In 1982, West German director Wolf Gremm adapted Per Wahlöö's Death on the 31st Floor into a vision of post-industrial decadence in a "perfect" society: Germany, 1989. The Wizard of this particular Oz is the media-specifically, a publishing house with a monopoly on printed matter (Wahlöö, incidentally, was a former journalist) whose "Blue Panther" comic books saturate the public consciousness. As police inspector Jansen, assigned to investigate a bomb threat against the thirty-story publishing house, the late R. W. Fassbinder in his last acting role is puckish and even more than typically outrageous-dressed in a loosely-fitting leopard-skin suit. Jansen's tactics range from the hardboiled to the ridiculous, but they work: his research uncovers a thirty-first floor whose denizens-exiled writers and editors of conscience-labor under the promise of publishing a journal of free thinking. Slowly he peels back layers of corruption and depression, the bulwarks of this perfect society. "(The film) is stamped with Fassbinder's witty revulsion against his world...He speaks little, but every gesture, every turn of his hulking body, every jaunty step and droop of shoulder expresses Jansen's purpose..." (Robert Hatch, The Nation). Xaver Schwarzenberger's luminous cinematography captures the steel, glass and neon metropolis-with its haunts, like the tacky Police Disco-as a futurist noir that is, after all, now.