Frantz, 2016

In the aftermath of World War I in 1919 Germany, Anna notice a stranger placing flowers on the grave of her fiance, Frantz. She now lives with Frantz's parents,  (a doctor who refuses to treat French patients) and his equally upset wife. In fact anti-French feelings run high in the town. The stranger is Adrien and he and Anna slowly get to know each other. He and Frantz were best friends in Paris and then both enlisted in their respective armies ...

This is a slow, languid film with marvellous widescreen black and white photography, with occasional moments of pale colour, and it confounds our expectations of where the story is going. Just when we think it is almost over there follows another departure as Anna travels to Paris to find the missing Adrien and ends up meeting his wealthy family. The upper class milieu of concerts and art galleries is nicely depicted, and is certainly a departure for Francois Ozon, the gay French director who has been very prolific - is it really seven years since his delightful POTICHE (reviews of this and other Ozons (SWIMMING POOL, UNDER THE SAND, 8 WOMEN. TIME TO LEAVE etc at Ozon label).

Paula Beer (new to me) is marvellous as Anna, a quiet controlled performance drawing the camera to her, and Pierre Niney is new too as Adrien. Highly recommended for when one is in the mood for something different (rather like Fassbinder's EFFI BRIEST also with that marvellous monochrome photography and hypnotic slow pace).

Co-scripted by Ozon loosely based on a 1932 Lubitch film BROKEN LULLABY.

Effi Briest, 1974

I had been meaning to catch Fassbinder's 1974 drama EFFI BRIEST - but pal Martin has been raving about it, part of the Fassbinder season on MUBI - Martin is a devotee of this site, so I just had to get the bluray of this stunning and engrossing drama.     .

We like Rainer Werner Fassbinder's early Seventies films here, they were must-sees in arty London circles then, along with the New German Cinema of Wim Wenders and Herzog. I liked Fassinder best: THE BITTER TEARS OF PETRA VON KANT, FEAR EATS THE SOUL and the very downer but essential gay classic FOX AND HIS FRIENDS (see Fassbinder label), and the later more bizarrely explicit QUERELLE, his last film, and the mess the out of control director made of DESPAIR with Dirk Bogarde, in 1978. 

In the nineteenth century, seventeen year old Effi Briest is married to the older Baron von Instetten and moves into a house in a small isolated Baltic town. She soon bears a daughter,  Effi is lonely when her husband is away on business, so she spends time riding and walking along the shore with Major Crampas. Instetten is promoted to Ministerial Councillor and the family moves to Berlin, where Effi enjoys the social life. Six years later, the Baron is given letters from Crampas to Effi that convince him that they had an affair. He feels obliged to challenge Crampas to a duel and banish Effi from the house.

Like HEDDA GABLER or A DOLL'S HOUSE or ANNA KARENINA or MADME BOVARY this is a searing indictment of women's lives and powerlessness once married to possessive husbands in the restrictive 19th Century. The lesser-known novel by Fontane was a favourite of Fassbinder's and he does it justice with stunning black and white photography and those white fade-outs. Hanna Schygulla is of course tremendous as Effi, and the cast also features Karlheinz Boehm, who also crops up in FOX AND HIS FRIENDS, 

I like EFFIE BRIEST a lot, it should be a better known Fassbinder, and is essential "Women's Cinema" for everyone. It is a film of marvellously controlled images, and vivid imagination, with all those mirror shots. Its a great costume movie too, and I like its leisured, stately pace, almost like a 1950s Ingmar Bergman film. Perhaps that's what Fassbinder intended ... it has a melancholy ending, with a perfect long last shot. 

We will now have to check out his other films. several with Schygulla: THE MARRIAGE OF MARIA BRAUN, LOLA, LILI MARLEEN, VERONIKA VOSS ...  Schygulla of course was also in PETRA VON KANT, and I remember her in a very vivid 1989 Mexican film by gay Jaime Humberto Hermosillo: MISS FORBES.  She has clocked up 98 credits and is still working now - one of those essential European actresses like Liv Ullmann, Thulin or Moreau, Deneuve, Huppert .... 

