The writer Gary Indiana memorably characterized the German filmmaker Rainer Werner Fassbinder in a 1997 issue of Artforum as “a fat, ugly sadomasochist who terrorized everyone around him, drove his lovers to suicide, drank two daily bottles of Rémy, popped innumerable pills while stuffing himself like a pig, then croaked from an overdose at 37.” The character Fassbinder plays in 1975’s Fox and His Friends — which the then-29-year-old also directed and co-wrote and which was, astonishingly, his 22nd feature overall — stands in stark contrast to Indiana’s brutal-but-true description. Beyond his drug and alcohol abuse not yet thickening his still-slender frame, Fassbinder’s Franz, who prefers the nickname Fox, is a vision of too-trusting, people-pleasing naïvete, doomed by his inability — which at a certain point looks a lot more like unwillingness — to recognize when people are taking advantage of him.

The version of Fox that we initially meet is probably the best off even though things aren’t looking up. He’s the boyfriend of the owner of a carnival he also performs in, and the film opens with that boss-slash-lover getting arrested mid-performance for tax fraud. Fox has nowhere to go until his luck changes. He chronically buys lottery tickets, hoping to eventually be the person to scratch off the winning combination, and one day he does. He’s thereafter introduced into an upper-crust social circle by a middle-aged antique-store owner with an ominous grin named Max (Karlheinz Böhm), and everyone in it is openly contemptuous of the ostensibly lower-class Fox until they learn that his bank account is now tumid with a half a million marks. 

Fox acquires a new boyfriend, Eugen (Peter Chatel), with an impressive degree of assertiveness — he basically invites himself over to the latter’s apartment, plopping onto his bed with his shoes still on — that turns out to not have been very necessary at all. The coldly handsome Eugen doesn’t have to state his intentions that plainly for it to be clear that he has designs on exploiting the generous, generally good-hearted Fox for his money. Once reliably spurting from his father’s textile business, Eugen’s usual stream of income is being threatened by that business’s recent financial decline. 

Christiane Maybach and Rainer Werner Fassbinder in Fox and His Friends.

In Fox and His Friends, the eponymous character will not only consistently bail Eugen and his family out, but also stuff the pockets of other people in Eugen’s milieu. Eugen will use hordes of Fox’s money to acquire furniture from Max’s store to decorate the new shared apartment that he pressures Fox to buy. He’ll also cajole him into purchasing stacks of fashions from the clothing business owned by Philip (Harry Baer), the man Eugen left behind for Fox that he obviously aches to pick back up with again. Fox doesn’t really have people in his life — save for his unhelpful, perpetually sloshed older sister (Christiane Maybach) — to point out the advantage-taking that’s manifestly happening. 

The closest thing we see to a correct reaction to the truth comes from a travel agent helping Eugen and Fox plan a trip to Morocco: she gasps, her shock frozen in place for a few moments, at how demanding Eugen is about Fox paying for a trip the latter groans is more expensive than he’d like. That trip, ironically, will be the first time we see Eugen have anything even resembling moral clarity: he’s taken aback when he and Fox try to bring a hirsute local man (El Hedi ben Salem) back to their room for hook-up purposes only to be told by an also-Arab employee that the hotel is racially segregated. Eugen is bewildered that someone could so unhesitantly other a fellow member of their race and class, the critic Michael Koresky observed in his review of the film, but he’s not mystified enough for it to dawn on him that he’s doing the same thing. It’s easier to have a conscience when you’re a third party, your own related self-interests gone uninterrogated. 

Rainer Werner Fassbinder and Peter Chatel in Fox and His Friends.

Full of movies surveying and rarely attempting to allay the worst aspects of human nature, Fassbinder’s oeuvre doesn’t inspire hope that things will change in Fox and His Friends — that someone will intervene and save Fox before his bank account has been completely dried. Though all the movie’s principal characters are gay, it doesn’t suggest that the horrifying avarice on display is an extension of homosexuality. Money corrupts; anyone who’s been cushioned by it long enough is bound to lose touch with their humanity.

Fassbinder is hard to see in Fox because Fassbinder, as other writers have posited, can be better seen in the film’s villains, who mirror his reputation for using and then discarding people, his emotional ruthlessness propped up by his relentless control-freak impulses. He always cast or hired behind the scenes people he was romantically involved with in his films, and his feverishly prolific professional pace made it so that his relationships were in large part defined by his artistic ability to control what his partners would say and do.

Fox and His Friends’ wealthy antagonists are incapable of suppressing their mercenary instincts; Fox, clinging with white knuckles on to a life and romance he seems to implicitly understand is entirely predicated on what he can provide, doesn’t stop what’s going on until there’s nothing left for himself. When desire is involved, knowing better isn’t always a saving grace.