(Rudolf Thome, Germany, 1970, 89 minutes)
Red Sun, a film primarily concerned with women, opens with a man. It will close with that same man--after his life has been irrevocably changed by the four women at its center.
With his shaggy hair and foppish cravat, Thomas (Marquard Bohm, Deadlock, Kings of the Road) looks like a cross between Mick Jagger and frequent Fassbinder player Gottfried John (The Marriage of Maria Braun, Berlin Alexanderplatz); handsome from some angles, less so from others.
In the opening sequence, Thomas hitchhikes from Hamburg to Munich to reconnect with Peggy (model Uschi Obermaier), a bartender with whom he once had a dalliance. This isn't about love; he may be attracted to Peggy, who looks like Twilight-era Kristen Stewart with her classic features and curtain of thick, dark hair, but it's mostly about finding a woman who will support him, since he has no desire to work, explaining rather hilariously, if accidentally poetically, "Work contradicts the rhythms of my life; it causes the body to waste away." Presumably, he's been doing this for awhile, bouncing from woman to woman, moving on after each one kicks him out.
It's the kind of thing a young person, like Patricia Highsmith's Tom Ripley, can do for awhile if they're pretty, charming, and/or persuasive enough.
Thomas has no other goals or aspirations, but the clock is ticking, and it's unlikely he can do this indefinitely, not least because he isn't especially charming. Amusing, perhaps, and the actor invests him with "a certain rotten charm," as Thomas puts it, but the guy doesn't otherwise have much going for him. It doesn't make him a villain, though. Plus, he knows Peggy is a soft touch. As her friends put it, "She mothers the layabout types."
After switching out his cravat with a tie, Thomas drops by Take Five, the high-end nightclub where Peggy tends bar. She seems neither thrilled nor disappointed to see him; but rather takes it in stride. Though she offers some light teasing, it doesn't dissuade him from embedding himself in her life. After a visit to the lake in her VW Bug, a sequence Thome will repeat at the end, they return to the flat Peggy shares with three other women.
Everything seems pretty normal so far, especially for 1970--whether in Germany or any other western country during the height of the sexual revolution--with one significant exception. At Take Five that night, Thomas passes middle-aged businessman Howard (Don Wahl) on his way down the steps to the club. Unbeknownst to him, the other women (Diana Körner, Sylvia Kekulé, and Gaby Go) lured Howard to the flat before he and Peggy arrived. Now he's bound, gagged, and hidden behind a closed door. Before the night is over, one of the four women will shoot him in the head.
The next day, they ask Thomas to help them move a large, covered basket--white like most of Peggy's outfits--from the flat to the street and into the Bug. It's obviously heavy, and he may be a layabout by trade, but he doesn't hesitate to lend a hand. It's a funny scene, because the audience knows exactly what's inside the basket, but the incurious Thomas doesn't, and nor does he care. So, he makes himself useful in the moment, but after Peggy decides she's had her fill--"You're lazy!"--she asks him to leave. He doesn't, and nor do they fight about it, but it's clear that he has signed his death warrant, because if he stays, he too could end up in a large, covered basket.
Oddly, Thomas sticks around, even after he starts to put two and two together. In fact, he joins forces with a local man whose brother went missing, vowing to remain until he catches the women in the act, at which point he'll alert the authorities and claim the reward. Sensing that the timid Isolde is the quartet's weak link, he attempts to gain her confidence. "We kill men," she states flatly, adding, "We thought it was right--they deserved it." Once again, as dark clouds continue to gather, Peggy asks Thomas to leave, even offering him money to go away, but he just won't take the hint.
Over the course of the film, four other men will die at the quartet's hands, which isn't a lot, but it's certainly enough, and Thome plays none of this for horror or suspense. Instead, he takes a matter-of-fact approach, largely free of violence or gore. If Thomas, a standard-issue layabout, isn't a villain per se, nor are the women. They're murderers, to be sure, and the director, by way of screenwriter Max Zihlmann, doesn't make light of that fact, but they aren't mean, nasty, or sadistic. If anything, they're just honoring a pact they made to kill any man with whom they find themselves involved after five days in order to sever any attachment that might develop, since that can only lead to dependency. They also believe they're doing society a favor by dispatching men who cheat, make sexist remarks, and the like.