A new LUDWIG

I was intrigued to see a new 4-disk Bluray of Luchino Visconti's 1973 opus LUDWIG is about to be released. I already have the 2 disk dvd, but this seemed too good to pass up, so it is on its way to me. We have covered LUDWIG and Visconti, Helmut, Romy, Silvana, Trevor Howard in detail here before, as per the labels - so more on it in due course. It should be a nice companion piece to the new Criterion bluray of Antonioni's BLOW-UP also out next week, and on its way to me from Barnes & Noble in New York. A brace of European classics then, all spruced up for the new era ...

Helmut acquits himself well here, and Romy is sheer perfection as the older, more cynical SISSI, while Trevor Howard and Mangano are ideal as the Wagners. Then there are all those attractive footmen as Ludwig battles his proclivities ... As with all Visconti films costume dramas don't get more opulent, and our perennial favourite Romy is simply stunning as the older Sissi. 
It was great seeing it initially on the large screen at a London Film Festival back then, watching at home it may be too long to see all at once, but ideal in chunks as the opulence washes over one ... its certainly up there with the other Visconti classics like SENSO, THE LEOPARD, L'INNOCENTE ...
Its a terrific package, with a 60 page booklet, a 1999 hour-long documentary on Visconti, when a lot of those who worked with him were still living and interviewed here, a documentary on Mangano and the full version of the film, in two parts, at almost 4 hours (238 minutes) or a 5 part TV version. There's also a new interview with Helmut Berger ..... Essential, then, As one review says: 
Among the scenes you’re most likely to remember – from all the versions – will be Ludwig’s wooing of the young actor Kainz in that glorious underground grotto with the swans and that charming little love boat, and Elizabeth’s visit to Ludwig’s most famous castle in the room with all those mirrors. Visually the film is a near-constant treat, with sets and costumes as gloriously garish and/or stunning as you’ll have seen. And then there’s that hunting lodge scene with all the young men perched atop and around the limbs of the giant tree that grows in the middle of the lodge.

Visconti with Romy & Helmut

Querelle & Fassbinder

One of the most bizarre movies is Rainer Werner Fassbinder's QUERELLE, a 1982 item from the novel by Genet - but in Fassbinder's vision it becomes a lurid if not sensational potboiler of repressed (and not so- ) homoerotic passions with all those matelots in those eye-catching outfits hanging out in waterfront dives in Brest in France, as our hero Querelle (Brad Davis) has the hots for his superior officer, a moody Franco Nero, right.. 
Add in Jeanne Moreau of all people, wearing those enormous ear-rings, intoning Oscar Wilde's "Each Man Kills The Thing He Loves" and Querelle submitting to her brutal husband, who likes getting off with those sailor boys.   It was all too much at the time, how would it fare now? It was actually released after Fassbinder's death in 1982. 

The Fassbinder we really like is his 1974 FOX AND HIS FRIENDS, reviewed here a while back, see Fassbinder label - where the director himself plays the loutish lottery winner taken to the cleaners by his smart new boyfriend (Peter Chatel, right) and his grasping family who need Fox's money to prop up ther ailing business. It ends on a very downbeat note as Fox's body is robbed by kids in a metro station.  

Other Fassbinders (once as prolific as Almodovar or Ozon) we liked then include FEAR EATS THE SOUL, his stylish hothouse lesbian drama THE BITTER TEARS OF PETRA VON KANT, EFFI BRIEST, THE MARRIAGE OF MARIA BRUAN, and the fascinating mess he made of Nabokov's DESPAIR with Dirk Bogarde, the director's last before his untimely drug-related death in 1982, aged 37. Still, he clocked up 44 credits ...  . 

