Most Helpful Customer Reviews
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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.
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1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
The Talented Mr Wenders, 27 Feb 2009
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.
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3 of 6 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
With Friends Like These....., 29 Aug 2006
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.
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