Rainer Werner Fassbinder was a gay German curmudgeon workaholic cinematic visionary. In the short span of 17 years, he made 43 films, before burning out at the age of 37, when he took a lethal overdose of cocaine and sleeping pills. He was allegedly found slumped over an unfinished draft of his latest screenplay.

1975’s Fox and His Friends is one of his best, most revered films. It’s the deceptively simple story of a proletariat gay carnival worker whose abrupt transition into a world of bourgeois assholes spells certain disaster. The normally rubenesque Fassbinder dropped an impressive amount of weight to takes on the role of Fox, our hapless love-blinded hero, conned into misery by his newfound friends. He portrays the character with such nuance and integrity that it’s hard to believe that Fox, with all of his faults and charms, could be the victim of Fassbinder’s own cruel design.

The film is structured brilliantly, its shots composed in an alien, stacked aesthetic in which relationships are visually fragmented by mirrors, bodies, and a variety of stray set pieces. The enclosed, self-consciously stagey settings of this and other Fassbinder films would be drawn upon by Wong Kar Wai for his similarly constricted-feeling In the Mood for Love.

It’s an amazing film and an often overlooked piece of gay history. So go rent it! Check out more pictures after the jump.