With early performances by Hanna Schygulla and Fassbinder himself, this chilling portrait of latent bourgeois fascism is one of the director's best films, yet was never widely shown in this country. “Group identity, its insularity, and its paranoid hostility to outsiders is the basis of Fassbinder's second film. A Munich apartment block houses several interchangeable couples, all of them bored, listless, and totally self-engrossed. The threat to their complacency comes from a ‘Katzelmacher' (pejorative Bavarian slang for Gastarbeiter or foreign worker), a Greek immigrant who rents a room in the block. The newcomer, played by Fassbinder himself with an impishly deadpan innocence, is both an object of curiosity to the group and the catalyst for their previously suppressed internal dissension, of which in the end of course he is the victim” (David Wilson, Sight and Sound).

Katzelmacher is repeated on Sunday, September 7.