[Although Why Does Herr R. Run Amok?] was made for German television, it is not on a par even with the Visions series on American Public Broadcasting, which gives young playwrights and filmmakers a forum. Fassbinder's exercise is more the equivalent of a loft production or an unpublished novel in the trunk. As I see Fassbinder's career in a spotty perspective, the film predates even his first tentative sparring with the aesthetic options of cinema, his so-called Sirkian conversion….

[The film is] a case history of banality with each entry contributing to the construct of a seemingly complacent architectural draftsman. The everyday abrasions from his wife, son, boss, and neighbors are within the general norm. Kurt Raab is a stereotypic middle-class clerk who would be as much at home in Manhattan and Tokyo as in Berlin; and I don't believe that it would be fair to Fassbinder in...