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Film noir is a language adjusted for the times, the hard-boiled image out of The Killing (tough guys huddled under a lamp) is examined closer to point out the porno cards they're playing with. Clad in white suit and dark fedora, the eponymous thug (Karl Scheydt) is a taciturn vet ("How was Vietnam?" "Loud"), a hired gun drifting through the neurasthenic Zeroville of 1970 Munich. Solving cases takes effort, easier for the police to just pay the hitman to shoot the suspects. The Pickup on South Street stoolie is a dissolute blonde (Katrin Schaake) peddling smut at the Lola Montez Saloon, lip-synching in the background is a depressed Dietrich (Ingrid Caven) with her own connection to the wanderer. Return to the old neighborhood (cf. Dead End), "pretty unhealthy area," a certain Frau Lang wanders about. (Piano and Madonna painting and pinball machine comprise the family living room, Kurt Raab as the brother helps elucidate the tension between Sam Spade and Joel Cairo.) Cinema history bound to personal malaise bound to societal dislocation, a wry hypothesis by Rainer Werner Fassbinder. Murnau at the hotel desk, Von Praunheim the moll, a Germany of old and new ghosts. The killer asks for a woman and gets the cop's squeeze (Elga Sorbas), they roll on a mattress while in the foreground the chambermaid (Margarethe von Trotta) leans against the bedpost and plaintively predicts the plot of Ali: Fear Eats the Soul for the camera. A nightmare of escape ("There was an elephant... in Belgium"), Double Indemnity for the bullet in the couple's embrace. Protracted overcracking at the close pushes the famous Bonnie and Clyde finale into satirical grotesquerie, milking the theme song ("Sooooo much tenderness is in my head / Sooooo much emptiness is in my bed") to the last drop. With Jan George, Hark Bohm, Ulli Lommel, and Irm Hermann. In black and white.
--- Fernando F. Croce |