AFTER HIS UNTIMELY DEATH IN 1982, AN ENTIRE MICROECONOMY OF GERMAN FILMMAKING COLLAPSED OVERNIGHT
Fox and His Friends (1975) is a tragic drama by Rainer Werner Fassbinder about a working-class man who wins the lottery, only to be exploited and destroyed by his bourgeois lover and his circle of friends
Director: Rainer Werner Fassbinder
Fassbinder’s companion piece to “Bitter Tears,” which he had made three years previously. Here, he casts himself against type as a working-class gay man who wins the lottery and then falls in love with the elegant son of an industrialist (Peter Chatel). His lover tries to mold him into a gilt-edged mirror of upper-class values, ultimately swindling the easily flattered “Fox” out of his fortune. A fascinating look at gay life in the seventies, it’s one of at least a dozen great movies Fassbinder wrote and directed in the decade before his untimely death. Karlheinz Böhm, who starred in Michael Powell’s “Peeping Tom” in 1960, is the older sophisticate who introduces Fox to his circle of wealthy friends.
The name of Fassbinder’s character, Franz “Fox” Bieberkopf, was taken from Alfred Döblin’s 1929 novel Berlin Alexanderplatz, which the director later adapted for television.
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https://thebrownees.net/seventy-queer-films-of-the-new-hollywood-1967-1981
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https://thebrownees.net/fassbinder-revisited-a-cinematic-journey/
