This melodramatic fable of emotional extremes is sharp and precise-nowhere more than in Fassbinder's attention to the price of domestic comforts and industrial necessities.

It excludes all life that is not within the very narrow intentions of its author. Its pores have been painted over.

Here is a movie about characters who define themselves by their sexuality, but the movie doesn't. It takes the sexuality as a given, and defines them by their values and morals.

... one of Fassbinder’s most affecting, accomplished, and personal films and he delivers a sweet, wounded performance as the proletariat Fox in a den of cultured, upper-class hounds.