Fox and His Friends

Director: Rainer Werner Fassbinder

1975 / 124min / 35mm

Fassbinder takes the lead role in this devastating drama—released in West Germany as Faustrecht der Freiheit (“Freedom’s Law of the Jungle”)—as Franz Bieberkopf, a leather-clad, working-class gay carnival worker whose reasonably happy existence playing “Fox, the Talking Head” on the midway turns complicated when he first loses his job, then wins a half-million Deutsche Marks in the lottery, placing him squarely in the crosshairs of an upper-class industrialist’s son who sets out to seduce and swindle the naïve Franz. Picketed by right-wingers for its frank depiction of gay relationships and criticized in other corners for positing that the exploitation of sex and love as commodity was by no means limited to mainstream straight society, Fox is one of the most trenchant, moving, and—as shot by Michael Ballhaus—grimly gorgeous works of his Sirkian period.