L'amico americano

Wim Wenders' tribute to American film noir, with cameos for two great American directors, Sam Fuller and Nicholas Ray, and boasting the most imaginative cinematography ever and the most beautifully ominous music, is finally available in widescreen enhanced DVD. What is it about about Patricia Highsmith which inspires so many directors? From Alfred Hitchcock (Strangers on a Train) to Anthony Minghella (The Talented Mr. Ripley), via Jean-Pierre Melville (Cry of the Owl) and Rene Clement (Plein soleil aka Purple Noon), her novels have translated to the screen with astonishing effect. Purple Noon and The Talented Mr. Ripley adapt the same book in such different yet equally gripping ways that curiosity forced me to seek out the novel, and then the other four Tom Ripley novels. Ripley's Game, the source for The American Friend, is arguably the best of the five, and perhaps of all her novels. Jonathan (Bruno Ganz), not Ripley himself (Dennis Hopper) is the real protagonist. The Hamburg-to-Munich train sequence is probably the centerpiece, but the Paris subway scene is just as incredible (ending in La Defense before the Grande Arche was built). Dialogue flows easily between German, English, and French. Just one example of sensitive detail - when Jonathan (Ganz)is reading his hopeless medical report in a steel/glass/concrete modernist Paris apartment, the camera zeroes in on the miniature Statue of Liberty replica on a concrete island under a bridge across the Seine. A symbolic representation of the title?

A couple of months ago, I bought and watched Paris Texas, directed by Wim Wenders. I searched his filmography to find some other potentially good movies. One of the movies that seemed interesting (to me at least) was this little gem with Bruno Ganz and Dennis Hopper. So finally I decided to watch it and I wasn't disappointed. The performances in English German and French are a bit « sketchy » and don't stand out too much, but other than that, this movie is good. The story is interesting and original. It's not just a standard crime drama like you would expect. The action and crime stuff is good and entertaining. The movie is slow, but it doesn't drag. But the best part about this movie, by far, is the cinematography, including the lighting and the colours.

I've seen many crime movies from the seventies and they all had one thing in common: the "dirty" look. The "dirty" look is hard to explain, but mostly it's abandoned, broken down buildings and streets, brown, grey, elephant pants, polluted streets, guns and big-ass cars. Those things give 70s crime movies that "dirty" look. I really like it, it fits well with crime stories. Der amerikanische Freund has that awesome "dirty" look, but it also has many many colours mixed in. The brightly coloured lights (neons, street lights, car headlights, etc.) reflect heavily on everything and the natural sunlight makes beautiful skies. It looks wonderful and it ads something interesting to the "dirty" look. There are also many great shots and colour choices that I liked throughout the movie.

This cinematography made this crime movie a whole new experience. I can't say this is a better movie than Serpico or Dog Day Afternoon, but at it looks way better. So if you're looking for something different that looks good, I would definitely recommend this german classic.

This 1977 Wim Wenders film is an adaptation of the Patricia Highsmith novel Ripley's Game. It stars Dennis Hopper as Tom Ripley, the amoral and lonely antihero Highsmith based five novels upon. Bruno Ganz plays a dying picture framer who is cajoled into murdering a man. Through various circumstances these two men come together, and briefly become friends. This is a thriller, but it's mostly the story of these two men who come to depend on one another for a brief time. Hopper is very touching in this film, conveying Ripley's loneliness in very subtle ways. And Bruno Ganz is even better as the man caught up in something he doesn't understand. And as always with a Wenders film, this is visually beautiful. For fans of Wim Wenders or The Talented Mr. Ripley, this is well worth seeing.

Plot summary: A normal, family "everyman" crosses paths with a questionable art broker and somehow gets tasked with the job of whacking a few people.

3 interesting things to keep in mind:

1. "The American Friend" is Wim Wenders' film adaptation of the novel "Ripley's Game" by one of his favorite writers, Patricia Highsmith. According to Wim, after he proudly showed the final print to her in a private screening, she hated it so much that she left without saying a word. This destroyed Wim. But months later, Patricia contacted him to say that she saw the film a 2nd time and LOVED it. Her initial negative reaction was due to her shock and confusion at the way the character "Ripley" was played, but on 2nd watching, she told Wim that Dennis Hopper's portrayal of Ripley was the best she'd ever seen. Which brings us to...

