Before we start, not the Red Sun from 1971, directed by Terence Young and starring Charles Bronson. Most emphatically not that one. Instead, the Red Sun from a year before, a film originally called Rote Sonne, from West Germany, directed by the largely overlooked Rudolf Thome and melding the politics of the post-1968, Women’s Lib era with a good old-fashioned horror movie. Though a warning to lovers of red plush and stakes through the heart, there is none of that going on here.
But first let’s meet the hero/victim of this story, a sad sack of male entitlement, a total waste of petulant, lazy, sponging space called Thomas, who we first glimpse hitch-hiking and trying to bum money off the guy who’s giving him a lift. Thomas winds up in Munich, where he has soon re-established contact with Peggy, an old flame who works in a bar, drives a white VW Beetle and is hot enough to start a fire.
She lives with three other attractive young women, all of them free and easy when it comes to men, and Thomas, ever the freeloader, has soon moved in with all four of them, unaware that these gals have a pact – once you’ve slept with a man for a few days, it’s time for him to die.
Dark and moody Peggy (Uschi Obermaier), tall and lithe Christine (Diana Körner), brunette and friendly Sylvie (Sylvia Kekulé) and slight and timid Isolde (Gaby Go) are a cross between a countercultural terrorist cell and a coven of witches. And this is a vampire movie, in essence, though Thomas is one of those gilded French New Wave heroes who thinks work is a drag, that the world somehow owns him a living and that just drifting about being vaguely young, moody and slender is enough to justify his place in the world.
Director Rudolf Thome does it all New Wave style too, with pauses colliding with jump edits and Thomas, Peggy and the other women all coming across only semi-attached to what’s going on round them.
The acting of Marquard Bohm, who plays Thomas, is key. He keeps suggesting that Thomas is going to develop emotionally – maybe change his ways and get a job (or even wash the dishes), maybe develop some self-awareness. Bohm keeps us dangling, and provides the film’s drama. Is he going to wind up dead in a trunk being dragged away for disposal like an earlier guy?
There isn’t a decent man in Red Sun. They are all boorish and believe women exist for their pleasure. Thomas, we learn incidentally at one point, has a wife and a daughter in Hamburg. Peggy had no idea because he hadn’t told her.
You could watch this film just to watch Peggy changing from one flattering outfit into another – though Thome seems to like her most in surely ironic white. But noticeably even she balks when it comes time for her latest conquest – Thomas – to take his medicine, leading to a finale out in the woods where guns rather than crucifixes, garlic and sharpened stakes are the weapons of choice.
Even if it’s nothing else, it’s a brilliant portrait of the time, when 1960s optimism had soured into something and discussion about the necessity for social change never got to the point where anyone actually laid out what sort of society they were aiming at. Does it help that in real life Obermaier herself was a radical activist who regularly got her picture in the papers? Probably, at the time, at least, though it complicates the suggestion that this is as much countercultural critique as countercultural artefact.
Thome’s direction and the strong blocky colours of the apartment where the young women live help make it a dynamic and colourful affair, and it looks all the more impressive on the recent hi-def transfer for the Radiance Blu-ray (which is linked to below and is also the version you’ll see if you’re signed up to Arrow’s streaming service).
This is a peculiar and fascinating film which has deserved to be exhumed from the cinematic graveyard. It looks good. It has something to say. And look at its final shot, as hazy and backlit and orange as any 1970s advertisement. As peachy as you like apart from the fact that there are two people dying at the centre of it.
Red Sun – Watch it/buy it at Amazon
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© Steve Morrissey 2023
