An early film shows some signs of Fassbinder's genius

Katzelmacher, from 1969, was one of the early works of the prolific filmmaker Rainer Werner Fassbinder (director, screenwriter, actor - as in many of his films) and by no means his best, but it shows his emerging talent and some of the cinematic skill that he later developed into some fine dramas and melodrama. Like much of his later work, Katzelmacher (I looked it up: the title is loosely translated as Troublemakers, but a literal translation would be Cat-fuckers!) is deliberately stagey: It feels like a series of snapshots or blackout scenes of interaction among the, I think, 9 main characters. They also show RWF's genius for staging. He was obviously working here on a limited budget, so the sets are often bare and many of the longer scenes are staged with the characters in front of the stucco wall of an apartment building, shoulder to shoulder leaning against or perched on a railing, looking straight ahead and making no eye contact w/ the other characters. The weird staging gives us a sense of the emptiness of the lives of these characters, none of whom seems to have any career or aspiration, other then sex with one another - often for pay - smoking, drinking. The film appears to be going nowhere for quite some time - perhaps recalled a Beckett play or more likely the deliberately stilted staging of a Cassavetes or early Godard film - until about 30 minutes in a new character appears (one of the main tropes of narration: A Stranger Comes to Town), a Greek "guest worker," who stirs up hatred and animosity and sexual jealousy and rivalry among all of the characters. The movie never becomes overtly polemical, but of course there are political implications even more resonant with us today than 50 years ago. The one hang-up, however, is that all of the characters seem too old for their parts - and not sufficiently menacing; no doubt RWF was working on a shoestring w/ fellow film students - you play with the cards you've got - but if anyone were to remake the film or stage it as a play you'd want these Katzelmacher to be scary and brutal. Here, they seem just feckless.