Kleinhoff Hotel (1977)

Pascale, married to an architect, misses her flight to London and is forced to stay in Berlin, at the Kleinhoff Hotel where she stayed as a student. Karl, a would-be revolutionary lives in the adjoining room and Pascale spies him and his ex-girl-friend through a hole. Then she follows him to a questionable place where she is arrested by the police during a revolutionists raid. When she returns to the Kleinhoff Hotel, Pascale finds Karl crying, and enters his room to console him and they have a love affair. When Karl kills himself while she sleeps, Pascale, on awakening, coldly dresses and leaves the hotel…

 

A co-production between Italy and Monaco, this steamy study of sexual obsession was directed by Carlo Lizzani (Crazy Joe). It takes place in a Berlin hotel where Penthouse pet Corinne Clery is an architect’s wife who becomes overwhelmed by her attraction to a leftist guerrilla (Bruce Robinson), a fugitive from the government because of his terrorist activities. Clery begins her obsession with mere voyeurism, but grows emboldened enough to practically fling herself at Robinson, leading to the expected tragic consequences. Michele Placido co-stars with Katja Rupe and Werner Pochath, and the film features several familiar names behind the camera, including composer Giorgio Gaslini and editor Franco Fraticelli, both frequent collaborators of genre luminary Dario Argento.

This movie has some elements of a low-rent version of “The Night Porter“, but it’s actually more like an Italian “terror film” where a bourgeois character is held captive by a criminal and develops a case of sexual Stockholm syndrome–except here the woman really develops Stockholm syndrome before they even meet.