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Not to be confused with the Fox News Channel's liberty-lovin' early morning coffee klatch Fox and Friends, itself a formidable showcase of sadomasochistic aggression and queenly preening, Fassbinder's 1975 film FOX AND HIS FRIENDS is one of his finest—a fatalistic cautionary tale about an innocent schnook deflowered by the logic of industrial capitalism.

Fassbinder articulates the silent violence of bureaucratic procedures with devastating precision, as Frantz's bid for meaning and admittance into the bourgeois class is accompanied by a sneezing fit, with Frantz convulsing upward of half a dozen times before falling silent. Those in the room simply wait for his episode to end and then proceed with the matter at hand.

People use one another or are used, and the usual markers of success (stable domesticity, steady work, material goods) are revealed to be meaningless. One needn't look any further for a pure dose of this tendency in Fassbinder than Fox and His Friends... In it, economic fate and emotional fate become one and the same, and the social creature that is a human being shows himself to be irredeemable, whether exploiting or exploited.

This melodramatic fable of emotional extremes is sharp and precise—nowhere more than in Fassbinder's attention to the price of domestic comforts and industrial necessities. Munich's hothouse demimonde plays like a permanent floating theatre that spotlights class and status divides that, in the wider world, often go unspoken. Here, good taste happens to bad people, and the predatory wiles of business and love alike remain suavely concealed.

His films easily outnumber his themes, but no director ever explored indoctrinated, casual human cruelty with as much raw-nerved despair... Fassbinder crucifies this basically decent character for the fatal crime of naive, true devotion.

Alongside a daring mix of subtle and overt imagery, Fassbinder expertly crafts a study of one man's fate that condemns those who lead him on, while aptly criticising his own willing participation in the events that unfold.

Make no mistake, this is the real Queer as Folk, but for all of Fassbinder's gripes with an elite gay culture's many sexual hang-ups, Fox and His Friends is first and foremost a riveting evocation of social Darwinism in action.

I'm not sure one that Fox would have ordered a different destiny for himself if he had it to do over. Which makes him a bit of a dupe, but also a kind of gourmet, finding ways of delectating in a life that's never going to serve him anything but leavings. Not that the message here is, "Be happy with what you get." I doubt there is a guiding moral—just the pure, craftily imagined raw materials of a human life, an ace snapshot from 27 years ago that still feels contemporary and pressing.

The film is notable for its then controversial but now revelatory presentation of gay relationships to be not that different from straight ones, and also Fassbinder's remarkably believable performance as the unlucky Fox. However, Fassbinder himself was aware that he was repeating himself, and Fox is one of the most obvious of the victim cycle. He would rarely tackle the subject of victimised innocence again, and never again so plainly and naturalistically.

Gullible from the word go and scarcely the master of a destiny that seems sealed before the end of the first reel, Fox is a sentimental victim of no mean proportions, and Fassbinder's casting of himself in the part against type has the advantage of making the role somewhat more palatable: an unromantic hero if ever there was one, he brings some rudimentary counterpoint to the fable through the sheer unwholesomeness of his appearance.