The story of an arrogant poet who hasn't written a word in two years, the film is a screwball farce with a cast of grotesques, perverts, madmen, and masochists. Walter Kranz (Kurt Raab), a poet of the revolution facing writer's block and an identity crisis, lives with his bitter wife and his mentally handicapped brother, a man-child obsessed with flies. Characters are humiliated, abused, degraded, betrayed, and in one scene dispassionately murdered, and it is all played for perverse humor. Fassbinder described the film as a "comedy about me if I were what I perhaps am but don't believe I am." Harry Baer, a longtime collaborator who served as production manager on the film, later wrote that Fassbinder "projected himself into the character of the slimy and sordid poet... He wanted him to appear as hateful as possible."
The set was anything but happy. Fassbinder is notorious for his abuse of actors and it reached an apex in this film. As biographer Robert Katz wrote, "He was just as capable of disarming kindness as he was of ruthlessness, but not, it seems, in the making of Satan's Brew."
Kurt Raab, a vital part of Fassbinder's company as both actor and production designer, was given the leading role of Walter. Fassbinder overworked Raab and verbally humiliated him while screening the rushes with the cast and crew, driving the actor (who already had a drinking problem) even deeper into the bottle.
Margit Carstensen, the glamorous leading lady of The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant (1972) and Martha (1974), costars as Andrée, an adoring fan willing to do anything the poet demands. Fassbinder dressed her in drab frocks, an unflattering hairdo, and eyeglasses with fisheye lenses that distorted her face and caused painful eyestrain. Carstensen later spoke about her great discomfort in the role. "We were suspicious of one another, and I became more and more diffident in what I was offering as an actress. Inwardly I was very inhibited, which is something he often wants."
As in so many of his films, the perverse relationships on screen mirrored Fassbinder's own abusive treatment of lovers and collaborators. Carstensen's character of Andrée is drawn almost directly from actress Irm Hermann, a former lover who Fassbinder tormented emotionally and physically. Actress Ingrid Caven, who costarred in the film as Walter's favorite prostitute, observed that Fassbinder often drew inspiration from the love-hate relationship with Hermann. "[T]here are lots of characters that have to do with her, and what she showed in her spontaneous hysteria."
Filling out the cast are Volker Spengler as Ernst, Walter's fly-obsessed brother, and Ulli Lommel, the handsome actor who starred in Fassbinder's debut feature Love is Colder than Death (1969), as the police detective investigating the murder of Walter's mistress.
The film was polarizing. Janet Maslin, reviewing the film for The New York Times, described the film as "a kind of Father Knows Best on acid... something of a sicko sit-com, with a set of domestic characters nonchalantly acting out their most bestial impulses." In Germany, film critic Wilfried Wiegand called it "an act of hatred of the human race." But it also had its champions and for many critics it is one of the most revealing of Fassbinder's films: a self-portrait as bitter, brutal comedy.
Sources:
Fassbinder, Film Maker, Ronald Hayman. Simon & Schuster, 1974.
Love is Colder than Death, Robert Katz. Random House, 1987.
"Film: 'Satan's Brew' is Cold and Bitter," Janet Maslin. The New York Times, August 10, 1977.
"Annotated Filmography," Wilhelm Roth. Fassbinder, Tantam Press, 1981.
Outsiders, documentary produced by Jason Altman and Robert Fischer. Criterion Collection, 2015.
IMDb
By Sean Axmaker