A FOX memory - between 1976 and 1979 I was working at Dillons University Bookshop (now Waterstones) in London's University quarter, not in the bookshop but in an office upstairs, working with a German woman, Monica, who became a friend (we both loved Dietrich and Romy Schneider); one day she was expecting a guest for lunch and asked me to talk to him until she came back from a meeting. In walked this guy whom I recognised as Peter Chatel, the actor from FOX AND HIS FRIENDS, he sat on the edge of my desk and we talked about that until Monica returned, Chatel died aged 42 in 1986, another Aids casualty, 
Below: Andy Warhol visits the set, with Fassbinder and Brad Davis.

Romy as Sissi: 1955, 1956, 1957

I first saw the Austrian SISSI when I a kid and was fascinated by all those costumes and this chubby teenager Romy Schneider. Sissi (who became Empress Elizabeth of Austria and led a fascinating life) with her father in Bavaria and with her pet deer, and escaping from home and meeting the young Emperor Franz Joseph, and their romance. He is supposed to be marrying her older sister but chooses Sissi instead to the consternation of his domineering mother. Sissi's own mother is played by Romy's real mother, Magda Schneider, star of a previous generation. The film's success spawned two further ones, also directed by Ernst Marischka: SISSI THE YOUNG EMPRESS in 1956, detailing the early years of their marriage and coping with mother-in-law who wants to bring up their child, and how Sissi copes with the rigours of court life, and in 1957, SISSI: THE FATEFUL YEARS OF AN EMPRESS as Sissi travels around Europe, becomes estranged from the Emperor, is tempted by other romances, and gets over tuberculosis by having a holiday in Greece! (The real Elizabeth was an expert horsewoman and used to go horse-riding in Ireland).
The kitsch is piled on thick but they are all richly enjoyable when one is in the mood. A box of good chocolates and a glass of something sparkly goes down a treat with them. All three were edited into one film FOREVER MY LOVE with highlights of each, and that is quite enough for me, even if dubbed into English. Walt Disney wanted Romy too but she resisted - he got Hayley Mills instead! 

Romy of course went on to that great career, becoming a French cinema icon in the '70s, a very busy decade for her, after her films in England and America, before her untimely death in 1982 aged 43 - as per my other posts and reviews on her films - see Romy label. I have been collecting all her films, theres quite a lot - over 60, including some rubbish ones, but she is endlessly fascinating and attractive and still has a cult following as one of Europe's great international stars - particularly her films with Alain Delon (we will be looking at LA PISCINE again soon), and for director Claude Sautet. 
I have been to the real Empress Elizabeth's summer palace in Corfu, and to her private chapel - the building is now a casino. 

This is what I said about the series when I began this blog: 

SISSI - 1955. I liked this when I saw it as a kid. There are 3 SISSI films, all made in Germany in the '50s, all are saccharine, sentimental confections, very chocolate box cover with pretty dresses, rural scenes, and court intrigue about the early life of Empress Elizabeth of Austria, and seeing them now they are just as enjoyable as ever – the interfering mother-in-law is a particular delight. 

LUDWIG, 1972

All 3 are edited into one compilation FOREVER MY LOVE which is fine for seeing the best of them. The SISSI movies are a guilty pleasure, even if Romy hated them and soon changed her image 

Romy returned to the role for Visconti in his monumental LUDWIG in 1972 where Helmut Berger is ideal as Ludwig, and Trevor Howard and Silvana Mangano are also right as the Wagners. Romy brings a lot of brittle humour and insight to the role of the older Sissi this time around. Right: the 1982 PARIS MATCH issue, which I still have, covering her eventful life and death. 

RIP, continued ...

England's "Daily Telegraph" has an obituary on Austrian actor Carl Boehm (or as they spell it, Karlheinz Bohm), who has died at age 86. Boehm (born in 1928, the son of conductor Karl Boehm) died on 28 May. He is of course best known as the PEEPING TOM of Michael Powell's notorious 1960 shocker.
 
