Product Details

• Actors: Harry Baer, Günther Kaufmann, Ron Randell, Hanna Schygulla, Ulli Lommel
• Directors: Rainer Werner Fassbinder
• Format: Anamorphic, Color, DVD, Widescreen, NTSC
• Language: German (Dolby Digital 2.0 Mono)
• Subtitles: English
• Region: All Regions
• Aspect Ratio: 2.35:1
• Number of discs: 1
• Rating: Unrated
• Studio: Fantoma
• DVD Release Date: March 28, 2000
• Run Time: 95 minutes
• Average Customer Review: 2.5 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (2 customer reviews)
• ASIN: B00005Y8UH
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #89,369 in Movies & TV (See Bestsellers in Movies & TV)
• For more information about "Whity" visit the Internet Movie Database (IMDb)

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com

Rainer Werner Fassbinder's seventh feature is a widescreen mix of hothouse southern gothic melodrama and edgy spaghetti western in sunbaked color. Whity (Günther Kaufmann, a longtime Fassbinder regular), the obedient family butler, is the illegitimate mulatto son of sadistic, bullwhip-wielding patriarch Ben Nicholson (American B-movie actor Ron Randell). The ghoulish Nicholson family members include a nymphomaniacal young wife and a brutal, homosexual eldest son (coproducer and future director Ulli Lommell) who abuse yet secretly love Whity, and a developmentally disabled youngest son whom Whity protects from the others like a brother. It's a grotesque portrait even for Fassbinder, who cakes the Nicholson family faces with gray makeup--they look and at times act like dead-eyed zombies--and sets them plotting against each other. Hannah Schygulla costars as a saloon singer who warbles Kurt Weill-like tunes, and Fassbinder himself plays a gambler who whips Whity for fun. It was Fassbinder's first feature abroad--he shot it on Sergio Leone's western sets in Almeria, Spain--and the first of many collaborations with Michael Ballhaus. The behind-the-scenes drama was so eventful that it inspired Beware of a Holy Whore only months later. --Sean Axmaker

From the Back Cover

Winner of two German Oscars, yet virtually unseen in the U.S., Fantoma is proud to present Rainer Werner Fassbinder's DVD debut, Whity.

The first of the director's psychologically complex melodramas, Whity centers around the illegitimate son of the seriously deranged Ben Nicholson. Despite being their slave, he becomes the obsession of each member of the family as they try to enlist his aid in disposing of one another.

Shot in lush cinemascope, in Spain, on the sets of Sergio Leone's spaghetti westerns, Whity marked the first of 14 collaborations between Fassbinder and cinematographer Michael Ballhaus (GoodFellas, Last Temptation of Christ, Bram Stoker's Dracula). The result is a unique film in the development of one of cinema's greatest and most influential talents.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

4.0 out of 5 stars Oh! Whity!, March 7, 2009

By	Cody K. (Parousia Falls, Rhode Island, USA) - See all my reviews

It's like a George Romero prequel to "Mandingo". Wretched and lurid, "Whity"'s a movie that could only have been made in the early years of the seventies, when Paul Morrisey's Warhol films were running in art houses alongside whacked-out gems like "Pink Flamingos" and "Eraserhead". Fassbinder had made (or would soon make) "Love is Colder than Death", "Katzelmacher", "Gods of the Plague" and "Beware of a Holy Whore" by this time, all replete with bizarre touches imported from his Antitheater stage productions.

None of these reach -- or even reach for -- the level of bizarrerie in "Whity". Beginning with the choice of American b-actor Ron Randell as patriarch Ben Nicolson, "Whity" feels like a vicious lampoon of American TV western shows like "Gunsmoke" and a stinging satire on the western genre in general, with its patriotic depictions of the Great American Struggle to Tame the West using God, guns, and gumption. The Nicolson family in "Whity" is as depraved as the Maxwell family in "Mandingo" could ever dream of being. Miss Kitty on "Gunsmoke", for all her Wild West pizazz, never pranced around a saloon crooning what are basically demented art songs the way Hanna Schygulla does in "Whity". And for all Ken Norton's Mede puts up with in "Mandingo", he's never given the burden of a simmering self-loathing that undercuts his rage at every turn.

"Whity" isn't always helped by the way it heaps on grotesqueries, from the ghoulish pancake makeup of the white folks -- sometimes rather greenish, actually -- or the coal-black masque of Elaine Baker as Whity's housemaid mother, Marpessa, a caricature who sings a garbled version of the Battle Hymn of the Republic while fixing dinner. Even Whity himself, though largely spared the clownish makeup of the others, is given white lips. Gunther Kaufmann -- at his most gorgeous here, apart from the lips -- is, like Mede, a kind of a noble savage and the object of both desire and revulsion. The relentless camp qualities of the film turn everyone involved into caricatures of the archetypes of the Western film and TV genre, resulting in an often annoying and seriously flawed film that's acceptable only when viewed in the context of Fassbinder's career to that point. Viewed by any standards other than the stagy, subversive meta-situation that Fassbinder gives it, "Whity" sucks. But it's exactly the strange uniqueness that Fassbinder's vision presents that makes it worth watching.

