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The American Friend More at IMDbPro »Der amerikanische Freund (original title)

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44 reviews in total

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34 out of 41 people found the following review useful:
I want to tell you how incredible this film is.., 7 June 2005

Author: byrmcusyty from Bangladesh

I want to tell you how incredibly joyous this film is...but I worry that I'll tell you the wrong way and sound ridiculous. So don't read any further. Just see the movie for yourself.

Dennis Hopper and Bruno Ganz are fantastic as the perverse Ripley and his randomly picked/stalked friend. I've never seen a buddy-buddy film where the bonding is done quite like this, unreal. Unreal how deep they go. No, really, it's that amazing.

Odd things that I liked: I like the way the two shift casually between English and German. I like the Bartok-ish music. The cinematography is great, and on the DVD commentary you will hear Wenders talk about Robby's inventiveness with gels. The train scene is one crisis after another but also contains some hilarious bits (the business with the tickets). Another powerful moment takes place later at Tom's house where they try to execute a reverse-ambush. Jonathan, pipe in hand, looking down sadly at the henchman he'd just sent down for good.

What else do I like without revealing too much of the plot? Gee, I guess I like everything about this film. This is one of those films (Je vous salue, Marie; Paris Texas; Lost in Translation; Chungking Express are others) that I LOVE so dearly that I hate myself for talking about it because it's inevitable that I will be wronging it with the inadequacy of my language (ie trying to capture something that is beyond words).

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27 out of 28 people found the following review useful:
A probing and fully realized character study, 19 January 2004

Author: Howard Schumann from Vancouver, B.C.

Jonathan Zimmerman (Bruno Ganz) is an easy going Swiss picture framer living in Germany who believes he is dying from a rare blood disease. When he makes the acquaintance of Tom Ripley (Dennis Hopper), an art dealer of dubious reputation, he is faced with a profound moral question. Should he commit a murder for Ripley's underworld associate, Raoul Minot (Gérard Blain) in order to guarantee the lifelong security of his wife Marianne (Liza Kruezer) and son Daniel (Andreas Dedecke)? Based on the novel Ripley's Game by Patricia Highsmith, Wim Wenders The American Friend is a probing character study of two very different men, one a solitary high stakes adventurer, the other a staid family man grown desperate by his circumstances. Perhaps as a result of an unacknowledged admiration for the other's lifestyle, the business relationship between the two men slowly develops into a reluctant friendship, powerfully illustrating the complexity of the human condition.

Shot in Paris, New York, and Hamburg, Germany, Cinematographer Robby Muller's moody waterfront shots and interior yellow-green color images enhance the mood of paranoia and keep the tension flowing. Cameo appearances by directors Nicholas Ray as a painter who faked his own death and Sam Fuller as an American mobster pay homage to these icons of American cinema. The plot centers around Ripley's revenge for an offhand remark Zimmerman made at an art auction, first spreading the rumor that is health is failing rapidly, then driving him to undertake an act that he would normally consider morally reprehensible. In trying to convince Zimmerman to commit the crime, Raoul offers to provide the services of a Paris hematologist but the lab results are faked and Zimmerman more than ever is convinced that he is going to die. Reluctantly, he commits the murder in a brilliant set piece aboard the Paris Metro, then slowly sinks into a maelstrom of deceit and deception that adds additional twists and turns to an already intricate plot.

Though questions remain unanswered, the strength of the film is not in the plot but in its multi-leveled characterizations and powerful performances. Ganz is fully believable as the decent man tortured by a moral dilemma and Hopper, rebounding from a period of substance abuse, turns in a performance of diabolical intensity as the underworld-connected profiteer. The American Friend avoids the temptation to be simply another film noir thriller or a good versus evil escapade, showing fully realized human beings who have thoughts and feelings we can understand even when we strongly disapprove of their actions. I just have one question. Didn't any one ever tell Zimmerman about life insurance?

