[The Fat and the Lean is a cynical slapstick tragedy that] evokes not only Samuel Beckett, but Hal Roach, and one thinks briefly of various American clowns: Laurel and Hardy, for the fat man bullying the thin one, Chaplin, for Polanski's fey, nimble pathos, Harold Lloyd, for the ingenuity of his eager-beaver attempts to please. If one hesitates to align the film alongside the great two-reel comedies (or early Tati), it's on account of spiritual and cinematic finesses, after which words can only clumsily grope. (p. 96)

It remains a deft, corrosive little parable on the theme of dominance absurdly accepted, of the volunteered slavery which is so paradoxical yet pervasive a feature of human society. In 1961 several critics wondered whether Katelbach represented a bourgeois capitalist or a communist bureaucrat, or both, or neither. In 1971 one thinks more easily of the Marcusian thesis, that in modern technological society, man...