See buying choices for this item to see if it's one of the millions that are eligible for Amazon Prime.

5 used & new from £7.48
See All Buying Options
Have one to sell? Sell yours here
 
   
The American Friend [1977] [DVD]
 
See larger image 
Share your own customer images

The American Friend [1977] [DVD]

DVD ~ Dennis Hopper
4.5 out of 5 stars See all reviews (4 customer reviews)

Available from these sellers.


2 new from £16.00 3 used from £7.48
Learn about Lovefilm
Amazon's choice for DVD rental.
With a 14 day FREE trial. Learn more

What Do Customers Ultimately Buy After Viewing This Item?

The American Friend [1977] [DVD]
51% buy the item featured on this page:
The American Friend [1977] [DVD] 4.5 out of 5 stars (4)
The American Friend [1977] [DVD]
15% buy
The American Friend [1977] [DVD]
£15.69
Ripley's Game [DVD] [2003]
13% buy
Ripley's Game [DVD] [2003] 4.0 out of 5 stars (14)
£4.98
The Talented Mr Ripley [DVD] [2000]
11% buy
The Talented Mr Ripley [DVD] [2000] 4.1 out of 5 stars (43)
£2.98
Explore similar items

Product details

  • Actors: Dennis Hopper, Bruno Ganz, Lisa Kreuzer, Gérard Blain, Nicholas Ray
  • Directors: Wim Wenders
  • Writers: Wim Wenders, Patricia Highsmith
  • Producers: Joachim von Mengershausen, Margaret Ménégoz, Renée Gundelach
  • Format: Anamorphic, PAL, Widescreen
  • Language English, German
  • Subtitles: English
  • Region: Region 2 (This DVD may not be viewable outside Europe. Read more about DVD formats.)
  • Aspect Ratio: 1.78:1
  • Number of discs: 1
  • Classification: 15
  • Studio: Anchor Bay Home Entertainment
  • DVD Release Date: 23 Jun 2003
  • Run Time: 126 minutes
  • Average Customer Review: 4.5 out of 5 stars See all reviews (4 customer reviews)
  • ASIN: B00009KP1D
  • Amazon.co.uk Sales Rank: 43,586 in DVD (See Bestsellers in DVD)

    •  Would you like to update product info or give feedback on images?

Reviews

Amazon.co.uk Review
A thriller that's nearly devoid of thrills? That's not a complaint--it's what makes The American Friend one of the most stylish (and at the time most expensive) films to emerge from the new German cinema of the 1970s. Loosely adapting Patricia Highsmith's mystery novel Ripley's Game, director Wim Wenders shifted priority from plotting to character, emphasising a richly colourful and atmospheric approach to locations in Hamburg, where a picture-framer (Bruno Ganz) is lured into an assassination scheme involving a mysterious Frenchman (Gerard Blain) and the titular American friend, Tom Ripley (played by Dennis Hopper, a far cry from either Matt Damon's portrayal of the same character in The Talented Mr Ripley or John Malkovich's in the 2003 version of Ripley's Game). The plotting is vague to the point of irrelevance; Wenders prefers to maintain the aura of mystery rather than generating any conventional suspense and expresses his affection for American movies by casting favourite directors Nicholas Ray and Samuel Fuller in pivotal supporting roles. The result is an intoxicating example of cinematic cross-pollination. --Jeff Shannon

Special Features
16:9 Anamorphic Wide Screen
German
Region 2
Dolby Digital 5.1 German
Dolby Digital 5.1
Audio Commentary By Writer And Director Wim Wenders And Dennis Hopper
Deleted Scenes With Commentary By Wim Wenders
Theatrical Trailer
Biographies
English


See all Reviews

Customers Who Bought This Item Also Bought

Wings Of Desire [1987] [DVD]

Wings Of Desire [1987] [DVD]

DVD ~ Bruno Ganz
4.8 out of 5 stars (21) 
Ripley's Game [DVD] [2003]

Ripley's Game [DVD] [2003]

DVD ~ John Malkovich
4.0 out of 5 stars (14)  £4.98
Paris, Texas [1984] [DVD]

Paris, Texas [1984] [DVD]

DVD ~ Harry Dean Stanton
3.8 out of 5 stars (13) 
The Lives Of Others [DVD] [2007]

The Lives Of Others [DVD] [2007]

DVD ~ Martina Gedeck
4.7 out of 5 stars (115)  £3.87
Werner Herzog Box Set 1 [DVD]

Werner Herzog Box Set 1 [DVD]

