Why Does Herr R. Run Amok? (Rainer Werner Fassbinder/Michael Fengler, 1970)
First off, I've only watched this once, and I will rewatch it at least one more time, but I might as well call them as I see them and go ahead and share. Fassbinder wrote and directed this film with Fengler, who produced several of his other films. I'm not sure how the directorial responsibilities were split, but it seems to fit into Fassbinder's early period where he was translating his love of antitheatre into antifilm. This movie follows an almost archetypal Fassbinder protagonist, Herr Raab (Kurt Raab), who works in a small Munich office as a draftsman. His wife (Lilith Ungerer) has dreams he will get a promotion and that she can move up from the middle class to the upper middle class. The couple has a young son who seems to suffer from ADHD, but the film was made before there was such an acronym.
This is basically a series of scenes which depict how Herr R. is
mostly a withdrawn worker who gets headaches at the end of almost every work day. Everybody in the film seems to think that the epitome of existence is smoking, and most of the characters come across as human enough, but they are completely vapid and unaware of things outside of their own world. Occasionally, Herr R. seems to almost be mentally-deficient, but mostly he's just quiet. My main problem with the film and why I give it the lowest rating of any Fassbinder yet which I've seen is not because the film is incompetent or even induces Fassbinder's desired effect on the viewer. The problem is the film is just too realistically banal. The characters talk but never say anything. There is no communication going on. I admit that this actually adds to the power of the film when something actually significant happens in the final 10 minutes. The viewer feels like a fly on the wall, with Fassbinder's technique of (as always) filming scenes in long takes, but here the camerawork seems to be more home-movieish. I felt like a fly watching this alright, but long before the tragic ending arrives, I wished that I had been squashed by a flyswatter.
For the record, I was ready to give this movie a
before the final 15 minutes. It may strike me as a work of genius next time, but no matter what I think, it's an oppressive film with less cinematic art than other Fassbinder films I've seen. It still contains truth, but it seems too strident and one-note to get anywhere near his best films which are both honest and highly-cinematic.
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The Beloved Rogue (Alan Crosland, 1927)
This is one of the best silent films I have ever seen. It's full of action, adventure, romance, comedy, violence and poetry. John Barrymore shines in the role of poet François Villon, who, in early 15th-century France, becomes the biggest enemy AND friend of King Louis XI (Conrad Veidt). Villon leads a group of ragamuffin criminal patriots, and he hates the dreaded usurper, the Duke of Burgundy, as much as Louis fears him. Although Villon is condemned to death by his actions, he eventually earns the right to try to save France and win the hand of Louis' beautiful ward Charlotte (Marceline Day), who has basically been offered to one of Burgundy's henchmen as a sacrifice.
One of my favorite Ronald Colman films is the talkie version of this, called
If I Were King (1938), wittily adapted by Preston Sturges. Both Colman and Basil Rathbone as Louis are wickedly hilarious, and that film has much more humor sprinkled throughout. But this version has Barrymore doing an impressive "impression" of Douglas Fairbanks. Barrymore is sliding across rooftops and avoiding adversaries at almost every turn. Also, this film is much more violent than the 1938 film. Villon is captured by Burgundy, whipped, tortured and burned, and that isn't exactly detailed in the Colman version. I highly recommend both versions of this story. This silent one is on DVD, but for some idiotic reason, If I Were King isn't.
Note: Alan Crosland was a talented silent film director who died much too young in 1936 in an auto accident. Before
The Beloved Rogue, he worked with Barrymore in the almost-equally impressive
Don Juan, and after this film, he directed the immortal
The Jazz Singer.
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