532 - Gods of the Plague, Germany, 1970. Dir. Rainer Werner Fassbinder.
We herewith commit your body, Franz Walsch, to consecrated earth,
For from dust you come and to dust you shall return.
May the Day of Judgment hold no horrors for you.
Therefore, let us pray for his poor soul that it may be cleansed in purgatory,
For the sake of our Lord Jesus Christ,
who leads the lost sheep back to the way of God
and cleanses us of all our sins. Amen.
Johanna Reiher stands in the foreground.
Marguerethe stands in the background, next to a third woman in mourning.
Three crosses rise from large tombstones, one above each of the women's heads.
Marguerethe, the brunette with sensible straight hair, stands in repose and grieves internally.
Johanna, the blonde with big hair, weeps openly.
I loved him so much!
That is quite a statement since she had told the police officer when and where he would be holding up the supermarket. So that the police could be there waiting for him when he arrived.
But then this film is a kind of sequel to Fassbinder's first film, Love is Colder than Death (1969), and as such it is a continuation of Fassbinder's appropriation of Godard's Breathless (1960).
In Love is Colder than Death, Franz Walsch was being interrogated by the police for two murders. He was part of a threesome along with Johanna and Bruno. When Johanna grew jealous of Bruno and contributed to his getting killed at the botched grocery hold-up, she told Franz in the get-away car that she called the police.
Now in Gods of the Plague there has been another threesome at another botched grocery hold-up, again because Johanna grew jealous and tipped off the police.
But this time she is not a part of the threesome. So she is even more jealous.
How did we get here?
Stadelheim Prison. Munich.
Franz Walsch is released from prison.
Take care, kid.
Yeah.
See you next time around.
There won't be a next time for me.
That statement would be known as foreshadowing.
0:56 - 1:35 - Tracking Shot. Franz walks past the brick wall.
Franz enters a cafe, orders a coffee, and asks to use the phone. The Cafe Owner places a phone on the counter and goes to make his coffee. She watches him with longing.
The espresso machine arm moves up as a correlative expression of the arousal in her eyes.
Her profile fills the left side of the screen in an extreme close-up. He stands behind the counter on the right side of the screen talking on the phone. Single vanishing point perspective.
Fassbinder has more money with his third film, and his camera work and production values show it. He is using the same cinematographer, Dietrich Lohmann, and Dietrich Lohmann is getting better. And probably has more gear with which to work. There will be plenty of perspective in this film.
He asks an employer over the phone if Johanna Reiher still works there. Just released from prison and she is the first person he calls. He reads them this number to call back when they get her. 63 64 07. (What?) 07. Then he hangs up and waits.
He puts money in the jukebox and orders up a song.
He puts money in a slot machine and starts it. But he sees the Cafe Owner and walks away before the slot machine settles on its numbers. It produces a WIN. 20-80-80, 80-80-20. In diagonal cross section. But he is not there to see it.
(Harry Baer wrote in 2007 that they filmed 76 takes until the slot machine gave them the results they wanted.)
The Cafe Owner dances with Franz to Ray Charles singing "Here We Go Again."
And if you watch the film again, you might think that this is the best shot at love he is going to get. This slow dance with a stranger.
The phone rings back before the end of the song, before the end of the dance, and he finds out that Johanna is singing at The Lola Montez.
This is the first of several allusions to other filmmakers that Fassbinder will make in this film. They are a bit thin and obvious, but perhaps in his time at his age they seemed fun.
Lola Montez was a real person who lived in the 19th century and achieved fame as a Spanish dancer. She was Irish. Lola Montes was a 1955 French film loosely based on her life and directed by Max Ophuls.
It was our 94th film to review, on Tuesday, April 4, 2017.
https://realbillbillions.blogspot.com/2017/04/094-lola-montes-1955-france-dir-max.html
Franz meets up with Johanna. He hears her sing in the club. And the next allusion comes right away, from Johanna's singing Marlene Dietrich to her standing next to a Dietrich poster backstage. (Another one will come with the name Schlondorff on the door of the room where Franz will find his brother's body. Margarethe von Trotta, who plays Margarethe, was married to director Volker Schlondorff, who cast Fassbinder as the lead in his film Baal, which was released the same year as this one.)
They go out together afterwards. He might be happy to see her but neither she nor we can tell. It seems he is trying to do his best impression of Meursault from Albert Camus' The Stranger. 28 years later.
He will hook up with Johanna and then hook up with Magdalena and then hook up with Margarethe and then hook up with Gunther. And if you connect with him and walk a mile in his shoes, then you might sympathize with his lonely, fruitless quest.
But when the movie is over, you might also find yourself saying to Johanna, Girl, you could do better.