Boehm was also very popular in the 1950s in the German SISSI films, as Emperor Franz Joseph opposite teenage Romy Schneider as the Austrian Empress Elizabeth. They made 3 SISSI films (there is a compilation film FOREVER MY LOVE). He also played Beethoven for Walt Disney (which I remember seeing as a kid), and co-starred with Dolores Hart in the 1963 comedy COME FLY WITH ME, as well as playing one of the Grimm Brothers in THE WONDERFUL WORLD OF THE BROTHERS GRIMM, and in Minnelli's FOUR HORSEMEN OF THE APOCALYPSE, both 1962. His career revived in the 1970s with 4 films for Rainer Fassbinder, the best of which was FOX AND HIS FRIENDS (see German label). He later become involved in charity work in Ethiopia - leaving his 4th wife, an Ethiopian, to survive him.
PEEPING TOM will endure as long as PSYCHO in cinema annals as among the key films of 1960, not least for Boehm's interpretation of the killer cameraman. 

Gordon Willis (1931-2014), aged 82, defined the look of Seventies thriller cinema - think KLUTE, THE PARALLAX VIEW, THE GODFATHER films, ALL THE PRESIDENT'S MEN, several Woody Allen films including ANNIE HALL, MANHATTAN, STARDUST MEMORIES. I have just got Hal Ashby's 1970 THE LANDLORD (review soon) which he also lensed.  He served in the Air Force during the Korean War, and his later films looked so individual and unsettling due to his lighting technique of using shadows - "shadows and light".

Nosferatu, 1979

Werner Herzog's 1979 version of the silent classic NOSFERATU is visually (and aurally) impressive and still has the power to unsettle, with Euro-favourites Bruno Ganz and Isabelle Adjani pitted against the vampire of Klaus Kinski - a dead ringer for Max Schreck in the 1922 silent Murnau classic - as the pitiful vampire bringing death and plague in his wake ...

Jonathan Harker is sent away to Count Dracula's castle to sell him a house in Varna, where Jonathan lives. But Count Dracula is a vampire, an undead ghoul living off of men's blood. Inspired by a photograph of Lucy Harker, Jonathan's wife, Dracula moves to Varna, bringing with him death and plague... An unusually contemplative version of Dracula, in which the vampire bears the curse of not being able to get old and die. 

Like Coppola's version in 1992 the visuals keep one mesmerised - starting with those close-ups of mummified bodies, then Harker's journey through that desolate countryside and mountains to that grim castle to meet the cadaverous Count. We have "The children of the night make their music" as the wolves howl, and that comment of the undead Count: "Time is an abyss... profound as a thousand nights... Centuries come and go... To be unable to grow old is terrible... Death is not the worst... Can you imagine enduring centuries, experiencing each day the same futilities..."

 
Ganz is effective as Harker, but Adjani, usually so magnetic, plays Lucy as though she is in a coma but presumably that pallid Victorian heroine what Herzog wanted. Kinski certainly conveys the loneliness and sadness of the vampire who longs to be human. Its certainly effective as that ghost ship arrives in at the port, bringing rats and plague, as the Count has killed off the crew, and the city succumbs to plague mania  ..... will Jonathan get to save Lucy in time? The ending is not what one expects, as Lucy keeps Nosferatu with her till dawn - but then a new vamprie arises to take his place. Maybe Herzog's most effective film since AGUIRRE: THE WRATH OF GOD? For another OTT Kinski performance see 1981's snake-on-the-loose thriller VENOM (Horror label), he is also good as the slum landlord in 1965's THE PLEASURE GIRLS (London label). 

Herzog's NOSFERATU is one of the centrepieces of the current BFI 3-month "Gothic" season, with an extended run of 46 screenings in London, as does Clayton's brilliant THE INNOCENTS (also reviewed at Horror, Deborah Kerr labels).