2. Dennis Hopper's portrayal of "Ripley". WOW!!! Just... WOW. In an incredibly complex, layered, formidable as well as lovable characterization, Dennis Hopper completely changes the book's Ripley into his own. Fresh off the set of Apocalypse Now, literally right out of the jungle and, as Wim mentions, "high on every drug created by man," Dennis Hopper entered the set of this film and proceeded to do whatever he wanted. It was fantastic, so Wim gave him free reign. So what you see here is Hopper's unique portrayal of what was originally a purely amoral villain. Instead we get a wonderfully magnetic, introspective, sensitive--and then back to calculatingly cold--character who is a real treat to watch. What makes it even better is his relationship (on screen as well as off-screen) with his co-star Bruno Ganz. Which brings us to...

3. Bruno Ganz's portrayal of "Jonathan". WOoooOOoOoOOoOWW! Swiss/German stage actor Bruno Ganz, in what he describes as his first real film credit, absolutely knocks it out of the park. And it's the dynamic between Ganz and Hopper that makes this film work. Ganz came to the set fully prepared with his lines memorized syllable-for-syllable as stage actors do. So it deeply TICKED HIM OFF when Hopper would go into his wild departures from script. This led to a knockdown dragout fistfight on set, upon which Wim shut down filming and told them to take it outside, which they did, for several hours awol, until coming back the next day stone drunk, arm-in-arm. This is exactly the sort of dynamic we have on screen. Ripley and Jonathan despise each other, and they love each other. Forced to work together toward a common goal, we watch their fantastic friendly-rivalry as events unfold. And if you believe the backstage stories, you'll understand how they achieved this rare balance. It's 100% real.

I'll just leave it there. I won't even go into the fantastic cinematography and lighting (the first time a major film was ever lit with fluorescent light, giving it a strangely surreal look), and I won't even go into the poetry and wonderful artistic elements characteristic of all Wim Wenders flicks. That's for you to look for and enjoy at your own pace. I just figured you might like the inside scoop on these 3 interesting things that helped make "The American Friend" the rare gem that it is.

Patricia Highsmith began infusing the world of film with creepy stories as early as 1951, with Hitchcock's masterpiece 'Strangers on a Train'. Her novels about the criminal character Ripley have been popular with several leading directors, and here Wenders has a go at her novel 'Ripley's Game'. It is not totally successful, and it is 'a real downer', with its gloom unalleviated. But it is yet another of Wenders's great films, just terribly depressing and leaving a sickly taste in the mouth. But of course that was what Highsmith aimed at, and Wenders duly executed. The main theme of the film is complicity, and the sub-text is the thin veneer of morality that lies across the surface of most respectable people, which can be more brittle than we imagine and under stress can reveal a spider's web of myriad cracks which quickly reduce the most smoothly groomed personality to a crinkled mass, like a shattered mirror which hangs on in its frame and refuses to drop. Here the shattered mirror is played by Bruno Ganz, a respectable and moral person leading a quiet life as a picture framer in Hamburg (a marvellously gloomy city). Lisa Kreuzer, who had made several Wenders films already, plays his silent and worried wife with deep intensity, and requires no lines of dialogue to convey her fears. Ganz believes he is dying, so he takes drastic measures to secure financial security for his wife and child. Ripley is played with subtlety and genius by Dennis Hopper, as an amiable American in a cowboy hat with a worm in his soul, but who beneath the criminal levels of his personality has an overwhelming and desperate craving for a real friend who is a nice person. We then see the complicity between these two opposites evolve through a harrowing tale of murder and corruption, with the pathetic Ganz becoming increasingly brazen and the brazen Hopper becoming increasingly pathetic, thus merging into one another. We see Hopper's essential loneliness when he is stripped psychologically naked by events. Ganz thinks he needs Hopper, but it is Hopper who really needs Ganz. Highsmith was intrigued by concealed needs, subliminal agendas, and dominance swops. This is a deep psychological melodrama between two men who in normal life would never even meet, much less end up as buddies. Wenders plunges in and gleefully excplores this moral maze with all the eagerness of a ferret in a rabbit hole. What fun he has! And film director Nicholas Ray is marvellous in his cameo as an aged painter of forgeries, living under an assumed name after having faked his own death. Everything about this film is morally dubious, and that is the point. After all, isn't most of life morally dubious? And aren't most people, when put to the test? Here, two unlike objects are struck together and both surprisingly turn out to be flints, producing fire and setting the kindling alight. Watch the blaze.