play so immediately. And then he sort of walks backstage and he's thinking to himself. And then we get a flashback to a bunch of Jewish people queuing up.

with like yellow stars of David's sewn onto them. Yes. One of whom is this woman, we found out later, her name is Lucia. And then that's when Max realizes what he knows her from. He's like, oh, she was standing in that line. And I was standing next to that line. Filming her.

Yeah. Making film of her. Go ahead. We get that just in two shots as well. It's really, it's slow enough that you understand everything, but quick enough that you kind of doubt it, that you don't quite register what's going on. It's also helped by the fact that the location that they're in,

it's like a sort of disused like school gymnasium or something like that. It doesn't look like a concentration camp, right? And I think that's very intentional. I think that's intentional too, and I will get to later what I think this looks like. Good. But yeah. We see that this sort of recollection profoundly affects Max.

He sees her. and he sort of like hides his face from her. And the next guest sort of has to say his room number three times because Max just cannot hear him. He's sort of like he's back in the past. He's remembering this. Yeah, yeah, yeah. He's lost in the source.

And so Lucia is with her lover, her husband indeed, in the hotel room. And he rings down to the front desk to order a bottle of water, which of course Max comes to deliver. She hides in the toilet and does not come out. So immediately we're thinking about a sort of a judgment at Nuremberg situation, or if you like a Marathon Man situation, uh, of fugitive. I think they're called Snickers Man now. Of like Nazi war criminal who is being recognized by his victim straightforwardly and

from there and out it's a straight shot to like police, uh, like war crimes tribunals, all of this. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Also, it's, it's interesting as well because as he delivers this water. She is having these same flashbacks. And the way it does these flashbacks is very good. It's like abrupt short stretches of film. And she also remembers this same interaction with this camera sort of in between him and her, him filming her. She's along with the whole rest of the queue of prisoners of inmates is naked.

And she also remembers herself as like a little girl. As like a young girl. this is the first thing she flashes back to it like it really establishes to her it was like this is a child first of all like number one there's a very very young girl she's on one of those like sort of carousel where there's a chain and you kind of spin around

one of those kind of things yeah I think the film is trying to tell us that like I don't know I think the film is trying to tell us that like when we see Charlotte rampling in flashback we should sort of mentally put a child in that place because

her to be very young. Because some shit is going to happen that you cannot film with a child actor. Yes, yeah, absolutely. And the fact that when she's on this carousel in her own memory, you're getting the audio of,

much like zone of interest for a second. You're getting the audio of the camp and like executions and screaming and so on. This is already, your sort of three things from this flashback, it's enigmatic,

it's disorienting, and it's deeply, deeply uncomfortable because already you are, you're implicating like, well, pedophilia, frankly. Yeah. Yes.

Because this is already kind of implicitly a sort of like gaze of sexual desire, right? When he's filming her. So we're 15 minutes in, Nazi paedophile. 15 minutes in Nazi paedophile and I have to explain

why I like this film. Less than 10. 9.57 I'm seeing. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Okay. It's like, no, no, trust me. Hear me out. It's important.

It's going to get worse. Yeah, it gets worse before it gets better and it doesn't get better. Yes, it doesn't. If you're not on board now, I haven't made of watch Salo yet, but the thing is, I fucking will.

You keep telling me, you keep being like, every time you get one drink and you're like, Salo's nothing, by the way, just to be clear. Salo is nothing, right? This is not nothing.

I think this is a more affronting film than Salo. It's so good. You finally get the reverse shot because you get all the shots from his perspective in his flashback and you finally get the ones from hers and he's leaning so close to her face with this fucking camera.

Film camera. making a film of these people. Yeah, big bolex, fucking thing. It's lecherous, but again, you have, like we talked about in, um, uh, white noise, right? You have this kind of interpolating, like, lens in between, uh, like, you know, one person and another, it's kind of defensive, too. And so at this point, this, this regular guy, this, uh, regular guest at the hotel, he's not a regular guy in the sense of being normal.

He's deeply fucked, in fact, but he is a regular customer. This Nazi-looking motherfucker. Yeah, this guy, this guy, this super villain, this guy who looks like his name, It should be like Dr. Claw or something. I just called him Mr. Monocle in mine. Yeah, he's just got a monocle. Yeah, it's perfect. He's like so obviously a Nazi.

He steps onto the screen like in profile. And you can see what half of him he's wearing his leather fucking trench coat. And it's like hat. He's got his gloves on. And then he rotates and you see the monocle as well. And you're like, okay, man. He's got the, he's got the fencing scars as well. Yeah, this guy is hunting captain America.

Like, you know. We get it. you're Adolf Hitler, okay. But he asks Max a couple of questions in a way that, again, we're kind of disoriented by it, because we've had this kind of established of like, oh shit, like Max is a Nazi, right? Max is in hiding from being a Nazi. Is this guy the cops? Because he seems to he has asking Max about an investigation, right?

Yes. Max is being looked into. And it sort of crazily emerges through this. conversation that this guy is he is investigating Max and Max is being sort of questioned but by his own side as it was. Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah. They allude, and this threw me for quite a few scenes actually because they allude to a trial that's going to take place on Thursday, some kind of hearing. And he says, don't worry about it. After all, there's no witnesses to testify against you. Yeah. But we will find out later exactly what the fuck this is. Yeah, these are war crimes

investigators, but not as you might first imagine. Yeah, yeah, yeah. To find out how sick it was, yeah. Like stress testing. And he's got a friend with him, fucking Baron von Monacle has a friend with him who's just called the professor. Yes.

It's like, he don't want to meet these guys. Come back. Yeah. Legion of Doom ass. The professor who is clearly like senior to them both, right? Because Max is meant to show them into a room, like a conference room that they're using, right? And when the professor comes in, Max clicks his heels, genuinely.

Like he is standing to attention as a German officer, as a Nazi officer. Like Dorothy and a Wizard of Oz. Yeah, he shows the professor and sort of Baron von Scull or whatever, his name is up into this room. And we get a conversation with them without Max. All right, stop right there. If you're listening to this on the free feed, I can only tell you that you're going to have to give us some amount of money to continue to listen to this. episode. You're going to have to go to patreon.com slash kill James Bond, that's all one word, and sign up today for as little as five pounds a month. By way of warning, this is the only

bonus episode this month. Everything else this month goes out on the free feed. So if you're not super interested in this one, save your money for January. All right, talk to you soon. Love you.