Gay working-class circus performer Franz Biberkopf, nicknamed Fox, wins half a million in the lottery. This new wealth attracts attention from Munich’s exclusive gay scene—and soon, the suggestible Fox is in a relationship with bourgeois Eugen and surrounded by a circle of materialistic friends.

Questions of money and class go under the microscope in Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s piercing melodrama, the first of his films to directly address gay culture. Taking the title role as a not-too-bright dreamer, the writer-director forges a compassionate interrogation of opportunism and complicity.