Of epic length at nearly 4 hours, this film feels that it needs a good edit to get an hour at least off the running time. Taking its lead from one of main characters - Wagner - it fails to sustain the viewers interest throughout. Which is a shame because it is an interesting historical story with a good performances from a number of actors - Helmut Berger has to carry the film. But it is obvious that the actors are all speaking different languages which have then been dubbed into Italian. Visconti also skirts round the sexual confusion which afflicts Ludwig.
Visconti's film about Ludwig, the mad King of Bavaria, has many interesting episodes within it, for example, the story of Ludwig's excessive admiration for Wagner and his music, admiration which inspired him to fund Wagner recklessly, to the extent that the Government of Bavaria became alarmed. Visconti uses a lot of Wagner's music on the soundtrack, which is entirely appropriate, given the heroic dimension to Ludwig's life and the operatic melodrama of its highlights. The reconstruction of the period is well done, as one would expect after The Leopard.
So it is a shame that the film is quite tedious in places. Visconti takes four hours to tell the story and there is nothing to justify that length. I felt that David Lean could have achieved the same positive effects much more economically. Part of the problem seems to be that Visconti is not sure what point he is trying to make - something about class, inequality, aesthetic elitism, sexual repression, aristocratic integrity versus bourgeois penny-pinching, etc. The lack of thematic focus results in a flabbiness of narrative. Not a magnificent failure, nor a flawed masterpiece. Just a potentially interesting story badly told.
Yeh - slow but convincing - follows the life of the tormented Ludwig 2 of Bavaria..
Lovely sets and costume and acting is superb
watch and see..