The further adventures of Love Is Colder Than Death's Franz (here played by Harry Baer) and Joanna (Hanna Schygulla) and their friends, Gods of the Plague is a gritty lowlife gangster flick in which the camera gets all the best lines. Sam Fuller comes to mind. But Fassbinder doesn't just distill the American/French gangster film down to its dead end; he's clearly in the ancient underworlds of G. W. Pabst (Pandora's Box) and Fritz Lang. (Try the mirror shot in Joanna's dressing room in which even Dietrich makes an appearance.) Franz Walsch (curiously, the nom-de-scissors of the editor on these early films as well) is a small-time crook, just out of jail, who is loved by three women-baby-faced prostie Joanna, working girl Margarethe von Trotta, and weird Ingrid Caven-and whose blaze of glory comes in the white heat of a supermarket aisle. Peer Raben's music is essential to this and every other Fassbinder film.