The American Friend
Wim Wenders (1977)
Ripley’s Game – the third of Patricia Highsmith’s Tom Ripley novels, first published in 1974 – is set largely in France but the plot involves important excursions to German cities. In Wim Wenders’s adaptation of the novel, the settings are transposed but in one important respect this makes no difference. The film’s Hamburg, where most of the action takes place, looks much like Paris, the scene of the pivotal crime. Wenders seems keen to show that contemporary big cities or, at any rate, their high-rise buildings have the same alienating effect. This spiritual continuum contributes to The American Friend‘s considerable power as a grim existential drama. It’s shakier as a thriller narrative.
Tom Ripley (Dennis Hopper) is raking it in as a major player in an art forgery enterprise. His partner in crime (Nicholas Ray) paints the forgeries; Ripley bids for them at auctions to help drive up the sale price. Introduced in an auction room to Jonathan Zimmermann (Bruno Ganz), a picture restorer and framer in Hamburg, Ripley finds that his reputation precedes him. When he tries to shake hands, Zimmermann coldly replies, ‘I’ve heard of you’, and moves away. Ripley is not a man to insult and conversations with two more of his shady contacts coincide to give him the chance to get even. Ripley learns from one of these two, a man known as ‘the American’ (Samuel Fuller), that Zimmermann is suffering from an incurable blood disease. The other man, a gangster called Raoul Minot (Gérard Blain), wants to engage Ripley as a hitman to kill a rival criminal. Zimmermann’s slight was slight; Ripley’s revenge is on a different scale. He declines Minot’s offer and suggests Zimmermann for the job instead. At the same time, Ripley contrives to make Zimmermann think he’s much closer to death than he thought. His own art business is honest but modest; he has a wife (Lisa Kreuzer) and a young son (Andreas Dedecke) to support. Zimmermann incredulously turns down the killing assignment when first approached by Minot but is alarmed enough to take up his invitation to attend a Paris clinic for a medical second opinion on his myeloid leukaemia. The results of these tests are falsified. Believing he’s at death’s door, Zimmermann desperately agrees to shoot Minot’s adversary (the actor appears to be uncredited) at a Métro station.
This episode is in two senses the heart of The American Friend. Occurring about halfway through, it’s also the high point of the film’s psychological drama. Wenders uses escalators and flights of stairs in public buildings as a motif to illustrate Zimmermann’s fearful predicament. He’s seen repeatedly, in Hamburg and Paris, on downward-moving staircases as he gets deeper into trouble. His target is on a rising escalator, however, when Zimmermann eventually shoots him and the assassin must eventually climb to a Métro exit, emerging into daylight and the reality of what he has done. There are some fine moments before Zimmermann summons the nerve to go through with the killing. Sitting in the underground train carriage in which the gangster is standing, Zimmermann settles down and closes his eyes, as if to escape the world in which he has to kill a man. When he opens his eyes, the gangster has moved and Zimmermann panics. On a station platform, he collides with a large metal construction and cuts his head. A bloodstained tissue on the cut reminds Zimmermann and the audience of his illness, of what got him into this situation.
The series of events leading up to the murder stretches credibility but this makes it all the stronger: the improbability of what’s happening to Zimmermann reinforces his feeling of being trapped in a nightmare. From this point on, though, The American Friend is doubtful in less compelling ways. Although offended by Zimmermann at their first meeting, Ripley starts to warm to him after visiting his shop to get a picture framed. When Minot tells Zimmermann that the second half of his hitman’s fee won’t be paid until he carries out another killing, Ripley feels obliged to get involved. It’s surprising that Patricia Highsmith’s most famous creation – conventionally described as cold-blooded, psychopathic and so on – should do this out of human sympathy for Zimmermann but that seems to be what’s implied. (According to the Wikipedia plot synopsis, Ripley helps out the Zimmermann equivalent in the source novel, too: I don’t know if Highsmith suggests a different motivation.) This second murder, of another gang boss, is to take place on a moving railway train; this time, the method of killing is a garrotte. It wasn’t clear why Minot believed Zimmermann would be capable of using a gun efficiently. It’s even more puzzling that Minot now assumes the picture-framer can easily turn his hand to a different kind of lethal weapon. In practical terms, it’s as well that Ripley arrives on the train when he does – just as the gangster’s sidekick has overpowered Zimmermann – and takes the lead in dispatching both the boss and the bodyguard.