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24 out of 28 people found the following review useful:
Wenders' wonder. Don't overlook this one!, 20 September 2001
Author: INFOFREAKO from Perth, Australia

Wim Wenders' movies are really a matter of taste. His detractors find his movies to be painfully slow, drawn out, pretentious affairs. Even I can admit to finding the prospect of sitting through some of his movies (particularly 'Until the End of the World' and 'Faraway, So Close!') almost unbearable. But when Wenders is on form he is hard to beat for mysterious, multi-layered, genuinely haunting movies.

Some people regard 'The American Friend' as a total bore, but I found it to be anything but, and almost equal to his masterpieces 'Paris, Texas' and 'Wings Of Desire'. Sure it is slow, and bound to frustrate those with MTV-type attention spans, but bear with it, and you will be rewarded.

Bruno Ganz is first rate as the picture-framer turned reluctant hitman, and Dennis Hopper, who is often ridiculed for his over the top self parodic "crazy guy" roles, is quietly impressive as the enigmatic, almost poetic Ripley. Compare his performance (and this movie as a whole) with Matt Damon's obvious turn in the more recent 'The Talented Mr. Ripley'. It speaks volumes for how much less subtle and intelligent most contemporary movies have become.

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18 out of 19 people found the following review useful:
long defrost time, 16 November 2003
Author: whitecargo from Philadelphia PA USA

The AMERICAN FRIEND

The fine German director Wim Wenders is responsible for this film. (If you dont know Wenders, you should). The setting of the film is handled well: the seaminess of the port of Hamburg Germany, comes across as one of the great film noir-type cities. It looks like an environment that is constantly wet and misty.

The movie ostensibly stars Dennis Hopper, but although he is given top billing in the movie he plays nearly a minor, background figure throughout. Clearly the most interesting performance, it is frustratingly parceled out to us in a way that makes you crave a really long scene with just him in it. But instead, his characterization happens in brief, truncated insights.

Hopper is well-cast once again in one of those teetering-on-the-edge roles he excels in. He is a loose cannon in this film--you clearly see his character is unbalanced --and you just dont know what he is going to do at any given moment and that lends the film its tense aspect. But the film doesnt really focus on him. Thats the main problem with this film.

Bruno Ganz (a fine Swiss actor) is the figure that the camera spends the most time on. He and Hopper and several other figures are all part of the world of art forgery and art smuggling. But Ganz's character--a painting restoration expert--is suffering secretly from a terminal blood disease. (His performance is soooo subdued it can make you antsy and annoyed, especially when you know Hopper is around somewhere).

Anyway, when the other shady characters in the movie learn of Ganz's condition they play upon his weakness to manipulate him into taking risks with the gangsters they deal with. His goal is simply to provide more money for his family after he is gone. (There is a nice moral dilemma in this film: if you knew you were dying, would your moral code alter?)

My emotional response to the plot: basically it evoked a sense of dread; a queasiness at the entanglements the main character is drawn into and the things he has to do--which are clearly against his better judgement. He is pushed to the limits of his moral and physical endurance. Its a tightly-focused story.

That being said, one immediately notices that the film's storyline is delivered in tiny, tattered snippets. These 'fragments' are in themselves intriguing. They are well photographed; they are sometimes laden with tension and atmosphere; and they often have taut, fused moments of acting.

There is also a poetic sweetness that occurs when two seemingly unrelated elements finally merge and make sense. Therefore, you know that the director isnt just fluffing it; because tiny motifs that are broken off in the beginning of the film reappear later and complete their meaning. Its great.

But overall, these slowly-delivered fragments can make one restless at times. There is too much that is unexplained; too much that we have to infer or dismiss because it simply isnt made clear. None of the characters, nor their subtle relationships to each other, are 'handed to us' outright. They are revealed in the same tiny flashes that forms the constructive style used throughout the whole movie.

Bottom line: a lot of the dialogue is frustratingly cryptic. I think you *could* figure out the weight behind each exchange if you went back carefully over the movie, but after a point--when the action takes over--youre left feeling that it just doesnt matter. Its as if Wenders shot long, fully drawn-out and rich scenes of dialogue but then went back and sliced it all up into little bits and pieces.

