Fox and His Friends (Rainer Werner Fassbinder, 1975)

Rainer Werner Fassbinder and Peter Chatel in Fox and His Friends

Franz Biberkopf: Rainer Werner Fassbinder
Eugen Thiess: Peter Chatel
Max: Karlheinz Böhm
Philip: Harry Baer
Hedwig: Christiane Maybach
Wolf Thiess: Adrian Hoven
Eugen's Mother: Ulla Jacobsson

Director: Rainer Werner Fassbinder
Screenplay: Rainer Werner Fassbinder, Christian Hohoff
Cinematography: Michael Ballhaus
Production design: Kurt Raab
Music: Peer Raben

I have a feeling that Fox and His Friends seems much less exotic or sensational to viewers today than it did in the mid-1970s, given the steady movement of depictions of gay men into mainstream entertainment culture. At the time it created outrage, not just from defenders of the heterosexual norm but also from the gay community, which found much of it distorted and unflattering. But Rainer Werner Fassbinder's story is not about being gay, it's about being exploited, about mistaking predation for love. Fassbinder's Franz Biberkopf, known as "Fox" from his gig as "Fox the Talking Head" in a sleazy carnival act, is a classic naïf who is taken for all he's worth -- which is the 500,000 Deutschmarks (a bit under $125,000 in the day) he won in the lottery. Fassbinder the director doesn't make it clear that the well-dressed guys Franz meets after one of them, Max, picks him up outside a public lavatory, are intentionally trying to fleece him, until Eugen, whose father's printing business is in financial trouble, sees a way to persuade Franz to rescue the company with a sizable investment and promises of part ownership of the firm. It could be, of course, that Eugen just gets a kick out of sleeping with the working class Franz. But he throws over his current lover, Philip, and takes the rough-hewn, slightly homely Franz into his home and bed. Is Eugen telling the truth when he tells Franz that he's being kicked out of his apartment for being gay? It would be entirely plausible in the day and time. Or is it a lie that gives Eugen an opportunity to persuade Franz to buy a posh new apartment, and to furnish it with opulent antiques from Max's shop. And to go along with Franz's new image as a haute bourgeois businessman, he of course needs new clothes from Philip's fashionable shop. None of this exploitation feels premeditated except in hindsight, as Franz becomes Eliza Doolittle to Eugen's Henry Higgins -- though with less overt success. The resulting film is a superb tragicomedy, one of Fassbinder's best films, I think. Fassbinder turns out to be as good an actor as he is a writer and director, giving Franz just the right blend of naïveté and street smarts. I think the ending of the film is a shade heavy-handed, but the rest of it is full of extraordinary satiric moments: The horrifying scene in which Eugen brings Franz to dinner with his parents. The vacation in Morocco, where the man* Eugen and Franz pick up on the streets is refused entrance to the Holiday Inn Marrakech -- though wouldn't a pretentious bourgeois like Eugen have chosen a tonier hotel? -- because it doesn't admit Arabs. (The employee refusing the entrance, himself an Arab, suggests that if they want boys, he could provide some from the hotel staff.) And the moment of truth in which Franz realizes he's been conned is shattering. Michael Ballhaus's vivid color cinematography is complemented by Kurt Raab's production design, especially in the garishly overdressed apartment which includes a chandelier hanging so low that guests have to walk around it, that Eugen puts together with the most expensive pieces from Max's antique shop. Only after Eugen and Franz break up does Eugen reveal that he hates the place: He has clearly condescended to what he thinks an uncouth working class guy would think is the height of fashion.

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*Played by El Hedi ben Salem, the star of Ali: Fear Eats the Soul (1974), who had been deported to Morocco after a bar fight in Germany. Brigitte Mira, ben Salem's co-star in that film, also has a cameo as the shopkeeper who originally denies Franz admittance to her store to validate his lottery ticket until the suave Max flatters her into it.