Zimmerman may be a pawn in Ripley’s game but The American Friend is Jonathan’s film rather than Tom’s. Bruno Ganz has more screen time than Dennis Hopper and his acting is markedly superior. The viewer feels thoroughly involved in his character’s crisis; this viewer appreciated Ganz’s portrait all the more after seeing, coincidentally and only two days previously, another film with a terminally ill protagonist: Jonathan Zimmermann is much more convincingly doomed than Isabelle Huppert’s title character in Ira Sachs’s Frankie (2019). Zimmermann does plenty of running about but the effort exhausts him: Ganz creates a man reaching the end of his tether emotionally and physically. Dennis Hopper, on the other hand, is a bad choice for Ripley and gives a performance to match. His mannered gestures and hollow delivery reliably reduce dramatic tension – except when he gives the train guard a confounding grin and, later, produces a couple of mad-eyed glares that now feel like a sneak preview of Hopper’s mesmerising turn in David Lynch’s Blue Velvet (1986).
According to a 2008 Sight & Sound piece by Nick Roddick, ‘Wim Wenders’ early films use the language of American cinema to express a sensibility that’s inescapably European’. In this particular film, however, what Wenders seems chiefly to express is cinephilia, particularly American cinephilia. Hopper’s Ripley mostly wears a Stetson; when another character expresses surprise, Ripley retorts, ‘What’s wrong with a cowboy in Hamburg?’ The Stetson is a facet of American film ‘language’ that doesn’t belong in Hamburg or fit Ripley’s personality but is less of a mismatch with the actor’s screen image. Perhaps Hopper’s significance behind the camera on Easy Rider (1969) and The Last Movie (1971) also mattered to Wenders: the cast of The American Friend includes several men better known as directors than actors.
Gérard Blain had numerous acting credits to his name but, at this stage of his career, was getting more into film directing. The presence of Hollywood veterans Samuel Fuller and Nicholas Ray is presumably even more significant (though I have to admit ignorance of their work: I don’t recall seeing anything by the prolific Fuller and know just three Ray films – In a Lonely Place (1950), The Lusty Men (1952) and Rebel Without a Cause (1955)). Fuller had already appeared for Godard in Pierrot le Fou (1965) and for Hopper in The Last Movie; Ray’s three previous acting roles, all uncredited, had been in two of his own pictures and in Elia Kazan’s A Tree Grows in Brooklyn (1945). Safe to assume the last-mentioned appearance (as a bakery clerk!) wasn’t totemic casting but it seems a reasonable guess that Fuller’s cameos and the involvement of both men in The American Friend were. On this evidence, Fuller and Ray are strong screen presences and bad actors. Conscious of their importance to Wenders, they draw attention to themselves and, whenever they speak, stop the film in its tracks (Ray, with more to say, is bound to be the worse offender). They may well deliver what Wenders wants but, in doing so, they interrupt his storytelling.
Wenders digresses in further ways into movie mythology. Zimmermann, although he makes his living from a different craft, is a collector of toys and visual puzzles that evoke the origins of film-making – a magic lantern, a stereopticon, etc. There’s no denying that Wenders’s referencing of cinema history is infectious. The magic lantern shows a speeding train; by the time Ripley and Zimmermann are aboard one together, these unlikely comrades are far from strangers on a train but they bring to mind Hitchcock’s version of that earlier Patricia Highsmith novel. Hard too, watching The American Friend at this distance in time, not to connect the predominance of red – there are red curtains, red silk sheets and pillowcases, rows of red chairs, red opening and closing credits – with details in Wenders’s Paris, Texas (1984). Shot by his regular collaborator, Robby Müller, The American Friend certainly has a look that stays with you: I hadn’t seen the film for years but some images were still familiar. At their best, the beautiful but depressing visuals connect vividly with Jonathan Zimmermann’s state of mind.
Jürgen Knieper’s score is impressive, too. Tragic and urgent, the music does a good job of linking the psychological drama and thriller aspects of The American Friend. Wim Wenders, otherwise engaged, doesn’t sustain that balance so well; in the closing stages, the film falters on both fronts. Jonathan’s crucial decision, made for the sake of his wife, Marianne, and their son, Daniel, nearly destroys the marriage – although he and Marianne are finally reconciled (and she does hold on to the wages of crime). How Marianne happens to pull up in the Zimmermanns’ orange VW and provide getaway transport, just when her husband and Ripley have finished killing further baddies who’ve suddenly emerged in the climax to the action, I’ve no idea. I didn’t get who the baddies were either. Just before he dies, Jonathan thinks of Daniel and says to his wife, ‘One day you must explain it all to him’. Good luck with that.
28 June 2023