Don't Believe the Hype

Absolutely Fantastic

Great movie! If you want to be entertained and have a few good laughs, see this movie. The music is also very good,

The film makes a home in your brain and the only cure is to see it again.

A quiet man who has a vary rare blood disease and is an expert in a certain painters oil paintings for a auction house. He owns and works in a frame shop gets involved with a man he despises, a collector who sells paintings. The quiet man moves from a stable life to a life of excitement and danger. Directed by Wim Wenders a movie that is exciting and brilliant. Bruno Ganz and Dennis Hopper are excellent together. This CANNES Film Festival Selection of 1977. This psychological thriller is equal to Alfred Hitchcock and Samuel Fuller and is gripping.

The American Friend is an interesting film. The film follows Jonathan, a family man with a blood pathogen, a frame maker, and a quiet and thoughtful fellow. He is recruited by the Mafia in France to assassinate two people, and the Mafia use his blood disease to dupe him into the jobs with the promise of money for his wife and son. The story takes Jonathan from Germany to Paris to complete the jobs, and his friend and handler, Tom, acts as his guardian angel during the more difficult moments.This movie is a mixed bag for me. Their are a lot of really great things about the film. The film is colourful, with wonderful establishing shots, use of costumes, and really great direction and shooting, which make the film really gorgeous. It manages to look almost surreal at times, and the use of head shots, close ups and panning to establishing what is happening make up for a lack of dialogue in the film. The acting is good, with Dennis Hopper as Tom being particularly interesting, and Bruno Ganz doing a quiet and reserved Jonathan well. The film has some tense moments as well, as the assassination jobs move forward, with Jonathan, the amateur assassin, tailing his prey, making mistakes, and having to improvise. The domestic scenes are also poignant, sweet, and entertaining. Much of this film is quite solid, with brooding and tense moments mixed with quiet and surreal to create a very tense and dream-like atmosphere.However, I had some reservations about this film. The story and plot were quite dull. I have watched slow burners many times, with films like Le Samourai being one of my favourites in the film noir line. The American Friend felt much slower. There is little dialogue at all, and much of the film features Jonathan trying to figure out what to do, with long shots of his expressions, him contemplating and so on. This felt very weak to me, and I struggled to hold my attention a few times. There were also a few confusing plot points. The various side characters in the film appear, at least at the beginning, to be part of a wider plot that may be revealed. This is never capitalized on, however. These characters flutter through hither thither, but there is no pay off, no explanation, to why we are seeing these set ups. Why do we need to go back to New York with Tom? Jonathan will never know anything that happens there.All in all, a bit of a mixed bag for me, but one I consider worth watching. It is a slow burning film to be sure, with a plot that I would approach calling weak, and a tad dull. Even so, the colourful and innovative shooting and direction, the good acting, and the tension and surreal aspects of the film, lend a hand to make it a watchable film. Easy to recommend for fans of film noir, or more "art house" affair. 6/10

I will admit that I watched this film having previously, repeatedly, watched and loved the later "Ripleys Game" with John Malkovitch as the eponymous eminence gris. So I cannot consider the Wenders version without comparison. Really though there is no comparison.I am staggered at how Wenders fans at this site seem to be preoccupied by the directors brilliance...as indicated in other work.I prefer to try to see what is before me. It isn't impressive.Compared to the Malkovitch rendition, Hopper is utterly unbelievable. Malkovitch is the cool, manipulative, patrician sophisticate and sociopath that fits Ripleys form. When he talks art we believe it. Hopper is just a bumbling joke. In no sense can we believe the proposition that such a flake could succeed as a player in the world of fine art dealing. He wouldn't get through the door. Ray Winstones clubland villain in Ripleys Game is totally believable. The French guy in this movie is just a vacant nothing, the echo of a fart that Winstone might deposit in passing. The American gangland henchmen are utterly ridiculous. They don't have a muscle between them and are as menacing as a tea lady. The fight scenes are a pathetic joke, reminiscent of something out of a Sixties spy spoof, one tap on the head and a guys dead. Yeah! The movie is padded out with empty scenes that serve no discernible function, such as Hopper playing with a polaroid camera. One senses Wenders trying to create "iconic" images, Ganz leaning bout of a train cab screaming...but they just don't work. How the heck would he gain access to the train cab anyway? The whole thing is amateurish, pretentious and glib. Nothing has substance. Its badly edited. Sloppily shot. Inconsistently lit. The music is dire and doesn't segue properly with the cuts of each scene.Ganz is superb, but Hoppers "performance" undermines that. He looks like he thinks the film is some funny foreign farce that he will take part in just for the fee but indicates his disrespect via various tells in expression amounting to a suggestion that he is playing "tongue in cheek" yet flatly without irony. I greatly enjoy him in other movies, even B-movies, but in this he was embarrassing to watch.I suspect that most of the high scorers here would agree with at least some of my opinions had they seen the movie without knowing its author.

"What's wrong with a cowboy in Hamburg?" asks Dennis Hopper at the beginning of the movie, wearing a Stetson like he just entered the wrong picture. For viewers used to the suave, sophisticated Tom Ripley played by Matt Damon and John Malkovich, Dennis Hopper's version will look like an abomination - unapologetically American, full of American speech mannerisms, slightly crazy and more than once acting like he's hopped on drugs. But that's the beauty of the movie, a beauty unique to the '70s, when American actors collaborated with European filmmakers, when different influences merged to create something unique.Based on a novel by Patricia Highsmith, the movie follows Tom Ripley, bon vivant, art dealer and occasional murderer. Enjoying success selling fake pictures of a popular but dead artist, one day he meets a picture-framer, Jonathan (Bruno Ganz), who displeases him. His mistake? To say 'I've heard of you' in a disdainful manner and refusing to shake hands with Ripley.Jonathan is dying from a blood disease and has more on his mind than social niceties. He has medical bills to pay and he's worried about the future of his son and wife (Lisa Kreuzer) after he passes away. So he becomes the perfect person for Ripley to turn into a murderer when a criminal friend (Gérard Blain) asks him to find someone to kill a rival for money. Quickly the movie enters fertile territory that lets Wenders explore questions about personal responsibility, duplicity, and the nature of evil.Although Tom Ripley usually has the spotlight in his movies, here the main character is Jonathan. Bruno Ganz plays this everyman with compassion for his predicament and also with a feeling of being trapped between accepting his fate and enjoying the freedom to become a murder it grants him. Quite fascinating are the scenes with his family, which become increasingly darker, going from idyllic to nightmarish as his secret life distances him from his wife.Dennis Hopper gives a great performance too as Jonathan's amoral friend who plays with his life like a child with putty, manipulating it for no good reason other than personal gratification. Unconcerned with what he has done to him, he only intervenes to help him when Jonathan's problems become his own. That's Tom Ripley: elegant and nice on the outside, empty on the inside, collector of art but hardly a sensitive man, owner of a beautiful neoclassic mansion filled with objects wrapped in plastic. Once the movie ends the viewer is left wondering which of the two is the greatest fake.Although these two actors would make the movie worth watching just for their performances, Wenders nevertheless crafted a tense, suspenseful thriller that stands on its own. Mixing cinematography reminiscent of American noir cinema with the slow pacing of '70s thrillers, this is mostly a visual experience in which sequences go on for many minutes without words spoken, the action directed by the camera and acting alone.Sadly there aren't cowboys in Hamburg anymore. European and American cinema ignore each other, happily proud of their provincialism. But The American Friend stands as a reminder of a time when cinema knew no borders and when artists were more daring.