Canadian programmer and historian Kier-La Janisse wrote about Red Sun in her essential guide to films about women on the verge, House of Psychotic Women, a 2012 title that FAB Press reissued in 2022. Then, in 2023, Radiance Films released a beautifully-designed Blu-ray with abundant extras, including a 52-page booklet (Margaret Deriaz's 50-minute visual essay about the New German Cinema is particularly enlightening). These are only two examples, but I believe the film has remained relevant, though not exactly widely known, because it isn't a clear-cut polemic or a standard-issue exploitation item, but something slipperier and more ambiguous.
Nor is Red Sun the kind of cult item that made no impact upon release, only to become better known over time. Due to the participation of Obermaier and Bohm, it received a fair amount of attention in Germany, but it wasn't a hit like Detektive--and the model-actress never made another film.
In his commentary on the Blu-ray, which comes from an interview with Obermaier's then-boyfriend Rainer Langhans, Thome explains that his funders wouldn't back the film unless he secured the services of the two performers, a feat made easier by the fact that both appeared in his 1969 directorial debut, Detektive. This time, however, Obermaier played hard to get, asking for more money each time he asked her. Though not exactly a great actress--she's good enough--her status as a countercultural icon gave her clout, and she used it. In the end, Thome met her asking price.
Wim Wenders, for one, was a fan, and reviewed Red Sun enthusiastically in 1970—the same year his own directorial debut, Summer in the City, first made the rounds. At the time, Wenders was more arts journalist than filmmaker, so I'm not sure how much sway his words had, but he described the film as "intentionally superficial" and compared it, favorably, to a comic strip, possibly because of the way Thome uses vibrant shades of red, blue, and gold; in that sense, it also recalls Godard's 1966 Made in U.S.A.
If Red Sun isn't heavy-handed in its politics, Thome's initial interest in Obermaier may have been intensified by her association--largely through radical writer and filmmaker Langhans--with the West Berlin-based Kommune 1, which would, in turn, inspire the formation of the infamous Red Army Faction/Baader-Meinhof Group.
The way the director concentrates his attentions on Bohm also confirms that Red Sun isn't a feminist film--not intentionally, at any rate--no matter how poorly Thomas comes across, though Thome may have also found it easier to work with the experienced actor. The less-experienced women are fine, but there's the sense that he hired them primarily for their looks, which is hardly a crime. It was the braless era, so even though nudity is kept to a minimum--Obermaier has a brief topless scene--the women's hip outfits don't leave much to the imagination, but nor are they overly revealing.
A more cynical viewer might dismiss the whole thing as a not-exactly-flattering satire about women's lib, not simply because the women kill men, but because the men just aren't that bad. They have their flaws, but they don't deserve to die. As author and podcaster Samm Deighan notes in her excellent essay for the Radiance release ("Guerilla Girls: Radical Politics in Rudolf Thome's Red Sun"), "While it was likely Thome's intention to present a parody of issues like feminism, commune life, and radical politics, Red Sun transcends these aims to become something stranger and more surreal."
If anything, the women are like praying mantises in that they fuck their victims before killing them (but do not eat their heads!)--a less cynical viewer might conclude that that's a pretty sweet way to meet one's maker.
About the music: Uschi Obermaier was an associate of krautrock pioneers Amon Düül II--a pretty cool credential--while the soundtrack combines rock and classical music (in her illuminating Psychotic Women review, Kier-La Janisse describes Obermaier as a groupie, which may be true, but I have some issues with that word).
Notably, most of the songs don't appear in the credits, possibly so that the low-budget production could avoid paying royalties. The acts/composers/ tracks include Jean Sibelius, the Small Faces, the Nice (Keith Emerson's pre-Emerson, Lake and Palmer outfit), and Remo Giazotto's "Adagio in G Minor," which Norman Jewison would later use in Rollerball and Gerry and Sylvia Anderson in Space: 1999, according to the fine folks at B&S at the Movies.
Radiance's restored, 2K version of Red Sun is out in the United States for the first time ever in a limited edition of 2,000. Though sold out at their UK site, it's available in the US through MVD. Images: IMDb (Uschi Obermaier), DVD Beaver (Obermaier and Marquand Bohm), McBastard's Mausoleum (Obermaier, Gaby Go, and Don Wahl), eBay (first edition of the S.C.U.M. Manifesto), Close-Up Film Centre (Anna Karina in Made in U.S.A.), and Retentional Finitude (Obermaier, Go, and Diana Körner).
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