Fox and His Friends

(Faustrecht der Freiheit). A fable in which rough trade is outfoxed by free enterprise. Franz Biberkopf (namesake of Alfred Döblin’s prole protagonist in Berlin Alexanderplatz), a gay carnival star known professionally as Fox the Talking Head (“a human being without a body”), determines to win, and does win, the national lottery. His newfound wealth attracts an elegant bourgeois lover, Eugen (Peter Chatel), who takes Franz and his much-needed money into the family business. But this is a particularly twentieth-century Fox, the working class incarnate, and for the capitalist vamp Eugen, a body without a human being. The lottery queen is picked clean. Fox/Franz is played with compassion by a young, lean, and desperate-looking Fassbinder, while the director’s antiteater regulars act as a kind of cabal. Fassbinder takes his homosexual milieu for granted; as always, what is at play is class and emotions, and in this brittle, unfeeling gay haute societé, Fassbinder subtly sustains a carnival atmosphere long after the fairground is left behind.

—Judy Bloch

• Written by Fassbinder. Photographed by Michael Ballhaus. With Fassbinder, Peter Chatel, Karlheinz Böhm, Harry Baer. (123 mins, In German with English subtitles, Color, 35mm, From Janus Films/Criterion Collection)