FOX AND HIS FRIENDS (Faustrecht der freiheit) (1975) (Rainer Werner Fassbinder) (with English .srt subtitle file)
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"A Tale of Deceit, Power, and Victimization: Fassbinder at his Best!"
A powerful and harrowing melodrama and one of Fassbinder's most accessible movies,this is a must-see for all those interested in intelligent film making.
The tragic story of Fox is masterfully and poignantly handled by Fassbinder, while never slipping into sloppy sentimentality. At the same time the film explores sexual and political issues that are still very much relevant.
Rainer Werner Fassbinder has long been honored as the 'bad boy' in European cinema, a writer, director and actor who repeatedly has taken chances and because of his brutal honesty has succeeded in making a stream of important films.
'Fox and His Friends' dates back to 1975 and remains one of Fassbinder's most successful films. As with all of his films, Fassbinder deals with the homosexual subculture in Germany but his main message goes far beyond the characters he creates: the examination of how people manipulate people for personal gain and the destruction that produces is a recurring problem and one that this film certainly explores.
'Fox' - a nickname of Franz Bieberkopf - (acted with consummate skill by Fassbinder himself) is a lower class gay carny kid whose lover is arrested, leaving the carnival to collapse and leaving Fox without support. Enter handsome Max (Karlheinz Böhm), a wealthy antiques dealer, who picks up Fox, helps him buy the requisite 'lottery ticket' on which Fox bases his hopes for financial survival via manipulative means, and takes him home, introducing Fox to his gay friends who regard Fox as scum but show obvious physical attraction to his rawness.
Surprisingly Fox wins the lottery and suddenly has 500,000 DMs and with his new money, Max's friends abruptly see a target for obtaining that money. One of the friends named Eugen (Peter Chatel) takes Fox in as a lover and talks him into investing in Eugen's family business of bookbinding. Eugen's father Wolf (Adrian Hoven) and mother (Ulla Jacobsson) tolerate their son's life with a low class wretch, ridiculing his manners and lack of culture and education, but willingly take his money to salvage their business.
With a lover and a business and a role model to make him suave, Fox dons fancy clothes, banters with his old friends in a tawdry club, and makes the pretenses that at last he is secure and happy. But in time Fox is blamed for problems at the business and when his funds have been depleted on expensive vacations and apartments by the smarmy self centered Eugen, Fox realizes that now without money he has no 'fancy friends', no lover, no security and his life becomes unbearable: the ending to the film is a tragedy beyond description.
Some would say the film is mannered in ways that depict stereotypes of the gay world (effeminate men, transvestites, hustlers, etc), but Fassbinder is completely honest in his attempt to recreate a subculture of a specific time in Germany.
The characters are well written and well acted allowing us to look at Fassbinder's greater picture of depravity between social class antipathies.
In many ways this is a difficult film to watch, but Fassbinder wisely places the main character whom he enacts in a place where his foibles and lack of higher class knowledge can be at once very humorous as well as pitiable. 'Fox and His Friends' has become a classic in gay cinema repertoire. ~ Grady Harp
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FILM INFORMATION: 'Fox and His Friends'
Web: Additional Cast, Details and Bios at IMDb
Director: Rainer Werner Fassbinder
Writers: Rainer Werner Fassbinder & Christian Hohoff
Full Credits: Full Cast, Crew & Credits
Genre: Drama | Crime | Romance
Awards: n/a
Runtime: 123 minutes
Spoken Language: German
Subtitles: External English .srt subtitle file
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FILM CLIP: 'Fox and His Friends'
DOWNLOAD & EXTRACT FILM FILES: 'Fox and His Friends'
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| Method 1.) File Self Extraction. (For PC) Download files into the same folder. then click on the 'xxxx.part01.exe' file and the film will self extract. (For Mac) You will need a Command Line Archiver like Rar for Mac OS X' |
| Method 2.) Download and rejoin files with a program like HJ Split/Join (For PC) and (For Mac) use either MacHacha or Split and Concat. |
Subtitles: External English .srt subtitle file.
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