2 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

1.0 out of 5 stars Bad, September 24, 2008

By	Cosmoetica "cosmoeticadotcom" (New York, USA) - See all my reviews

In 1970 the German film director Rainer Werner Fassbinder wrote and directed a German language American Western film that, unlike the Spaghetti Westerns of that era- also filmed in Almería, Andalucía, Spain, was not played straight, but more like a silent era Expressionistic film, replete with melodramatic music, cartoonish face makeup, and over the top acting, especially in the physical movements of the actors' bodies. It's one of those films that is so highly stylized, so earnestly trying to be deep and/or profound that it is instead really, really bad; but in the best possible sense of the word bad. It's so bad a film that it is often hysterically funny. This starts from the very notion of Old American West gunslingers sprechen in Deutsch, as well as having them speak German even though all of the signs and Wanted Posters are in English. It's absurd, but wonderfully so.
To say that it is absurd or bizarre is, however, an understatement, yet the film is obviously a satire; unlike, say, Werner Herzog's Even Dwarfs Started Small or Stanley Kubrick's A Clockwork Orange. In a sense, this film also reminded me, in terms of lighting and stillnesses, of Kubrick's 1975 costume epic Barry Lyndon, crossed with some of the manifestly fake Western sets in American television shows of that era, especially those that were not Western based shows, but those that had Western themed special episodes, like Star Trek or The Prisoner. Then, added to that, there is mental retardation, transvestism, homosexuality, prostitution, racism, Ku Klux Klan hoods- wholly displaced in the Old West (something a German likely did not know, thinking it merely the American equivalent of the swastika), incest, bestiality, bleached eyebrows, green-white cake makeup, and sadomasochism. Yet, what makes this film so uproariously funny is that Fassbinder's camera and style seem to be oblivious to how truly and uniquely bad and funny the film is. One might even believe that he was a German version of Ed Wood, if this film is any indication of his talents, for true camp comes unwittingly, when an artist is being serious and is oblivious to the worst aspects of his work.
Whity was filmed in garish color, in Cinemascope, where the palette leaps out at you, and this is in keeping with the rest of the over the top nature of the film, and suggest Fassbinder must have known he was making a Carnivalesque romp, if not an outright burlesque. This gaudiness includes the art direction of Kurt Raab, which also won a German Academy Award. While a bit too much, there is no denying that the color palette used by Fassbinder sears into the viewer's head, on an emotional level, and the film seems almost like an Impressionist painting- especially a Monet watercolor, come to life, with its rich reds, ripe oranges, sensuous yellows, burnt browns, and other lesser colors that texture the film like some narcotic fantasy. Also, Ballhaus provides some interesting camera movement that makes the ill written and acted scenes at least interesting to watch, if nothing else; and since film is a visual medium, this is worth noting, even if there's no intellectual reason behind it. For example, in the scene where Ben Nicholson reads his last will and testament, the rest of the actors are standing still, as if composed out of something from one of Ingmar Bergman's hyper-composed 1960s filmic experiments. The camera slowly sweeps over all of them for minutes at a time, while weird music by Peer Raben, who scored the film, and remanent of the just passed psychedelic era, drones on. Some critics contend that this is meant to allow the viewer to ponder the psychological bonds between all the family members, but really it's a funeral dirge for any remaining health the clan might have had, and the filmmaker taking stock of the coming body count.
Thankfully, Whity does not push its tenuous humorous likeability by being too long. It's only 95 minutes, and its manifest flaws lead one to believe that part of the problem was that Fassbinder probably did not spend enough time crafting the film, which was shot in only thirty days. Before he overdosed in 1982, at the age of thirty-seven, he would make forty-three films, direct fourteen plays, write four radio plays, and direct twenty-four television projects. It is interesting to note these flaws and compare them to the flaws that followed him across the films of his career. As for Whity, it's simply a bad, bad film, but more in line with Robot Monster or Plan 9 From Outer Space good bad than with The Hours or Brokeback Mountain or Crash bad bad. As for whether Fassbinder realized he'd made a camp classic, a film that is funny enough to give Blazing Saddles a run for its money? I don't know. Nor do I care, just as I so not care how one labels this film- satire, camp classic, Neo-Expressionist masterpiece, black comedy, melodrama; for funny is funny, and the hour and a half of laughs I got from this dreadful little film was worth something. Perhaps even what little I paid for it.