I read Bram Stoker's novel when I was 17 and it was profoundly scary, most of the vampire movies have been fun - I particuarly like ther 1960 Hammer BRIDES OF DRACULA (Horror label) and the effectively chiller DRACULA PRINCE OF DARKNESS with Christopher Lee and Barbara Shelley is maybe the best of the other Hammer Draculas, apart from Polanski's deliciously comic DANCEOF THE VAMPIRES or THE FEARLESS VAMPIRE KILLERS - also at Horror label.

Romy x 4

I counted I have 38 of the 62 films featuring Romy Schneider (1938-1982), one of the most prolific stars of the 60s and 70s in European and international cinema, who became a leading player in French cinema as well - particularly with those 5 Claude Sautet titles - see Romy label, for reviews and my other comments on her. Romy has always been a particular favourite of mine (along with those other Euopean ladies like Sophia, Monica, Anouk, Silvana..) ever since I saw those SISSI films as a child. What kitschfests they are now .... 
Being so busy she also made some duds - 1969's MY LOVER MY SON must be about the worst! The early '60s saw her becoming a prestige player in those international films like THE TRIAL, THE CARDINAL, THE VICTORS, BOCCACCIO 70, WHATS NEW PUSSYCAT etc. 
Above: PARIS MATCH's issue covering her death, which I still have, with 46 pages on her!
I have about 10 Romys yet to see, here's just 4 for now .... 2 late '50s ones (CHRISTINE with Delon) and AN ANGEL ON EARTH, plus the '73 THE LAST TRAIN (one of her 4 with Trintignant) and her last film in 1982: LE PASSANTE DE SANS SOUCI. 

CHRISTINE, 1958 - turns out to be a pleasant surprise and fits in with my recent viewing here - like LA RONDE it too is from a story by Arthur Schnitzler, which was also filmed as LIEBELEI by Max Ophuls in 1933, starring Magda Schneider, Romy's mother. The 1958 version looks great with that bright Technicolour as we are back again in 1906 Vienna with those costume balls, nights at the opera, horses and carriages carrying lovers to secret assignations, those dragoons in their blue and red uniforms and pretty girls in pretty dresses. Like the SISSI films it is all a bit kitsch, but this one has a bitter ending. Dragoons Alain Delon and pal Jean-Claude Brialy meet some new girls, but Delon has been carrying on an affair with mature woman Micheline Presle (so good in Losey's BLIND DATE in '59) who is the wife of his senior officer, who is getting suspicious ... 

after he meets nice girl Christine (whose father plays cello in the opera orchestra) he breaks off the affair with the Baroness, but by now her husband finds out and sets a trap for them, and challenges Delon to a duel - I won't reveal the ending, but it is very bittersweet .... one amusing moment is at the Opera as Christine giggles when we see the aged emperor Franz Joseph in attendance - she had of course by then finished playing his wife SISSI.

Romy is delightful here, but Delon in one of his first roles seems to merely go through the motions - it would take his next, PLEIN SOLEIL with Rene Clement and ROCCO with Visconti, to make him mature as an actor. Directed by Pierre Gaspard-Huit. This was Schneider's first French film and her voice was dubbed as her French was not yet good enough.

AN ANGEL ON EARTH (EIL ENGEL AUF ERDEN). Another early Schneider, this 1959 comedy is quite a rarity. Romy here is an airline hostess secretly in love with frequent flier Henri Vidal, who is about to marry his vacant and mean fiance Michele Mercier. Romy plays two roles - she is also Vidal's guardian angel who has to steer him in the right direction towards the hostess. It is an amusng comedy with nice locations, Vidal (who died that year aged 40 - see label) has young Jean-Paul Belmondo (before his big break in BREATHLESS) as his rather gormless sidekick.

