Germany in the early 1930s. Against the backdrop of the Nazis' rise, Hermann Hermann, a Russian émigré and chocolate magnate, goes slowly mad. It begins with his seating himself in a chair to observe himself making love to his wife, Lydia, a zaftig empty-headed siren who is also sleeping with her cousin. Hermann is soon given to intemperate outbursts at his workers, other businessmen, and strangers. Then, he meets Felix, an itinerant laborer, whom he delusionally believes looks exactly like himself. Armed with a new life insurance policy, he hatches an elaborate plot in the belief it will free him of all his worries. From the Dirk Bogarde Site http://www.dirkbogarde.co.uk/actor/european/10.php In 1978, Bogarde received a phone call from Tom Stoppard who asked if he was "making any more films." When Bogarde replied, "I'm not making any more crap," Stoppard rebutted, "I don't write crap." The playwright had just completed adapting Nabokov's novel "Despair" for the experimental young German director Rainer Werner Fassbinder."We both think that you would be marvelous for the leading character," Stoppard said. At the thought of "Stoppard, Nabokov, Fassbinder," Bogarde felt "an old surge of excitement." An important consideration in accepting was the nagging thought that his days as a major star were waning, and if "Despair" were to be his last film, he was consoled that he "would not fade out on a cameo role. At least I would go out above the title, a position to which I had grown accustomed ever since my first film in 1947." (An Orderly Man, 248-249) Bogarde embraced the opportunity, giving a brilliant performance as the bourgeois Russian émigré whose personality gradually fragments into two during the film. He considered Despair 'a bloody good film' and his best 'technical' performance, explaining to Tony Bilbow at a Guardian lecture: 'I think it's the best technical performance I've given on the screen... it's the culmination of all the work I've ever tried to do, and if you take it layer by layer, inch by inch, step by step, it is a perfect example of a developing madness which becomes paranoia... the lengths I found I could go to in that satisfied me enormously. I did aAfter viewing the 'final' cut of the film in September 1977, he wrote to Fassbinder: 'Stoppard called yesterday... he is now convinced that we have done a marvelous film and is very excited. I told him that he would be shocked here and there the first time around, but that he would be immeasurably proud the second time. I hope this is correct.' (Watson, 27) But in the seven-month interval between the version he had seen and what was actually shown at Cannes in May, Bogarde concluded that Fassbinder had edited his part 'to bits'. In a letter to Wallace Watson, he indicated he was 'profoundly disappointed when he saw the film at Cannes... in the intervening time Fassbinder had cut the film substantially.' (27) He believed that the drastic editing was in part to blame for his losing the Best Actor Award to Jon Voight. With a certain amount of disillusioned resignation, Bogarde returned to his farm, pointing out to one interviewer: 'I retreated, not retired, a whole different thing.' (Bilbow, 212) Yet Bogarde had now reached the satisfying position where his innovative work with Visconti, Resnais and Fassbinder put him in high esteem with a new group of young British filmgoers. (Coldstream, 416-417) lot of research for that.' (220)

• published: 09 Oct 2012
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