There are now over 1500 reviews in this collection and it's possible that I've earlier written on Wim Wenders' 1977 Der Amerikanische Freund, perhaps, a thousand or so postings ago. I don't re-read what I have written and so, must confess, that I don't know if I have posted something on this movie earlier. The American Friend has been important to me for so many years that I can't really write about it objectively. This is true of many of the movies made by Wim Wenders and released in the seventies, films I saw at the University of Minnesota Film Society or the Walker Art Center and that I admired 45 years ago and debated with my friends in smoky beer halls in Dinkytown near the campus. These pictures, particularly The American Friend are infused with nostalgia and, therefore, have a significance to me that exceeds their cinematic merits.
Recently, I was in Hamburg and became sick there (it was COVID) and so The American Friend has, now, assumed some new dimensions in my imagination. In a real sense, the suspense thriller (based on Patricia Highsmith's Ripley's Game) might be labeled "Death in Hamburg" with a nod to Thomas Mann's famous novella set in Venice. The protagonist of the film, Jonathan Zimmerman (Bruno Ganz) is dying of some sort of "blood cancer," presumably leukemia, the sickness that killed my sister-in-law Janet in July of this year -- she lapsed into a coma when I was in Germany. Zimmerman's doctor is reached through an allegorical Hades, an underworld represented by the Altes Elbetunnel, the old tunnel under the Elbe River. We see Zimmerman, increasingly panicked by rumors that his sickness is advancing, jogging through the Elbe Tunnel to reach his doctor's offices, apparently on the north side of the river. The scenes in the empty tunnel have a hellish intensity that embodies Zimmerman's increasing desperation as he senses that his condition is deteriorating. When I walked under the river in Hamburg, I was very ill and the movies, therefore, has a peculiar resonance for me now -- the Elbe Tunnel as a symbol of mortal disease seems plausible. Nothing good can happen in a grim underground tube of this sort and recall feeling a sweaty sense of dread as I trudged under the river in that hole in the ground. (Of course, I never knew that the movie featured this tunnel until returning from Hamburg this summer.) As the movie darkens in preparation for its inexorable neo-film-noir ending, Zimmerman's sickness accelerates and he passes out several times. His leukemia is one of those movie illnesses that makes the character look a bit haggard and worried but doesn't affect his ability to act violently until the last reel. Even, then, Zimmerman is still mostly upright, although he can't drive reliably and, in the film's powerful last scene, he loses control pf a VW that his is driving, careens up a steep dike along the sea, spins over its top, and comes to stop only a few feet from the waves. Even this scene is ambiguous as to whether Zimmerman is driving recklessly because he is dying or simply for the sheer hell of it, having successfully wiped out the gangsters that have besieged the protagonist in the Hamburg villa of his American friend. Throughout the movie, Zimmerman, a mild-mannered craftsman (he frames pictures) has shown exuberance when he successfully murders people as assigned by his handler, a sinister French gangster who has offered him a fortune to kill rival mobsters since his terminal illness means he has nothing to lose. Just before the final series of shots in which Zimmerman ricochets over the embankment and almost into the sea, he has terrified his wife by driving wildly along the steep edge of the dike, an intentional devil-may-care gesture. Wenders made the movie when he was a young man and the picture has an idealized aspect -- the terminal illness killing Zimmerman doesn't really disable him and he's competent, more or less, up to the final shot. But Wenders successfully captures Zimmerman's despair and his relationship with Ripley, the titular American friend, is pathological itself, a disorder every bit as virulent as the sickness that is destroying him and the last half of the movie has a clammy, dank, inflamed, and, even, sepulchral ambience -- the visual representation of mortal illness. Wenders' direction is superb. The murder sequences are terrifying after the manner of Hitchcock -- Highsmith wrote Hitchcock's Strangers on a Train and The American Friend is redolent of that earlier film -- and Wenders doesn't romanticize the violence: it's sordid, chaotic, and horrible. The acting is remarkable. At the time that the film was firstsreleased, Dennis Hopper's performance as Ripley seemed problematic and fraught, over-the-top and highly stylized; now, Hopper's performance seems to me properly proportioned and exquisitely calibrated to complement Bruno Ganz' acting as the everyman suddenly trapped in a shocking vortex of criminality. Ganz has to play his part in a low-key manner to emphasize that the hero is just an ordinary fellow who has become entangled with professional killers involved in some utterly abstract and inscrutable vendetta involving two gangs. Hopper's exuberance makes Ganz' realistic performance seem underplayed, even, minimal -- but this is part of the design of the film and Zimmerman's friendship with the American Ripley makes sense only as an example of opposites attracting one another. The cast of other European film makers (as well as Nick Ray and Samuel Fuller) playing various criminals and heavies is also excellent with over-the-top performances that give the film a weird Kabuki-theater feeling. The American Friend isn't a perfect movie -- it's overlong at two-hours and six minutes (American noir could get this sort of plot done in about ninety minutes) and there's a little too much of the brooding European art film in the picture. Nonetheless, the movie is brilliantly shot by Robbie Mueller and often very suspenseful; it's one of the best pictures made in the seventies.
An American Friend is a person who throws you into a ghastly dilemma and, then, purports to come to your rescue. I've always thought that Wenders' brief and unfortunate foray into American films (he was hired by Coppola's Zoetrope to direct Hammett another neo-noir that proved to be an utter failure) is an example of this phenomenon, prescient since Wenders' work in LA hadn't yet happened when 1977 movie was made. Hollywood seduced Wenders into working in a way that was radically different from his earlier film-making in Germany. Hollywood, as an American Friend, offered all sorts of incentives for Wenders to betray himself and, for awhile, the director took the bait with predictable consequencs. At the end of The American Friend, Zimmerman asks Ripley why the American configured the infernal machine that has involved him in several murders and that now results in the gangsters stalking him. Ripley says: I heard you say Ich habe von Ihnen gehoert ("I've heard about you.") These words are uttered by Zimmerman at an auction in which Ripley is promoting the sale of forged artworks and spoken in a derogatory sense -- Zimmerman refuses, at that time, to shake Ripley's proffered hand. Zimmerman is shocked: "That's all?" he asks. Ripley now is shocked: "Isn't that enough?" he asks.
When I was in Hamburg, an old man that I met asked me why I had decided to visit his city. Remarkably, he and I had just gone to a picture-framer's studio in the old Kontordistrict in Hamburg. The true reasons that I was in Hamburg would have been too difficult to explain and so I mentioned The American Friend and said that I had always wanted to visit the place where the movie was filmed and that it was incredible that the movie starred Bruno Ganz as a picture-framer since I had just accompanied him to meet a craftsman of that sort where he was having his own pictures framed. (Of course, the idea of being "framed", an idiom that doesn't exist in German, is integral to Wenders' bilingual movie.) The old man seemed confused and I had the sense that he had probably never seen the movie.
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