A gritty, color case history of a bourgeois office worker who, "without warning," goes berserk, killing his wife, child and neighbor before hanging himself, Why Does Herr R. Run Amok? predates Fassbinder's Sirk-influenced period and in fact seems to reflect an influence of Andy Warhol's cinema. But the thread that drew Fassbinder to Sirk - Sirk's relentless disrobing of the Emperor (normality) to reveal, and only then show compassion for, an individual divided against his own nature - already runs through this more distanced, early work (now all but disowned by Fassbinder). "The hand-held, single-take, overexposed color modernism of Why Does Herr R. Run Amok? is light-years away from the theatrical Sirkian backdrops (equally Brechtian, though monumentally classical) that Fassbinder now prefers.... (But) Herr R. stands up to any of the later films in terms of its awareness of the inescapable lonely terrors and hidden compartments of crippling anxiety...accompanying modern bourgeois existence.... For (Herr) Raab a journey has begun that will carry him right to the edge of, and then beyond, the boundaries of the flat, inhibited world of petit-bourgeois repression and bad faith...." --John Hughes, Film Comment.