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"So with the poet and the secret wish" (Nemerov), blocked and strapped and reincarnated. Once the revolution's literary hero, now dry and begging the publisher for advances, Kurt Raab a ringer for Lubitsch throughout. "When you've been eaten by worms, my name will still shine!" At home the harridan wife (Helen Vita) and the brother like a numbskull Renfield (Volker Spengler), the love declaration to his friend's wife (Ingrid Caven) is uttered while she scratches her rump in the bathroom. Another mistress (Katherina Buchhammer) is gunned down in the heat of the moment, the police investigator (Ulli Lommel) slouches through the case. "You fuck flies, you don't shoot them." Rainer Werner Fassbinder is at his most despairing when he tries being at his zaniest, exuberant grotesques populate the bleak state of mind. Verses stolen from Stefan George comprise the second wind, which means getting rouged and bewigged and going cruising for disciples. The groupie is a bespectacled spinster (Margit Carstensen) who exults in humiliation until she discovers her übermensch is nothing but a fellow masochist. "You lick poems off strange men's lips!" Dolorous scenario, screwball treatment. Families and whores, philistines and sycophants, the Muse as the burly hustler who comes wrapped in a toga for a reading. "Bourgeois asceticism, the noblest of all things." Pistol among rubber dildos, money behind the cuckoo clock. Visit with mutter und vater, revenge for the blackmailed demimondaine, Artaud manifestos to bracket things. The magnum opus at last, No Ceremony for the Fuhrer's Dead Dog, "not your usual leftist crap." Death and resurrection of the fascist artist at the close, plenty of scabrous laughter to go around. Chinese Roulette is a concurrent refinement of the puckish style. With Marquard Bohm, Y Sa Lo, Brigitte Mira, Armin Meier, Vitus Zeplichal, Hannes Kaetner, Peter Chatel, and Lilo Pempeit.
--- Fernando F. Croce |