Fox and His Friends (German title: Faustrecht der Freiheit or "The Right Fist of the Freedom") is a 1975 film by Rainer Werner Fassbinder.
A young, working-class gay man wins the lottery and falls in love with the son of an industrialist, who sees him as an easy target and swindles him out of his fortune. The film is a rather cutting look at the relationship between love and money, and that the former can't exist unless the latter is in a healthy supply.
Not to be confused with the Fox News morning program Fox And Friends.
Tropes
- Affably Evil: Max.
- Crapsack World: Love doesn't really exist — it's just a commodity.
- Downer Ending: Fox dies, and his friends abandon his corpse, leaving teenagers to loot him.
- Driven to Suicide: Fox kills himself by taking pills, dying alone in the underground.
- Fan Disservice: Male Frontal Nudity is shown in a very asexual way.
- The Hero Dies: Poor Fox!
- Male Frontal Nudity: Everything is shown for quite a long time very matter-of-factly.
- Mirroring Factions: The main point of this film is that gays exploit each other within their community in the same way as usual people do.
- Nice Guy: Fox. Though it comes in hand with a degree of naivete that results in him being swindled.
- Protagonist and Friends: Only the English name.
- Pygmalion Plot: Subverted. Eugen apparently wants to turn the working-class Fox into a classy lover, but is mostly just using him as an easy meal ticket.
- Shout-Out: The real name of Fox, Franz Bieberkopf, is an obvious reference to the main character of Berlin Alexanderplatz. Later Fassbinder would make a TV series based on that novel.
