Baal

This striking vehicle for the great rock star David Bowie makes an interesting comparison with the earlier 1970 New German Cinema adaptation in which the Bowie role of the outrageously misbehaving scruffy poet was played by none other than Rainer Werner Fassbinder.

The original production of the 1920s play by Brecht started Oscar Homolka, later to be seen as a sometimes comforting and heartwarming character actor in Hollywood films. The

But the Baal character, based on a part animal legendary figure of the 17th century, is hardly at all comforting and makes the scampish bum in Renoir's Boudu Saved From Drowning look like a paragon of the bourgeois.

I have not seen a more recent German adaptation but contrasting the 1970 and 1982 versions I prefer the way director Alan Clarke in the later one relies on old fashioned tableaux combined with simplified stylized backgrounds and split screens to the way in the earlier one Schlondorff used smeared lenses and hand held camera work.

Plus Bowie's rendition of the song lyrics is spot on.