Fuller brings the homely detective film up-to-date with the cynical flavor of international intrigue and more than a suggestion of political corruption (in this way Dead Pigeon is very much like Fassbinder's The American Soldier, see August 9). The story has private eye Glenn Corbett tracking an international extortionist ring. Eric Sherman, editor of several major interviews with Fuller, calls Dead Pigeon on Beethoven Street Fuller's "most anarchic" film: "Plot twists abound, loyalties are non-existent, love affairs are confounded by layers of blackmail, sex is a result not of emotional sensitivity but of impersonal in- trigue. The chaos of Fuller's world is apparent not only in the complex story, but in the shooting and editing of the action and exposition sequences...Murders occur with lightning speed, both on and off-camera...This renders the battle not so much as man against man, but violence as a state of everyone's struggle. There are no heroes in Dead Pigeon. All relationships spring from a dubious base, and in Fuller's world, doubt leads to destruction." Dead Pigeon on Beethoven Street is also the film in which Fuller tips his hat (or his hand) to the French and American filmmakers and critics who made him a cult figure. One of the Corbett character's a.k.a.'s is Sherman (as in the above-mentioned Eric); Stephane Audran, wife of Claude Chabrol (both ardent Fuller fans) plays a character named Bogdanovich; Fuller's wife Christa Lang is seen in a previous incarnation as a prostitute in Godard's Alphaville... It's a game but it's also one of the ways Fuller underlines the illusionary nature of the medium. A glance (back) at Godard.