The blacks should be given more rights. Then they wouldn't get up to so much mischief.
Fassbinder Goes West? Indeed, he does in 1971's Whity, which mercilessly picks at the scab of racism underlying most westerns -- American, Germanic or otherwise. Günther Kaufmann plays the title character, butler to the Nicholsons, a family of wealthy ranchers headed up by patriarch Ron Randell, whose young wife (Katrin Schaake) is only waiting around for him to drop dead so she can inherit his estate. All she has to worry about are her two stepsons, drooling idiot Harry Baer and conniving cross-dresser Ulli Lommel, who somehow think they should have a say in the matter. (Well, Lommel does. Baer doesn't have much to say about anything.) To complicate matters, Schaake wants Kaufmann to kill Lommel, and Lommel wants Kaufmann to kill Randell, and Randell has paid a man to pretend to be a doctor and tell Schaake that he's dying. Kind of makes you wonder why Kaufmann puts up with all of their degrading bullshit.
That's certainly the question on the mind of saloon singer (and part-time whore) Hanna Schygulla, who receives nightly visits from Kaufmann and tries to convince him to go away. He sure doesn't seem very welcome in town, to the point of getting beaten up by Fassbinder and some of his associates when he stops by the saloon one night to listen to Schygulla sing (accompanied by pianist Kurt Raab). Meanwhile, back at the ranch, the melodrama heats up to the point where something has to give and when it finally does (after Fassbinder has drawn things out to an almost ludicrous degree), it's pretty darn cathartic. Also worth mentioning is the sharp cinematography of Michael Ballhaus, who was working with Fassbinder for the first time and may have been the one to convince him to try shooting in anamorphic widescreen. (I'm sure Ballhaus will have something to say about that on his audio commentary.) Whatever the case may be, Fassbinder sure took to it like a natural.