[The Third Generation is Fassbinder's] most violently outspoken film yet, and incidentally the first from Germany … to represent fictional terrorists on the screen. Expanding into a high-camp melodrama the idea of collective responsibility underlying his Germany in Autumn episode, Fassbinder disregards the politically rigidified idea of terrorists as either demons or martyrs; and instead locates the colourful members of his terrorist cell … at the centre of a complex, wheels-within-wheels social machine governed only by the laws of greed, profit, cross and double-cross….

[In] Fassbinder's angry, and only superficially cynical, apocalyptic vision, there are no right or left, no good or bad guys….

The Third Generation is not the first Fassbinder film to suggest a kinship between cops and outlaws (this motif ran through his earliest thrillers, as through many of the films noirs which inspired them)…. But it is the first of his films to locate these twin...