It stars Dirk Bogarde as Gustav von Aschenbach and Björn Andrésen as Tadzio, with supporting roles played by Mark Burns, Marisa Berenson, and Silvana Mangano, and was filmed in Technicolor by Pasqualino De Santis.

The soundtrack consists of selections from Gustav Mahler's third and fifth symphonies, but characters in the film also perform pieces by Franz Lehár, Ludwig van Beethoven, and Modest Mussorgsky.

While awaiting dinner in the hotel's lobby, he notices a group of young Poles with their governess and mother, and becomes spellbound by the handsome boy Tadzio, whose casual dress and demeanor distinguishes him from his modest sisters.

Before his return, he sees an emaciated man collapse in the station concourse, and, when he attempts to investigate this, the flattering hotel manager speaks in a dismissive matter of exaggerated scandals in the foreign press.

He gets a makeover from a chatty hairdresser, giving him a resemblance to the old man who had pestered him upon his arrival, and pursues Tadzio's family again, until he collapses near a well and bursts into a pained laughter.

Apart from this change, and the addition of the scenes in which Aschenbach and a musician friend debate the degraded aesthetics of his music, the film is relatively faithful to the book.

In another volume of his memoirs, An Orderly Man, Bogarde relates that, after the finished film was screened for them by Visconti in Los Angeles, the Warner Bros. executives wanted to write off the project, fearing it would be banned in the United States for obscenity because of its subject matter.

They eventually relented when a gala premiere was organized in London, with Elizabeth II and Princess Anne attending, to gather funds for the sinking Italian city of Venice.

In 2003, Björn Andrésen gave an interview to The Guardian in which he expressed his dislike of the fame Death in Venice brought him and discussed how he sought to distance himself from the objectifying image he acquired by playing Tadzio.

[9] On the review aggregator website Rotten Tomatoes, Death in Venice has a 71% approval rating based on 28 reviews, with an average score of 7.10 out of 10; the site's "critics consensus" reads: "Luchino Visconti's Death in Venice is one of his emptier meditations on beauty, but fans of the director will find his knack for sumptuous visuals remains intact".

[13] In a 2003 review of the film for The Guardian, Peter Bradshaw hailed Dirk Bogarde's performance as one of the greatest of all time, concluding: "This is exalted film-making".