My favourite Fassbinder feature (1973; not shown in the U.S. for years because of problems involving the rights to the Cornell Woolrich source novel) is a horrific black comedy—a devastating view of bourgeois marriage rendered in a delirious baroque style. Vacationing in Rome, a virgin librarian in her 30s (Margit Carstensen) meets a macho architect (Peeping Tom's Karlheinz Böhm) and winds up marrying him. It's a match made in heaven between a masochist and a sadist, with the husband's contempt and absurdly escalating demands received by the fragile heroine as her proper due. Suspenseful and scary, excruciating and indigestible, this is provocation with genuine bite—though the manner often suggests a parody of a 50s Douglas Sirk melodrama.

Direction: Rainer Werner Fassbinder.

Screenplay: Rainer Werner Fassbinder, based on a novel by Cornell Woolrich.

Photography: Michael Ballhaus.

Editing: Liesgret Schmitt-Klink.

Art Direction: Kurt Raab.

Margit Carstensen..................................................Martha

Karlheinz Böhm.....................................................Helmut

Gisela Fackeldey...................................................mother

Adrian Hoven...........................................................father

Barbara Valentin.................................................Marianne

Ingrid Caven...............................................................Ilse