Word: preying
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Writer-Director Rainer Werner Fassbinder, who died last June at 36, was a cauterizer of the German body politic. In the 1977 telefilm (reduced from three hours to 110 minutes for theatrical release), he portrays Hanni and Xaverl not simply as predator and willing prey but as victims of both economic hypocrisy and puritan prurience. Nor is the viewer exempt: he must peek at Hanni's lovemaking through frosted train windows and the billowing lace curtains of the middle class. The leading actors are exemplary: Trissenaar, porcelain-skinned and angel-faced and scarily self-possessed, and Raab, the perpetual...
...Moscow initially was surprised at the fervor of the Afghan resistance movement, the Soviets may no longer be trying to crush the rebels. If the Soviet objective is to control the Afghan government, the major cities and the economy, as well as ensure that its neighbor does not fall prey to an Islamic revolution like Iran's, Moscow may have achieved its goals...
...attempt to search her desk for evidence. Suddenly, he stops and says aloud. "This is dumb." The abruptness of the self-deprecating remark underscores his ambivalent feelings: While Dr. Rice the shrink recognizes an element of the ridiculous in his decision to play detective. Sam Rice the man is prey to an overpowering need to satisfy his curiosity...
Suddenly, a nongentlemanly caller opens the screen door and asks, as a ruse, for a guy named Joe who supposedly lives there. Raul (James Russo) is one of nature's punks. He exudes malignant animal magnetism. As the world is his jungle, women are his chosen prey. Marjorie tries a feeble ploy about a policeman husband asleep upstairs, but Raul knows better. He rips the phone cord out of the wall and pins Marjorie to the floor as he semi-suffocates her with a pillow...
...there is an even more important reason why he is easy prey: because he bares his soul to us. He lets us see his values, his struggles, the contradictions with which his life is fraught. He chooses to be no more and no less than a human being to us. Not only does this make him open to attack, but it can hurt us if we let it, because it forces us to see our own humanness...