851 Fox and His Friends

[swo17]

Fox and His Friends



A lottery win leads not to financial and emotional freedom but to social captivity in this wildly cynical classic about love and exploitation by Rainer Werner Fassbinder. Casting himself against type, the director plays a suggestible working-class innocent who lets himself be taken advantage of by his bourgeois new boyfriend (Peter Chatel) and his circle of materialistic friends, leading to the kind of resonant misery that only Fassbinder could create. Fox and His Friends is unsparing social commentary, an amusingly pitiless and groundbreaking if controversial depiction of a gay community in 1970s West Germany.

SPECIAL FEATURES

• New 4K digital restoration, undertaken by the Rainer Werner Fassbinder Foundation and supervised by cinematographer Michael Ballhaus, with uncompressed monaural soundtrack on the Blu-ray
• New interview with actor Harry Baer
• New interview with filmmaker Ira Sachs
• Excerpt from a 1975 interview with director Rainer Werner Fassbinder
• Excerpts from a 1981 interview with composer Peer Raben
• Trailer
• New English subtitle translation
• PLUS: An essay by film critic Michael Koresky

[FrauBlucher]

Beaver

[Telstar]

Has anyone compared this to the Arrow yet?

[R0lf]

I don't have the Criterion but the screen grabs from beaver look the same as the Arrow.

[tenia]

It's unlikely to look much different anyway since they're sourced from the same 4k restoration.

[Minkin]

Svet and His Friends

[movielocke]

This is probably my favorite Fassbinder film I've seen. in some ways, it's the first film of his I've seen where I actually "get" why he is so revered.

A superb film all around, fantastic performances, and a perfectly tuned melodramatic script exploring class.

Really loved it, which was a lovely surprise.