Whity

Leave it to Fassbinder to subvert the Western genre. It's a Western, set in America, but of course everyone speaks German. Whity is the mulatto slave of the perverse Nicholson family. The family almost gets as much joy from abusing him as they do from masochistically harming themselves. The grown children of the family patriarch all come to Whity and ask him to kill their father. One of the sons clearly has some sexual issues to work through. In fact, all of the main white characters in the film already look dead. They are made up in a grotesquely pale make up that looks like it would be more at home in a Romero film. This is easily the most subversive Western since Nicholas Ray's masterpiece, Johnny Guitar, but this isn't nearly as much fun, though it is certainly more psychologically probing. Just watch the way Fassbinder (and cinematographer, Michael Ballhaus') camera glides around the room from one character to another in the scene in which the father reads out his will. Like the best of his films, there are moments of almost delicious perversion, but he is unable to sustain the mood for the entire film.