Its a movie that gives one mixed reactions. Kind of hard to characterize what the sum total of this film really is. Its basically a thriller, but done in such a low, deliberately dead-pan manner; that youre left with no sense of tension. Or climax. The Hopper character's weird relationship to the main protagonist, is what really leaves an aftertaste in your mouth. Perhaps that was the intent all along.

There is a sense of calm and satisfaction at the close of the movie, but more because the chaos is over and things have settled into a peaceful arrangement. Still, I enjoyed the movie and recommend it as worth seeing.

One reason that any film fan should really watch this film is the wonderful cameos by two of America's classic Hollywood directors from the 1950s: Nicholas Ray and Samuel Fuller. This is really a treat! Fuller plays a gangster and Ray plays a forger. Its the main reason I wanted to see this movie, and I am glad I did.

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11 out of 12 people found the following review useful:
Fascinating and unusual thriller, 22 February 2000

Author: contronatura (contronatura@aol.com) from Los Angeles, CA

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.

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12 out of 16 people found the following review useful:
probably postmodern, 13 April 1999

Author: Jeff Dantowitz from Toronto, Canada

A wonderful film whose plot elements are not nearly as important as the characters' development. Hopper is endearing, and the suspense created in a few paramount scenes is very effective. The music, and the surreal cameos and nature of the story create a very involving film full of clever twists, scenes, and dialogue. The use of different characters might be interpreted as symbols for different national characteristics; but the film is best seen for what it is. A really good story that plays on many of the cliches that were established ten or twenty years before it. Wenders knows his American films.

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7 out of 8 people found the following review useful:
Dennis Hopper gives real life to Tom Ripley in Wim Wenders truly atmospheric film, 18 October 2005

Author: Guido_TheKillerPimp from New Hampshire, United States

*** This review may contain spoilers ***

Any reader and fan (of which I am both) of Patricia Highsmith would reject the placement of this film in the "Noir" category. Highsmith was the author of several novels involving Tom Ripley. "The American Friend" is based on "Ripley's Game." Although born in Texas, Highsmith spent most of her adult life in Europe. The Europeon experience is an important feature of her novels. An even more important feature, one which seems to permeate every page, is a feeling much more than "Noir." This is not so much "Noir"; which, unfortunately, has grown to be synonymous with "Crime" in American Noir films of the past twenty years, as is an absence of morality. This amorality, personified in Tom Ripley is wonderfully fleshed out by Wim Wenders' direction of Dennis Hopper in "The American Friend". Ripley is a self-involved narcissist who breaks the monotony of his naval-staring to ruin the life of several people just to see if it can be done. His focus is Jonathan Zimmerman, an Ubermensch with a pre-school age son and an extremely devoted wife scraping out a life as a picture-framer while dealing with a chronic illness. Wenders completely places the viewer in Zimmerman's world as he putters around his shop between the occasional framing job only to come home to a horribly cramped apartment in the worst part of Hamburg. The viewer may be put off at the way the film plods along at times, but this is all part of the palette from which Wenders paints a world of futility for Zimmerman (and shared by residents of the post WWII/pre end of Cold War West Germany) as he begins to believe his illness is closing in around him worse than his life. The patient viewer allows a Wenders film to wash over them and breathes deep the atmosphere Wenders conveys - even if this atmosphere is terribly dreadful and smothering. Through his agent, Reeves, Ripley gives Zimmerman a chance to do right by his family by becoming a hit men of mobsters. The world closes in even more on Zimmerman as Reeves directs Zimmerman to perform the killing on a train. As Wenders moves his characters across Europe he transports the viewer within the dangerous pages of a Highsmith novel where the most everyday people are one step away the most horrible of acts. Who do we most identify with...Zimmerman?...Ripley? How close are we to these personas under the right - or wrong - circumstances. Give "The American Friend" a try and find out for yourself.