DVD ~ Klaus Kinski
4.1 out of 5 stars (11)  £18.17
› Explore similar items

Suggested Tags from Similar Products

 (What's this?)
Be the first one to add a relevant tag (keyword that's strongly related to this product)
Check a corresponding box or enter your own tags in the field below
(3)
(2)
(2)
(2)
(2)
(2)
(2)
(1)
(1)
(1)
(1)

Your tags: Add your first tag
 
See most popular tags
 

Customer Reviews

4 Reviews
5 star:
 (2)
4 star:
 (2)
3 star:    (0)
2 star:    (0)
1 star:    (0)
 
 
 
 
 
Average Customer Review
4.5 out of 5 stars (4 customer reviews)
 
 
 
 
Share your thoughts with other customers:
Most Helpful Customer Reviews

 
18 of 22 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars Not Ripley's game - and the better for it, 5 Jun 2003
By A Customer
I ordered this DVD after I saw Ripley's Game. An American Friend, as it happens, is very loosely based on the same Patricia Highsmith novel. Zimmerman is a picture framer, who, expecting his death from an incurable disease, is persuaded to commit murder for money. The story follows Zimmerman, rather than Ripley. Zimermanns life - one rather imagines it to have been as free from adventure and excitement as a Shire Hobbit's - turns into a slow motion rollercoaster ride. Bruno Ganz' performance is moving as an ordinary man stepping way outside his boundaries whilst no one is looking. Dennis Hopper's appearance saves the film from being too much of an "Old Europe" introspective sort of movie. If you like to visit Ripley's world and think Hollywood might not not get it right - then this is a very interesting variation of it.
Comment Comment | Permalink | Was this review helpful to you? Yes No (Report this)



 
1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars The Talented Mr Wenders, 27 Feb 2009
By Trevor Willsmer (London, England) - See all my reviews
(TOP 50 REVIEWER)      
From the days before foreign cinema/arthouse movies became big business and were still a fit playground for non-mainstream imaginations instead of auditions for Hollywood (although this in fact was just such a showpiece for Wenders), Wim Wenders take on Patricia Highsmith's Ripley's Game has lost little of its power and allure over the past quarter of a century. A Franco-German-American co-production - a concoction which would now spell a massively compromised disaster - it uses its varied cultural backgrounds rather than allowing itself to be stifled by them as the possibly terminally ill (German) Ganz is covertly influenced by (American) Hopper's crooked art dealer to take a (French) gangster's lucrative offer to perform 'one - maybe two' contract killings.

The film buff references are there, but filtered through European cinema as much as Hollywood noir - the hero has tests at the hospital Oanassis and Jean Gabin died, Jurgen Knieper's music takes its lead from Bernard Herrmann scored for harmonica and synth and the gangsters are played by a mixture of German, French and American directors. Additionally, the then on the brink of critical rediscovery Nicholas Ray is cleverly cast as a painter everyone thinks is dead and who uses the assumption to up the prices of the multiple copies of his paintings he churns out.

While such self-conscious touches are often used to hide a lack of imagination or personal vision, this is very much Wenders' film and one with its own distinct identity. Ray's 'life after death' is less a conceit of casting than a reflection on Ganz's predicament as part of the old world (he used to restore works of art) caught in a world being rebuilt around him in which he has no place or future. Where Ray filters his art through pragmatism and survives (itself a perfect metaphor for his Hollywood career), Ganz is too caught up in his own mortality, his desperate need to be certain of his fate turning into a subtly conveyed love affair with his own death.

What's more, this is a film where everything fits. Hopper's early ramblings into his pocket tape recorder in an attempt to remind himself of the person he's forgotten he ever was after years of lying to others at first seem a self-indulgence, but his words at the beginning of the film - "We have nothing to fear but fear itself" - provide the motivation for Ganz's actions, as the picture framer who constantly puts himself in the frame (both literally and figuratively) allows his paranoia over his disease to set him on the road to his rendezvous with death.

As a thriller it has two great setpieces - Ganz's clumsy stalking of his first assignment on the Metro and a double-killing gone wrong on a train that is real edge of seat stuff. By comparison, the finale loses its way somewhat, with the characters giving into both their and the situation's absurdity with a giggling fit. Despite this, the film doesn't disappoint, holding the attention throughout its deliberate and sometimes esoteric build-up and staying in the memory long after it has finished. One of the best foreign films of the seventies and still Wenders most completely satisfying work to date, it's well worth a second (or even first) look.

Anchor Bay's deleted DVD is well worth tracking down - as well as a good widescreen transfer of the film that makes the most of Wenders' and cinematographer Robby Muller's ambitious use of colour and sweeping camera movements, it boasts an excellent extras package, including audio commentary, 30 minutes of deleted scenes, outtakes and behind the scenes footage and the film's trailer.

