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Why Does Herr R. Run Amok? is the starting point, the factory worker's rampage is heard as a radio bulletin, he leaves behind a wife to negotiate the scandal. The working-class hausfrau (Brigitte Mira) believes in the God-given order of things, suddenly she's at the center of a sensationalist whirl. "For years, nothing happens. Then, overnight, everything comes crashing down on you." Her son (Armin Meier) is a schnook, her daughter-in-law (Irm Hermann) won't let anything delay her vacation, her daughter (Ingrid Caven) uses the family's notoriety to boost her singing career. (The chanteuse's album of sub-Weill dirges is titled Men—Who Cares About Them?) The magazine journalist (Gottfried John) promises an objective report and peddles a lurid portrait, the Commie swells (Karlheinz Böhm, Margit Carstensen) make her a prop for election campaigns. "Everybody's out for something. Once you realize that, everything is simple." Rainer Werner Fassbinder on the circle of awakening and exploitation, as mordant a German tragedy as The Last Laugh or Ace in the Hole. Drab Frankfurt, its domestic dungeons and seamy dives. (A ballet drag act pirouettes in the background of a nightclub gathering in a characteristically deadpan composition.) Denied her pension and deserted by her brood, the matriarch drifts into politics as a way to stave off loneliness. Her plainspoken morality is a hit at the comrades' meeting, where she's promptly accosted by a radical (Matthias Fuchs) who guarantees action. "Mutter und Anarchisten?!" A pair of endings give Fassbinder's acerbity and compassion, a widow's visage frozen in bewilderment (screenplay text on the screen outlines her demise) and aglow with hope (a dinner of mashed potatoes and blood sausage courtesy of a cuddly janitor). Pamphlet or fairy tale, which is bleaker? The Third Generation is a farcical pendant. With Peter Kern, Kurt Raab, and Lilo Pempeit.
--- Fernando F. Croce |