THE TRAIN (or THELAST TRAIN). Not Frankenheimer’s 1965 train in France evading the Nazis, but another equally desperate French train, also evading the Nazis, in this rarely-seen 1973 French film by Pierre Granier-Deferre, from a Simenon tale. It is 1940 and the French are moving out of the way of advancing Germans, ordindary guy Jean-Louis Trintignant joins the train with his pregnant wife and daughter. They get a seat in first class, he is back at the rear in the cargo wagon, with other refugees including mystery woman Anna (Romy). They are gradually drawn together, while the others (including Regine, Anne Wiazemsky Nike Arrighi), drink, fight, play cards, and even engage in sex. They are strafed by enemy planes causing the deaths of some; the part of the train containing his family is sent in a different direction leaving our two leads alone together. 
This is an engrossing, slow-moving drama, with the two leads (one of 4 films they made together) stripped down to their emotional cores. Schneider in particular is very effective, in this her great era in French cinema. There is a coda that takes place 3 years later … It all looks just right with great period feel and Granier-Deferre paces it nicely. (He also did another Simenon I have been meaning to see: THE WIDOW COUDERC, with another great team in Signoret and Delon). 

LE PASSANTE DE SANS SOUCI, 1982. Knowing this was Romy's last film inevitably colours how we view it. It is a standard revenge story, from a story by Joseph Kessel, with lots of flashbacks, as successful businessman Max Baumstein (Michel Poccoli) explains why he shot the president he was visiting. Romy plays two roles, one in the present as Max's wife Lina, and the other as Elsa Weiner back in 1930s Germany ... who with her husband Michel (Helmut Griem) raised the young Jewish Max as if he were their own child. Events (the rise of the Nazis who wreck Michel's printing business), force Elsa and Max to move to Paris, where she sings in a nightclub and attracts the attention of Matthieu Carriere, one of the Nazis in waiting, while Michel is in a concentration camp .... eventually she does what she has to do to get Michel released, but there is no happy ending for them.
The adult Max tracks down Carriere, now that President he is visiting on behalf on his foundation. We see the court case and the aftermath. It is a rich, complex, involving story. Romy in the modern section does not have much to do, but interplays nicely with Piccoli a decade or so after their Claude Sautet hits (Romy label) - they must have done at least 5 films together. She shines as Elsa in the flashbacks, looking after the young Max, coping with drink and heartbreak (after the death of her own son).  I was in Paris in 1982 and posters for this were everywhere, nice to finally see it at last.

We will be reporting later on the supposedly gruesome THE INFERNAL TRIO (also with Piccoli in '74, FANTASMA D'AMORE (GHOST OF LOVE) with Marcello in '81 - which surprisingly never played in London and is only available in Italian; LE MOUTON ENRAGE also with Trintignant, plus THE LADY BANKER, WOMAN AT HER WINDOW, Sautet's MADO, Jean-Claude Brialy's UN AMOUR DE PLUIE with Nino Castelnuovo, and some more ... and I love going back to WHAT'S NEW PUSSYCAT? and yes, SISSI ....

Fassbinder & Fox and his friends, 1975

This powerful and harrowing melodrama from 1974 is one of Rainer Werner Fassbinder's most accessible movies, and is a must-see for all those interested in intelligent film making.

The tragic story of Fox is masterfully and poignantly handled by Fassbinder, while never slipping into sloppy sentimentality, but unfolds with grim inevitability. Fassbinder was inexhaustible. In his 15 year career he made 40 feature-length films, 3 shorts, directed 24 stage plays, wrote 33 screenplays collaborating on 13 more, developed 2 series for television and took on 36 acting roles in not only his, but the films of his contemporaries as well. He remains a key figure as the Enfant Terrible in the New German Cinema of the 70s, along with Wim Wenders and Herzog. It was his ability to work quickly on a shoestring budget that allowed him to take advantage of government grants that enabled him to continue working at breakneck pace, often taking on the roles of producer, editor, composer, production designer and cinematographer in order to ensure the quality of his work.
FEAR EATS THE SOUL and THE BITTER TEARS OF PETRA VON KANT were big hits one had to have an opinion on at the time, and then came FOX AND HIS FRIENDS....like Polanski playing the lead in DANCE OF THE VAMPIRES it is odd seeing Fassbinder himself playing the lead as the lumpy fairground worker who is convinced he is going to win the lottery [the woman who sells him the ticket is Brigetta Mira, the heroine of FEAR EATS THE SOUL - and other Fassbinder regulars pop up too]. Add in Carl Boehm (from the SISSI films and PEEPING TOM etc) as the wealthy gay Fox initially hooks up with, and Peter Chatel as the object of his affections and we get a rapacious gay milieu which Fassbinder presents before us.

