Fox and His Friends · reception & legacy

1975 · Rainer Werner Fassbinder

How Fox and His Friends has been received, argued over, and remembered.

The arc

On release it stirred real anger — parts of the gay press accused Fassbinder of airing a hostile, self-loathing picture of gay life. Half a century on it's been fully flipped: now it's canonised as a foundational queer-cinema text and one of the most loved entries in the Fassbinder catalogue.

What's debated

The perennial fight: is it a homophobic portrait from inside the community, or — as Fassbinder insisted — a film where the characters just happen to be gay and the real subject is class exploitation?

Its footprint

It's a touchstone whenever cinema talks about money poisoning love — the go-to reference for 'queer film as class critique' — and its blunt German title, Faustrecht der Freiheit ('Fist-Right of Freedom'), gets quoted almost as often as the film itself.

Where it stands

A 'you must have seen this' pillar of both the Fassbinder canon and queer film history, and a fixture of Letterboxd queer-cinema lists.

★ Did you know? Fassbinder cast himself in the lead — his biggest starring role in his own work — and named the character Franz Biberkopf, after the protagonist of Döblin's Berlin Alexanderplatz, the novel he was obsessed with and would later adapt into a 15-hour epic.