Beware of a Holy Whore is influenced by Fassbinder's own experiences with his previous film Whity, a spaghetti western which never went on general release. In turn, this was an inspiration behind Olivier Asseyas's Irma Vep (1996), and it's interesting to note the appearance of the French actor Eddie Constantine is this, in which he plays himself and his appearance as Lemmy Caution in Godard's Alphaville is also mentioned.
As one of Fassbinder's preoccupations is unhappy families – and by extension the vast majority of social relationships in his cinema are unhappy (that's the way of the world as he sees it) – then here we have a film about the horrors of making a film (in a sea resort in Spain in this case). The main characters in Beware of a Holy Whore (apart from Constantine) are the director of the film within a film Jeff (Lou Castel), actors Ricky (Marquard Bohm) and Hanna (Hanna Schygulla), and the producer Sascha (Fassbinder himself).
Egos collide; many cuba libres are drunk and glasses thrown about the bar and hotel lobby; money doesn't arrive; the director, producer and other members of the film crew yell at each other; people (hetero- but mainly homosexual) kiss, have sex or simply lust after each other; there's a lot of Leonard Cohen music; and everyone is thoroughly pissed off.
There's a final amusing quotation, from Thomas Mann: 'And I say to you that I am weary to death of depicting humanity without partaking of humanity'.
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