Below: FEAR EATS THE SOUL / The lush THE BITTER TEARS OF PETRA VON KANT


Fassbinder’s fatalistic outlook was reflected in the extreme brutality and sorrow that permeate his films. That quality, combined with his gritty, naked in your face drama often left film critics and viewers speechless, while utilising melodrama like Douglas Sirk, a big influence on him. His first film LOVE IS COLDER THAN DEATH in 1969 was poorly received and died a slow painful death. THE BITTER TEARS OF PETRA VON KANT was an art-house success in 1972 and concerns the idea that power is the ultimate goal in all human relationships. MARTHA in 1974, explores cruelty of traditional marriage; FEAR EATS THE SOUL brilliantly re-works Sirk's ALL THAT HEAVEN ALLOWS in a working class milieu as the cleaning woman's marriage to the Moroccan immigrant outrages her family and friends, until they get used to the idea and need her for work and baby-sitting duties, and FOX AND HIS FRIENDS the same year showcases the cruel side of homosexuality. This story centers around a good-natured young adult who wins half a million in a lottery, then naively hooks up with a lecherous man who, aided by his family, drains him of all his money and love, leaving him to die alone on the floor of a train station. These movies (plus a period drama EFFI BRIEST) were staples of London's indie revival houses (like the "Screen on the Green" where I used to hang out all the time), and the BFI also did a major retrospective.

He capped his career with a trilogy of films, the highly regarded THE MARRIAGE OF MARIA BRAUN in 1978, LOLA in 1981 and VERONIKA VOSS in 1982 all centered around women (usually Hanna Schygulla) in post-fascist Germany; and DESPAIR with Dirk Bogarde, which according to Dirk, the by then drug-addled Fassbinder ruined in the editing just before its screening at the Cannes film festival.



Fassbinder lived hard and partied hard. One of his relationships with men included El Hedi ben Salem, the male lead in FEAR EATS THE SOUL and Fassbinder’s longtime lover, who hanged himself while in jail. Fassbinder did not live to see his last film QUERELLE in 1982, a lurid success about a good-looking sailor, a thief and hustler (featuring Franco Nero, Brad Davis and Jeanne Moreau), because he died from a lethal combination of sleeping pills and cocaine, a few days after his 37th birthday. His short remarkable career influenced some of today’s most imaginative directors like Pedro Almoldovar, Richard Linklater, John Waters, Todd Haynes and Gus Van Sant.

The ending though to FOX is a tragedy beyond description - Love is colder than Death indeed ... fascinating though the look of that early '70s: the clothes, the interiors, and the characters fascinate: Boehm as the wealthy gay who observes, the alcoholic sister wanting her money back, Chatel as the venal boyfriend with his own boyfriend poised to return once Fox has been cleaned out, the purchasing of the antiques and the trip to Morocco, and the money invested in the parents' failing company, and that ending at the railway station ... what a bleak universe. Interesting now to compare with the newly restored TAXI ZUM KLO, Frank Ripploh's vivid diary of his gay life in Berlin circa 1980. FOX though can be exasperating: does he not realise what is going on, is he complicit in his own destruction, if he is looking for love does he not realise he will not find it here? Is he so unloved?


A personal memory here: I worked for a London university bookshop in the late 70s, imagine my surprise one day when a guy came into my office and sat on my desk, waiting for my colleague, Monica, a German friend, to return. It was Peter Chatel - who died in 1986. Fassbinder's main films though will endure and continue to fascinate.

Next: Mexico's joyous DONA HERLINDA AND HER SON by Jaime Hermosillo.