Critics reviews

The writer-director's cynicism here about the creative process anticipates the imminent breakup of Antiteater, the theater company he cofounded in 1967; at the same time, the film's intoxication with the possibilities of mise-en-scene are rapturous. Fassbinder later claimed that this was his favorite of his own films; it's certainly his most furious.

It opens with a Goofy fable recounted by Werner Schroeter in a black Stetson and closes on a Thomas Mann quote, in between there's the countless private melodramas and irritations of the creative process, "crazier every day" and all the funnier for it. Slapping games and split-second freakouts fill the void, boredom is its own art form.

The increasing dissolution of the shoot is captured in the kaleidoscopic fragmentation of the story, which shatters the filmmaking process into a whirl of dispersed moments of latent or blatant conflict—which is the stuff that Jeff's film is made of. Co-starring Fassbinder himself, as an assistant whose practical wiles don't prevent his own breakdown.

Michael Ballhaus, the movie's young, ferociously skilled DP, would earn praise for a bravura 360-degree camera twirl in Fassbinder's Martha several years later and go on to preside over even more virtuosic effects during his decades-long collaboration in Hollywood with Martin Scorsese, but it's arguably more stunning to watch him make spatial sense of the way the indolent characters in the first half of Beware amble in and out of the camera's field of vision.

Fassbinder seems determined to use his Anti-Theater precepts to create a kind of Anti-Cinema, drained of forward momentum. The blocking is reminiscent of a play, with its train of exits as characters adjourn to drink and fornicate, and entrances as they rejoin the fray. Indeed the action does not leave the hotel lobby for the entire first hour. As in Sirk, vibrant colors contrast with frustrated human subjects.

The confrontational framings, baroque camera moves and eye-jolting colors all suggest the materialization of a world of inner derangement... The rapidity, consistency, and diversity of his movies—added to their sheer cinematic inspiration—combine to make one of the great wonders of the time.

Above all, Beware of a Holy Whore is an evocation, an enthralled pronouncement about the pleasures of being on all the time, about knowing so much about—and continuously participating in—the same thing without hesitation.

Beware of a Holy Whore is essentially Contempt by way of Andy Warhol's Factory. Similar to what Warhol was doing in the '60s and early '70s, Fassbinder spent his all-too-brief career in Germany cultivating a radical free-form aesthetic with a select group of actors. The characters in Beware of a Holy Whore are all prone to random emotional fits and schizophrenic outbursts, and as such it's almost impossible to truly appreciate the film without some knowledge of [Warhol's] camp classics...