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22 out of 38 people found the following review useful:
Film noir and meditation are a bad combo, 7 February 2005
Author: BornJaded (BornJaded@aol.com) from United States

Wim Wenders is one of my favorite filmmakers, and like Scorsese and Tavernier, he is a world-class cinephile, as much in love with watching movies as he is making them. The problem with 'The American Friend,' I think, is similar to the problem of most contemporary films noir, which is, it's made with the knowledge it's a film noir. But it fails for a different reason than, say, 'L.A. Confidential.' The latter film is simply a big-budget period reconstruction of film noir, like something from the candy sampler box of film genres. It has no life of its own and is sort of like the model they show you when you're shopping around for a home in a new development; the furniture's well-chosen and neatly in place, but no one lives there. Other contemporary noirs, like Altman's 'The Long Goodbye,' approach the genre from a revisionist angle, and 'The American Friend' does it from the wrong angle, from a cinephile's angle.

The movie feels studied, like an academic exercise. It has no edge, no spontaneity. One can appreciate the movie, its cheeky comment on the art world, its humanism, without really enjoying it, and that's the trouble.

I've seen the movie twice and while its bold primary colors were appealing, and its meditative pace pleasurable to an extent, I found it a bit of a chore. It's interesting to see noir slowed down to a crawl, and Nicholas Ray is a delight, and surely, some sequences are involving, but the whole affair is lacking. Wenders' intensity has always been augmented by a certain lightness of touch, and that's what made the noir elements of 'Until the End of the World' a lot of fun. 'The American Friend' is too austere, though. Too muted. I thought 'Purple Noon,' René Clément's 1960 adaptation of the other Patricia Highsmith novel, was too muted the first time I watched it, but on subsequent viewings thought it to be engaging, almost musically so. Metaphysical heaviness for once bogs down a Wenders film rather than enhancing it.

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7 out of 9 people found the following review useful:
Wenders' masterpiece, but also Highsmith's, 12 January 2003
Author: rjohnsonr (rjohnsonr@mindspring.com) from Boston

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?

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13 out of 21 people found the following review useful:
Wenders' thriller, 13 September 2001

Author: dbdumonteil

A thriller?Only because it's adapted from a Patricia HIghsmith's novel,and because this friend is none other than Thomas Ripley the criminal dandy.It's an adaptation of "Ripley's games" but it also alludes to the former "Ripley goes underground" when it alludes to fake paintings.Although the treatment may seem "modern",the novel's main topic has been kept:when you've got a lethal disease ,and when you leave behind a wife and a young boy,is it a crime to slay a criminal?

Only strong actors could pull it off,and here we deal with Bruno Ganz and Dennis Hopper:the former,now sixty,was playing "Faust" on stage a few months ago,21 hours with an intermission (!)He was already one of the best German actors at the time.He 's Jonathan,a poor lad who's got nothing to lose.Wenders does wonders when he shows his antihero overwhelmed by an inhumane urban environment,particularly in the spectacular metro (French subway) scene.Hopper is also very effective ,a much better Ripley than Delon's in "purple noon" (plein soleil),because he's American after all.He gives a stunning performance,now threatening,now comforting,finally giving support to the unfortunate Jonathan.You should see him humming Dylan's "I pity the poor immigrant" and the Beatles' "Drive my car".

The cast is very odd:outside the two leads,we find Gérard Blain,who was twice Chabrol's star (les cousins,le beau serge) and had fallen into oblivion ,at least in France-he recently died.His reappearance in the middle of such a crepuscular thriller adds to the doomed atmosphere.And that's not all:Samuel Fuller,who was to direct a movie in France several years later("les voleurs de la nuit "-thieves after dark- not on a par with his best American movies like "shock corridor" or "pick up on south street")and Nicholas Ray whose last days Wenders filmed soon after(some critics called it a "bad taste " work)in "Nick's movie are also part of this strange gathering.

Wenders' most accessible movie,the less pretentious,and along with "Strangers on a train" the best adaptation of Patricia Highsmith for the screen.

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