This was the first film that I watched in the eclipse series of early Fassbinder films. In fact it was his first feature. I really liked this film. It was simple but complex, raw but stylish. I saw a number of similarities in this film that it might have inspired in other films. The opening sequence reminded me of Reservior Dogs or the Usual Suspects in parts. It is not as grand as those two films, but it has a style that resembles them.
The film is very tight. It is a film-noir picture with much borrowed from American crime films. Fassbinder was not remiss about how he borrowed from American crime movies for this picture. The film isn't long, it runs about 90 minutes. Yet it moves fast, there is a littel violence, a little sex and a great ending which I will not spoil by writing about it in this post.
I liked the dialogue. The opening is great when one guy asks Fassbinder's character for a cigarette and he beats him up. There is a lot of interesting dialogue. It's very understated, but always delivered cooly, directly, and simply. The shots of dialogue are also presented visually in a very simple, but creative way. The headshots on the train or in the gun shop or in the apartment are all done well.
Perhaps more arresting than the dialogue are the tracking shots. Those shots, the one in the police department, in the street, and on the train moving are all great. It totally distorts a viewer's impression of movement. I also liked what the cinematographer did with mirrors in car sequence shots. The image at the end of the film; Fassbinder and his girlfriend driving away, and in the mirror you see Fassbinder, just his eyes with sunglasses on.
I have seen the BRD trilogy and those films are very complex and elaborately produced. They must have had much larger budgets than this film. But this film shows Fassbinder's promise as a filmmaker and the great films he was to produce later in his short life.
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