Subtitled "A Melancholy Comedy of Justice and the Construction Industry," The Little Attorney provides a satiric showcase for the talents of Hark Bohm, one of Germany's finest character actors (we recognize him, with his pinched face and wire-rimmed glasses, from Fassbinder's films including The Marriage of Maria Braun and Berlin Alexanderplatz). In this film, one of several which he also wrote and directed, Bohm knowingly casts himself as a mousy public prosecutor for whom exceeding caution confounds upward mobility at every turn. But the film's fast-paced humor is as much at the expense of the West German bureaucracy, which it cleverly lampoons, as of the hapless prosecutor, who bluffs his way into exposing a building scam with resounding political repercussions. In the end, the bungling civil servant is forced to choose between career and personal integrity. Critics reviewing the film at the Berlin Film Festival called this Bohm's most genuinely felt, brilliantly understated characterization in a long line of bespectacled accountants and small-time crooks.