Wim Wenders’ The American Friend is a curious artifact—part Euro-noir mood piece, part shaggy existential bromance, and part Dennis Hopper fever dream. It lumbers through its two-hour runtime with alternating moments of menace, melancholy, and mild confusion. There’s a striking film somewhere inside its wandering corridors, but you may need a flashlight, a fondness for Hopper’s improvisational lunacy, and a tolerance for narrative ellipses to find it. This is a film more interested in atmosphere than architecture, and while that’s often rewarding, it’s also occasionally frustrating. Still, what The American Friend lacks in coherence, it makes up for in vibe, performance, and sheer cinematic curiosity.
A Tale of Two Ripleys
Wenders, long a devotee of Patricia Highsmith’s morally ambiguous antihero, had his heart set on adapting The Cry of the Owl or The Tremor of Forgery. But as rights negotiations typically go in publishing, both were already spoken for. What he got instead was a consolation prize with teeth: Ripley’s Game, offered to him in manuscript form by Highsmith herself. Wenders, in a blend of homage and mild heresy, promptly folded in elements from Ripley Under Ground, then renamed the whole venture Framed—before changing it again to The American Friend, a title that sounds like a Cold War thriller or an NPR podcast.
The project was conceived less as a faithful adaptation and more as a cinematic riff. Wenders saw in Tom Ripley a character less anchored in plot than in personality—drifting, observing, manipulating. And he shot the film with that in mind: long takes, elliptical transitions, disjointed dialogue. Ripley doesn’t so much scheme as saunter, often through shadows, hallways, and customs zones, framed by Robby Müller’s distinctive low-light compositions. The camera doesn’t just observe—it lingers, unsure whether to follow Ripley or recoil.
Hopper with a Hangover
The casting of Dennis Hopper as Ripley was either a stroke of madness or a moment of clairvoyance. Hopper had just come off the chaos of Apocalypse Now, jungle sores and all, when Wenders scooped him up from the airport. He was meant to be Wenders’ American cipher—cool, enigmatic, unplaceable. What he delivered was something wilder: Ripley as a half-mad, paint-splattered, denim-draped cowboy, equal parts noir trickster and burned-out artist. John Cassavetes had turned the role down, but Hopper made it unforgettable—if also erratic.
Bruno Ganz, in his first major film role, delivers the true emotional spine of the film. As Jonathan Zimmermann, a dying picture framer roped into murder for the sake of his family, Ganz plays the role with tightly coiled anguish and understated desperation. Offscreen, he and Hopper got into a literal fistfight during production, which sounds about right. And yet, something about their bruised rapport translates to the screen. Their scenes together—awkward, elliptical, sometimes electric—form the bruised heart of the film.
Shot mostly in Hamburg and Paris, The American Friend was plagued by daily rewrites, budget limitations, and the kind of improvisational chaos that would make most Hollywood producers break out in hives. Hopper improvised entire monologues, and Ganz, ever the consummate professional, prepared by working in a real frame shop. Even the gun in the Métro scene was real—because the production couldn’t afford a fake one. Call it guerrilla noir.
Critics, Criterion, and Cassette Recorders
Reception at the time was measured but intrigued. Roger Ebert gave it a polite nod with three stars, noting the film’s surplus of mood and deficit of momentum. Others were less kind, citing its languorous pacing and elliptical storytelling as liabilities rather than choices. Patricia Highsmith herself initially loathed it—though, in a development worthy of Ripley, she reversed course months later and declared it the best cinematic interpretation of her creation.
In hindsight, the film has aged like a bottle of offbeat German wine: idiosyncratic, acquired, but ultimately satisfying to those who develop the taste. Its presence in the Criterion Collection (Spine #793) and its inclusion in 1001 Movies You Must See Before You Die cement its status as a cult classic—if not quite a masterpiece. It is less a thriller than a fugue state, more concerned with tones and tremors than cause and effect.
Cinephiles revere The American Friend for its texture: the Hopper references (Easy Rider’s “Ballad,” Bob Dylan’s lyrics), the directors moonlighting as gangsters (Nicholas Ray, Samuel Fuller), the Parisian clinics and Hamburg train stations where shadows outnumber dialogue. It is a love letter to cinema’s possibilities and a hazy shrug at its conventions.
Verdict
The American Friend is an uneven but haunting entry in the Ripley canon—eccentric, moody, and anchored by two strangely magnetic performances. It’s not for everyone. Hell, it may not even be for most people. But if you like your noir a little continental, a little cracked, and a lot Hopper, it’s worth the price of admission—preferably late at night, with a strong drink in hand.
⭐️⭐️⭐️ (3/5)
#WimWenders #TheAmericanFriend #DennisHopper #BrunoGanz #RipleyOnFilm #CriterionCult #GermanCinema #PatriciaHighsmith #NeoNoir #FilmHistory
No comments:
Post a Comment