Comment Comment | Permalink | Was this review helpful to you? Yes No (Report this)



 
3 of 6 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars With Friends Like These....., 29 Aug 2006
By Mr. S. Anderson (Hereford, England) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   
THE AMERICAN FRIEND is a clever film, but one that perhaps suffers from a being a little too smart for its own good. As an exploration of the cultural colonisation of Germany it is very effective, and WIM WENDERS fills the subtext of his film with a pessimistic tone that borders on paranoia, a redolent theme for a film of the 1970's. He depicts a featureless and grey Europe that is bending under the unbearable yolk of capitalism. A continent that has had its originality squeezed out of it by the duplicitous behaviour of people like Tom Ripley. A land of commerce and greed, rather than art. In fact art becomes the metaphorical device for the insidiousness of a consumer driven society, with both painting and the cinema acting as its agents. Of all European countries to feel the pinch of forced doctrines by the USA, Germany in the wake of WW2 is perhaps the most notable. A generation of film-makers grew up with an ambivalent attitude towards Hollywood. They were respectful of its efficiency, but resentful of its corrupt value system and sought to implement their own brand of national cinema. THE AMERICAN FRIEND and to a lesser degree Werner Herzog's STROSZEK are the most indicative examples of these complex tensions. Viewed today the film also becomes an intricate and enjoyable parody of film noir and the values that genre embodied. It's post-modern credentials are worn as a badge, in both Wenders choices of colour, and especially in the casting. As a deconstruction of both Hollywood's influence and the effects of forced capitalism THE AMERICAN FRIEND works tremendously well. Unfortunately the sophistication of its satirical elements, wring a great deal of the life out of the film, especially in terms of excitement and spectacle.
Comment Comment (1) | Permalink | Was this review helpful to you? Yes No (Report this)


Share your thoughts with other customers: Create your own review
 
 
 
Most Recent Customer Reviews

4.0 out of 5 stars "I like to make money and I travel a lot." Tom Ripley also enjoys now and then corrupting a good man
If you're thinking about a man who just wants to lead the good life, it's hard to beat that charming sociopath, Tom Ripley. Read more
Published 7 months ago by C. O. DeRiemer

Only search this product's reviews


Customer Discussions

 Beta (What's this?)
This product's forum (0 discussions)
  Discussion Replies Latest Post
  No discussions yet

Ask questions, Share opinions, Gain insight
Start a new discussion
Topic:
First post:
Prompts for sign-in
  [Cancel]


Active discussions in related forums
   
Related forums

Listmania!

Create a Listmania! list

Look for similar items by category

Feedback

Fun for Everyone

Christmas Gifts
Achieve over 15,000 RPM with our great range of Powerballs.

›Shop the Powerball store

  

Make A Wish

Get what you want with an Amazon.co.uk Wish List Make sure you always get what you want with an Amazon.co.uk Wish List.

›More info on Wish Lists

  

We've Got Converse

Converse
Stock up on your favourite styles with great deals on Converse shoes.

›Shop Converse

  

Treat Someone

Amazon.co.uk Gift Certificates--available in any amount from £5 to £500 With an Amazon.co.uk Gift Certificate, you can get them what they want (even if you don't know what that is).

›Learn more about Gift Certificates

  
Ad

Where's My Stuff?

Delivery and Returns

Need Help?

Your Recent History

  (What's this?)
You have no recently viewed items or searches.

After viewing product detail pages or search results, look here to find an easy way to navigate back to pages you are interested in.

Look to the right column to find helpful suggestions for your shopping session.
Continue Shopping: Top Sellers
The Girl Who Played with Fire
The Girl Who Played with Fire by Stieg Larsson
4.5 out of 5 stars (72)£3.86
 Breaking Dawn (Twilight Saga)
Breaking Dawn (Twilight Saga) by Stephenie Meyer
4.1 out of 5 stars (462)£6.49
 The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo
The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo by Stieg Larsson
4.1 out of 5 stars (163)£3.99
 The Host
The Host by Stephenie Meyer
4.2 out of 5 stars (80)£3.86

amazon.co.uk Amazon Home
International Sites:  United States  |  Germany  |  France  |  Japan  |  Canada  |  China
Business Programs: Sell on Amazon  |  Fulfilment by Amazon  |  Join Associates  |  Join Advantage
Customer Service  |  Help  |  View Basket  |  Your Account
About Amazon.co.uk  |  Careers at Amazon
Conditions of Use & Sale |  Privacy Notice  © 1996-2009, Amazon.com, Inc. and its affiliates