Salon Kitty

Salon Kitty is a 1976 erotic war drama film directed and edited by Tinto Brass, from a screenplay co-written with Ennio De Concini and Maria Pia Fusco. It stars Helmut Berger, Ingrid Thulin, Teresa Ann Savoy, John Steiner, John Ireland, Stefano Satta Flores, Tina Aumont and Bekim Fehmiu. The film is based on the book of the same name by journalist Joseph Fritz (under the pen name 'Peter Norden'), covering the real life events of the Salon Kitty operation, under which the Sicherheitsdienst took over an expensive brothel in Berlin, had the place wire tapped, and replaced all the prostitutes with trained spies, in order to gather information on various members of the Nazi party and foreign dignitaries. Berger plays a fictionalized version of SS officer Walter Schellenberg, who oversaw the operation, and Thulin plays the brothel's madam. Salon Kitty was a co-production between Italian, West German, and French companies. It is considered among the progenitors of the Nazisploitation genre. In the US, the film was edited to lighten the political overtones for an easier marketing as a sexploitation film and released under the title Madam Kitty with an X rating.