The slow-mo shindig of a stalled film production, just another day at work for Rainer Werner Fassbinder. Cinema is the eponymous harlot, Hollywood in any case, artists and artisans and groupies comprise the torpid idolaters, "they're kind of a commune." The Sorrento Coast doubles as a Spanish villa for the pellucid backdrop, the main stage is a hotel lobby featuring a steady flow of Cuba Libres and a jukebox stocked with Leonard Cohen dirges. The director holds the film stock…

Midway through the Budd Boetticher-Randolph Scott run, a poetical treatise on the toll of getting a good steak in a bad spot. All Scott's easygoing soldier of fortune wants is to settle down, between him and his stretch of land in West Texas is the border outpost ruled by a trio of pig-bellied brothers, "quite a town." Sheriff (Barry Kelley), judge (Tol Avery) and hotel manager (Peter Whitney) are all cut from the same corrupt cloth, the stranger smiles until…

The modern girl who vanishes and is replaced, the ancient vase that's broken with a shrug, "it figures." The foundation is Rossellini's, Michelangelo Antonioni's dilation ponders Europe and its ominous, vacant spaces. "Islands, I don't get them," says the dowager aboard the yacht, voicing Shelley's complaint ("stones, stones, stones, nothing but stones!") as a gigolo's hand idly creeps under her blouse. The Roman diplomat's daughter (Lea Massari) can no longer endure "the usual uneasiness" and evaporates in the volcanic Mediterranean…