Part of it is that Harry Baer, Fassbinder's sometime Assistant Director, does not have the presence or charisma that someone like Orson Welles has in Touch of Evil (1958), which would make someone like Marlene Dietrich herself say upon his death, "He was some kind of a man." Nor does he have the star-making magnitude of Jean-Paul Belmondo in Breathless (1960). Of course, it does not help that Baer is playing Walsch in exactly the opposite manner--absent, without charisma, life, or energy. Or that he treats Johanna, and Margarethe after her, so shockingly poorly. And though Fassbinder appears to have cast Baer over himself to play the role in order to get a thinner, more handsome leading man, well, maybe a little charisma, life, and energy might have helped. And maybe a little affection underneath the tough (or blank) exterior. At least if you are trying to remake parts of Touch of Evil and Breathless on a poor man's budget. Or maybe a classic thriller just does not come off as well after being mixed with 20th century existential posturing. This Franz Walsch is not some kind of a man. He is fine as it goes, and we believe that people would love him and grieve over his death, for sure. But you might just find yourself pulling for Johanna to move on with her life afterwards.
And yes, I am saying that Fassbinder's first works are derivative of his heroes. He has a case of anxiety of influence. Harold Bloom's book by that name would come out just three years later, in 1973. (Did Bloom himself steal his ideas from T.S. Eliot?) But then, so what, right? Fassbinder will go on to make his own way in spades. He needed to get started somewhere.
We are told that the German trailer for this film stated the following:
Capitalism is the plague.
Criminals are its gods.
OK.
These films work better without making explicit their Marxist underpinnings. If Walsch thinks he is justified in his bad behavior because other people are making money in a free market economy, well, no, he is not.
Gunther at least gives us a moment of poetry in his final moment, after his overwrought bloody lumbering from the grocery store to seek revenge.
Life is very precious. Even right now.
* * * *
Here We Go Again. Ray Charles.
Don Lanier, Russell Steagall.
Here we go again.
The phone will ring again.
I'll be her fool again.
One more time.
I've been there before
And I'll try it again
But any fool knows
That there's no way to win
Here we go again.
She'll break my heart again.
I'll play the part again.
One more time.
Blond hair, dark-blue eyes
I see wherever I may be
And a silly little childlike smile
Haunts my reverie
My blond baby
Do not forget me
My little baby
Don't do that to me
You've no idea
What you mean to me
For in your soul
You're still a baby
My little baby
Listen to me
In my dreams
There's only you
Hear my yearning
Speak to you
My blond baby
Do not forget me
Karl Valentin, Liesl Karlstadt
Klapphornverse Maskenball der Tiere Wo die Alpenrosen bluhn
All creatures, great and small,
gathered for a grand masked ball.
The turtle from a turtle race
played trumpet at a hurtling pace.
The chameleon, chameleon
puffed on a bulky bombardon.
And all the lice, the little lice,
they made a noise that wasn't nice.
The bumblebees, the bumblebees
banged on bombastic tympanies.
The eel, the eel
performed a slithering reel.
The leopard, with a spotted scarf,
was waiting for his better half.
The flamingo, the flamingo
was looking for some place to go.
The mule, the stubborn mule
was sprawling in a vast fauteuil.
The water's mirror showed the swan
that he was looking rather wan.
And the hippo, hippopotamus
behaved badly like a lot of us.
The pig, who wasn't very fine--
(Do you want some ravioli?)
The buffalo, the buffalo
bawls to the goose a gruff "Hello!"
While the spotted salamander
slides down to the veranda.
The fly, the fly
stands outside in the pantry.
A parrot who could count to three
squawked "Pretty Polly" constantly.
The storks, the storks
were camouflaged as hawks.
The wolves, a pack of twelve,
had sheepishly disguised themselves.
The bugs, even the little bug,
began to dance a jitterbug.
And when it danced, the eagle
did something very regal.
The fleas, the fleas
hopped in the air with ease.
Then suddenly the hall was still.
They all sat down to eat their fill.
The raven and the stork
ate soup with just a fork.
The giraffe, the giraffe,
ate chocolate wafer with cafe.
(Like a schnapps?)
And the serpent, for a change,
tried to eat a blood orange.
The lizard, oh, the lizard
had pork crackling in its gizzard.
The gnu, the gnu,
had eaten quite enough, he knew.
The aurochs, who was soon replete,
asked who would like the rest to eat.
The dromedary chewed at length
on caviar to give him strength.
The snipe was but a snipe,
though clearly not a guttersnipe.
The llama, the llama,
finished off with a banana.
That this was just a nonsense song,
was something we knew all along.
Hush, hush, sweet Charlotte.
Charlotte, don't you cry.
Hush, hush, sweet Charlotte.
He loves you till he dies.
And every night after he shall die
Yes, every night when he's gone
The wind will sing to you its lullaby
Sweet Charlotte was loved by John.
Two roses he gave to you
The red one tells you of his passion
The white one of his love so true
And every night after he shall go
Yes, every night when he's gone
The wind will sing to you its lullaby
Sweet Charlotte was loved by John.
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