Salon Kitty

Salon Kitty (1976) is Tinto Brass's wartime drama, and you can watch it online on iFILM. In Berlin at the height of Nazi power, a lavish brothel run by Madame Kitty welcomes the highest ranks of the Reich — none of them aware the walls are listening.

Behind the elegant front sits an SS operation. An officer named Wallenberg, played by John Steiner, recruits women through racial screening and drills them into total obedience, while hidden microphones feed every careless word from a client straight into a dossier. The point is blackmail aimed at the regime's own leadership. The scheme runs flawlessly until Margherita, Wallenberg's own mistress, falls for a Luftwaffe pilot who has stopped believing in the Führer or the war.

Brass films the rot of a regime as a suffocating carnival of power, sex and fear, with no one left to root for. Ingrid Thulin plays Kitty cold and unsentimental; Helmut Berger lends the whole thing a glassy decadence. This is not easy viewing — a provocative, grim piece of 1970s cinema that earned its cult standing and still divides audiences. Stream Salon Kitty (1976) online on iFILM.