As directed by Losey, the blacklisted American director whose native banishment resulted in one of the most interesting cinematic trajectories across periods and cultures, there’s a distilled sense of just desserts in his presenting a protagonist whose ruin seems not only inevitable, but welcomed. Klein, a Kafkaesuqe escapade about an amoral art dealer who receives karmic retribution for his aggressive ambivalence and opportunistic profiteering. Premiering the same year was Joseph Losey’s late period masterpiece, Mr. In Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s Chinese Roulette (1976), a venomous marital melodrama, a character played by Margit Carstensen provocatively inquires, “Who would this person have been under the Third Reich?” In the generation removed from the dark shadows of WWII, a glut of 1970s spectacles grappled with the sinister aftermath of their parents’ atrocities, an inheritance which pushed well beyond the limits of a divided Germany.
