Man About the Haus

Red Sun (Rudolf Thome, 1970)

What bugs me about new wave cinema is this whole notion that its rejection of traditional film making fundamentally makes it an intelligent art form. Thus, pretentious art house films are treated like the emperor's new clothes. Straddling the thin line between art house and exploitation is the appropriately coined tern - artsploitation. Rudolf Thome's Red Sun (1970) is an example of this category and not to be confused with the testosterone loaded, east meets west western Red Sun (1971).

Red Sun's trailer instantly grabbed me as a film I very much need to check out as it gave me strong Jerzy Skolimowski's Deep End (1970) vibes. Turned out to be a correct assumption. Despite its different subject matter, it proved to be an entertaining offbeat comedy. Red Sun isn't quite as good as Skolimoski's film, but it does have enough charm which won me over.

Thomas (Marquand Bohm) is an obnoxious layabout and a sponger, who crashes the crib of his ex girlfriend Peggy (Uschi Obermaier). While dossin' there, he learns that Peggy and her housemates are a radical feminist, bomb-making collective, who murder their boyfriends after five days.

The beauty of Red Sun is watching Thomas, the German equivalent of Robin Askwith, raid the fridge and ponce money off the deadly terror cell to buy cigars and moan about the tedium of having to work. What's even more entertaining is how nonchalant he is regarding the dangerous predicament he finds himself in. The fact that Peggy and her criminal cohorts are remarkably dumber than Thomas is the icing on the cake for me.

Intentional or not, Rudolf Thome's film has so much levity that it looks and feels like a seventies sex comedy rather than a feminist laced crime thriller. There's no real depth or emotion to the characters either, save for Isolde from the death-dealing sisterhood, who sheds some remorse occasionally. Supposedly influenced by Jean Luc Godard’s work. I would say this trumps any of his films as this is art house cinema I can watch without being bored to tears. The film does lose its way around the midway point, but I found enough entertainment from Red Sun to forgive its mistakes.

For a German film from the early seventies, I presumed krautrock or German psychedelia would be the soundtrack to the film, but it turned out to be some choice British prog rock instead thanks to The Nice's Rondo and The Small Faces performing Rollin' Over along with the legendary Grand Theft Auto V trailer tune Ogden's Nut Gone Flake. To tie Anglo German relations further, Georg Friedrich Händel's funeral parlour choon Adagio (Messiah) is repeated throughout the course of the film, thankfully without Jim Morrison's spoken word poetry ruining it. 

Lastly, how fit was Uschi Obermaier back in the day? Jimi Hendrix was like a rat up a drain pipe and made the effort to travel to the hippy shit-hole she was living in known as Kommune 1 just to score with her. This blogger hates hippies with a passion, but in the case of Uber Uschi, going incognito like Sid James once did when he sabotaged the crusty hippy gig in the adjacent field to him in Carry On Camping (1969), is a worthy effort.

"Ich bin ein hippy, Uschi!"