It needs a number of his films, close together, to realize what Rainer Werner Fassbinder is doing. Notice, not what he is saying, for the matchstick characters and situations are so nakedly black-and-white (no pun intended) that that part of it is hardly difficult: the social and political evils of manipulative modern -isms, as recurrent victim-figures are sucked dry, to be tossed away, by human parasites who are no less imprisoned within the system. On the other hand, it takes a few viewings to become aware of the man’s methods, praised by some, dismissed as dishonest “old Joan Crawford movies” by others.

The Patricia Highsmith-y titled tragi-drama Fox and His Friends/Faustrecht der Freiheit aka Fox/Fist-Right of Freedom was a modest success that brought Fassbinder to wider audiences, particularly in the U.S. Shy of thirty at the time, in this his twenty-fifth feature he as usual wore several hats, as director, actor and co-writer. Driven himself and mercilessly driving those around him, the enfant terrible-turned-adulte terrible plays Franz, nicknamed “Fox,” onscreen for all but a few of a hundred twenty-three minutes. The method of presentation is a cinematic equivalent of the naturalistic novels of Dreiser and Frank Norris; like, as well, von Stroheim’s stunning Greed (from Norris’ McTeague), as Fassbinder advances by sheer accretion, clumsily at times, by the piling on of short unadorned vignettes. There is little gradation, and if his abused protagonists are maddeningly slow to grasp what others are about, the audience is never in doubt.

Billed as Der Sprechende Kopf, “Talking Head,” in a Munich sideshow, Fox Biberkopf loses his barker-male lover and his job when police close down the act. Pleasant enough, hopeful, so hopelessly dim that Anthony Quinn’s Zampano is a rocket scientist alongside, he is a lottery freak and confident that that state-run gamble will be his fortune. To its credit, the film wastes no time on his small scams to raise the ticket money, on his liaison with cultured antique dealer Max (Karl-Heinz Bohm), or even on his winning a 500,000 DM jackpot.

Echoing the carnival opening, Max is throughout an urbane, voyeuristic ringmaster who observes people’s performances and so introduces the unwashed younger find into his largely gay circle of snobs. Hearing of the worker’s windfall, Eugen (Peter Chatel) leaves lover Philip (Harry Bär) and takes up with the newly well-off Fox. At first a bit charmed by slumming, half believing himself in love, for six months the effete Eugen pretends to love and educate the other while unsurprisingly milking him. One German critic saw this situation as autobiographical irony about the intelligentsia’s mixed condescension to, and fawning over, the director.

Henry James’s later Preface to The American admits that, realistically, his novel’s impoverished and criminal European aristocrats would have “taken on board” the daughter’s uncouth American suitor to get at his money. Aghast at Fox’s table manners, gaucheries and ignorance, Eugen’s mother and dipsomaniac father Wolf (Ulla Jacobsen, Adrian Hoven) do take the mark aboard, bilking him into a contract to bail out the family’s sinking book-binding business.

Spouting his happiness, acquiescing in everything, the uneducated moneyed dupe increasingly resorts to acquaintances from the old days at Springer’s (Hans Zander) Black Orchid. At this bar, too, there are no shades of grey: as in Titanic with all its rich nasty and all the poor joyous salt-of-the-earth, this is melodrama, aimed at the gut. Thus the aristocracy of Chippendale and tailored suits is infallibly devious, and, though Max’s suggested drug deal corrupts prole parolee and Fox’s one-time lover Klaus (Karl Scheydt), the lower classes are honest and happier.

There are no surprises in the garish Eastmancolor story, and on to the closing sick-neon Marionplatz Station desecration of his hero’s studded jean jacket, Fassbinder hammers it home. Though several assessments have praised the director’s presence as star in the film, he is too soft, pasty, uncalloused and small for the true working-class cinema image, and his self-effacing stupidity is a stretch. Still and all, with, and in no small part because of, its artistic shortcomings, in its stark relentlessness Fox and His Friends has power to move an audience as many a more rounded film would not. Herein lies the canny victory of this anti-bourgeois, seemingly methodless method.

(Released by Tango Film/New Yorker Films; not rated by MPAA.)