BERLIN ALEXANDERPLATZ Movie Review

The generally derogatory expression “made for television” is pretty much without meaning in the case of Rainer Werner Fassbinder's adaptation of psychiatrist Alfred Döblin's epic 1929 novel of Germany in the late 1920s. Without the backing of television, how else could Fassbinder have created a 15-and-a-half hour movie, including a two-hour epilogue in which the director recapitulates the preceding 13-and-a-half hours as an hallucinatory dream? The question, I suppose, is how did Fassbinder do it even with the backing of television? Whatever the answer, Fassbinder's creation, despite its occasional niggling flaws as drama and its surprisingly rare repetitiveness, is a genuinely great achievement. The intimate and richly detailed chronicle of Franz Biberkopf's journey from prison to an underworld of intrigue, love, and crime that would eventually overwhelm him proves overwhelming to the viewer as well. The sheer magnitude of Berlin Alexanderplatz is no small element of its power to seduce. In the not inconsiderable pleasure of simply being immersed in a story this size, with such a huge number of sub-plots and characters, the film reminds us of reading Dickens—arguably the last author most of us would mention when speaking of Fassbinder. Gunter Lamprecht as Franz gives a truly memorable performance that holds everything together, and he's ably supported by Fassbinder regulars Hanna Schygulla, Barbara Sukowa, Gottfried John, Brigitte Mira, and Margit Castensen. Peer Rabin's score is insistent but never unwelcome, adding to the operatic, larger than life feel of the whole enterprise. (Those who have seen this film tend to carry it around with them. Shortly after Berlin Alexanderplatz played to sold-out houses at the Detroit Institute of Arts in 1981, an anonymous gentleman, who paid to have one of the theatre's seats refurbished, simply requested that his seat's commemorative plaque read: “In Memory of Fifteen-and-a-Half Hours with Franz Biberkopf.”)

NEXT STOP … The Godfather Parts I & II, Little Dorrit, The Kingdom, Parts I & II

1980 930m/C GE Gunter Lamprecht, Hanna Schygulla, Barbara Sukowa, Gottfried John, Elisabeth Trissenaar, Brigitte Mira, Karin Baal, Ivan Desny, Margit Castensen; D: Rainer Werner Fassbinder; W: Rainer Werner Fassbinder; C: Xaver Schwarzenberger; M: Peer Raben. VHS FCT, MGM