The Merchant of Four Seasons [Händler der vier Jahreszeiten] **** (1972, Hans Hirschmüller, Irm Hermann, Hanna Schygulla) – Classic Movie Review 6192

Writer-director Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s 1971 German film is his earliest success and arguably first masterwork. Hard work but rewarding, it is a credibly written and performed assault on middle-class values, with the director’s typical mix of despair, sentimentality and sly humour.

In 1950s Munich, self-destructive Hans Epp (Hans Hirschmüller), a former Foreign Legionnaire, upsets his bourgeois family by becoming a peddler of fruit and vegetables. Eventually he is a success, but the more he becomes a credit to his family, the more depressed he becomes. One day, while toasting everyone, he decides to drink himself to death.

The pathetic greengrocer anti-hero – who gets drunk and beats his wife – is seen in a surprisingly fair, even-handed light. So it is a tough film, not easy to warm to, but generally very thoughtful and fairly rewarding. It is easy to read the film as partly autobiographical.

Fassbinder recalled: ‘It comes from a period in which I had gotten intensely involved with the melodramas of Douglas Sirk, and had learned a couple of things from them. I began trusting myself. Melodrama always sounds like a dirty word, but I don’t think it is. It can be socially critical.’

The producer Ingrid Caven [Ingrid Fassbinder] was briefly married to Fassbinder from 1970 to 1972.

Also in the cast are Irm Hermann, Hanna Schygulla, Andrea Schober, Gusti Kreissl, Klaus Löwitsch, Karl Scheydt, Ingrid Caven, Kurt Raab, El Hedi ben Salem and Rainer Werner Fassbinder.

It is shot by Dietrich Lohmann, scored by Rocco Granata and designed by Kurt Raab.

Fassbinder’s feature debut was Love Is Colder Than Death in 1969, made when he was 24.

El Hedi ben Salem stars in Fassbinder’s Fear Eats the Soul (1974).

© Derek Winnert 2017 Classic Movie Review 6192

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