“Fassbinder's film noir; his eighth feature (made in ten days, with his now familiar cast of ‘Antitheater' actors) which he calls ‘a study of a perfect killer.' Often compared with early Godard, Fassbinder here also re-works the infiltration of American culture (the iconography of gangster movies; two characters are called Walsh and Fuller in honor of the Hollywood directors), refers to his other films (‘It was a study where I tried with certain distance, humor, and acertain self-irony to recapitulate what I had done before'), and uses a stylized, distancing camerawork. Ricky, always dressed in white, returns to the Munich underworld as a Vietnam veteran, and is hired as a professional killer by three policemen. He visits childhood haunts, swigs whiskey, and kills, in the same dispassionate manner, even when his last vicitim is his girlfriend. ‘Never has Fassbinder so sharply described love as colder than death in certain circumstances. Each killing in this extraordinary gangster movie is a substitute for sexual intercourse, and each policeman looks and behaves like a gangster' (National Film Theatre)” --Richard Kwietniowski