The American Friend (1977)

Like the great film, it's made with a great deal of visible affection both in front of and behind the camera.

The acting in this movie is really good.

There are moments in this movie where the great movie it could've been peek out... They're fleeting, here, but they're worth savoring, and they happen often enough to make it worth your while.

Through painfully honest and emotional moments, the movie becomes irresistibly relatable

The main reviewer identifies a flaw in the script. "Didn't the afflicted character ever hear of life insurance." The reviewer should know and I am sure the late great and lovely Pat Highsmith already knew, that one can't insure an existing condition. The insurance companies aren't that daft, or, at all. Perhaps there is an opening for Ripley to take exception to this and wreak his horrible revenge on the insurance establishment and their desperate commission hungry sputniks. He could play a bogus insurance salesman offering life cover to the terminally ill, fiddling the applications and medical data and ladling oodles of dosh into his bogus bank accounts when the punters pop their clogs.Imagine him joining a insurance company boiler room set-up and wreaking mayhem against scumbag sales people, their gutter crawling supervisors, sales prospects that give him a hard time on the telephone and cynical insurance company owners. I saw a later version of this with Malkovich playing the sociopath Ripley, the effete serial killer cad. Malkovich was born to play Ripley. Haven't seen this Hopper one. But look forward to comparing Malkovich with Hopper.

"What's wrong with a cowboy in Hamburg?" asks Dennis Hopper at the beginning of the movie, wearing a Stetson like he just entered the wrong picture. For viewers used to the suave, sophisticated Tom Ripley played by Matt Damon and John Malkovich, Dennis Hopper's version will look like an abomination - unapologetically American, full of American speech mannerisms, slightly crazy and more than once acting like he's hopped on drugs. But that's the beauty of the movie, a beauty unique to the '70s, when American actors collaborated with European filmmakers, when different influences merged to create something unique.Based on a novel by Patricia Highsmith, the movie follows Tom Ripley, bon vivant, art dealer and occasional murderer. Enjoying success selling fake pictures of a popular but dead artist, one day he meets a picture-framer, Jonathan (Bruno Ganz), who displeases him. His mistake? To say 'I've heard of you' in a disdainful manner and refusing to shake hands with Ripley.Jonathan is dying from a blood disease and has more on his mind than social niceties. He has medical bills to pay and he's worried about the future of his son and wife (Lisa Kreuzer) after he passes away. So he becomes the perfect person for Ripley to turn into a murderer when a criminal friend (Gérard Blain) asks him to find someone to kill a rival for money. Quickly the movie enters fertile territory that lets Wenders explore questions about personal responsibility, duplicity, and the nature of evil.Although Tom Ripley usually has the spotlight in his movies, here the main character is Jonathan. Bruno Ganz plays this everyman with compassion for his predicament and also with a feeling of being trapped between accepting his fate and enjoying the freedom to become a murder it grants him. Quite fascinating are the scenes with his family, which become increasingly darker, going from idyllic to nightmarish as his secret life distances him from his wife.Dennis Hopper gives a great performance too as Jonathan's amoral friend who plays with his life like a child with putty, manipulating it for no good reason other than personal gratification. Unconcerned with what he has done to him, he only intervenes to help him when Jonathan's problems become his own. That's Tom Ripley: elegant and nice on the outside, empty on the inside, collector of art but hardly a sensitive man, owner of a beautiful neoclassic mansion filled with objects wrapped in plastic. Once the movie ends the viewer is left wondering which of the two is the greatest fake.Although these two actors would make the movie worth watching just for their performances, Wenders nevertheless crafted a tense, suspenseful thriller that stands on its own. Mixing cinematography reminiscent of American noir cinema with the slow pacing of '70s thrillers, this is mostly a visual experience in which sequences go on for many minutes without words spoken, the action directed by the camera and acting alone.Sadly there aren't cowboys in Hamburg anymore. European and American cinema ignore each other, happily proud of their provincialism. But The American Friend stands as a reminder of a time when cinema knew no borders and when artists were more daring.

To be honest I don't Know what to think of this film. At times I loved it and at others I was bored. The film is rather slow moving and tedious to watch at times however what occurs within it is what makes in interesting. The film doesn't rely on plot, but on the relationships and actions used within it. The relationship between the two men is one of the most interesting to watch because it is far from real. The locations in this film add to it causing various captivating shots in Paris, New York, etc. Although much of the film is unexplained it doesn't really matter. When watching scenes such as those on the train one can't help but be entertained. So many crazy events occur on the train showing how absolutely insane the main character is. When he sticks his head out of a moving train and just screams out of top of his lungs you can't help but think he is an interesting person to watch.this isn't a film I find easy to explain, and not one I can recommend to others because I myself don't know what to think however although it is long and irritating at times it also feels rewarding to watch. Its not one of those spoon-fed Hollywood films. Its different!

Let's start with the good news: Bruno Ganz, in the part of a tragic hero tricked into felony, will make it worth your while. But pretty much everything else about "The American Friend" will please only the most dedicated followers of art-house director Wim Wenders. Although this is one of his earliest feature-length movies, it is already riddled with his trademark allusions to the history and theory of moving images, ranging from a Zoetrope toy and ubiquitous surveillance cameras to the lead character putting himself "in frame" by hanging a picture frame around his neck. Against the backdrop of Hamburg's grimy port, Wenders indulges his obsession with American culture in the guise of Dennis Hopper. Posing as a fake cowboy, he feeds fake American paintings back to the American market by way of a German auction house. The final third of the story, from the moment Zimmermann gets on the train, is completely incomprehensible without prior knowledge of the book it is based on, "Ripley's Game". What little action we see is awfully shot; most of the time, it's slow-moving people mumbling lines from Bob Dylan songs as they go about their somber business in a parallel universe heavy with misery and meaning. What we need is filmmakers who care less about movies and more about life.