The Night Porter

A serious film that producers immediately misread as a template for the nazisploitation cycle. Years after the war, a former SS officer working as a Vienna hotel porter encounters a concentration-camp survivor, and their old relationship resumes in a study of trauma, power and complicity that critics have argued over ever since.

Liliana Cavani, who had made documentaries about the camps, directs Dirk Bogarde and Charlotte Rampling in something difficult and serious. It was attacked on release and remains contested, but it belongs to a different order than the films it inspired.

Not exploitation at all, and the one film in this tag with a real argument.