Der amerikanische Freund

Another of the foreign films that was sitting on my DVR about to expire that I had to make a point of getting around to before that expiration was Wim Wenders' The American Friend.

The movie is based on Patricia Highsmith's Tom Ripley (played here by Dennis Hopper) character, as Wenders was apparently a big fan of Highsmith but couldn't get the rights to the particular Highsmith book he wanted to adapt. Ripley here is an underworld gangster shuttling between New York and Hamburg. In New York he commissions art from Derwatt (director Nicholas Ray), who has faked his own death because this raises the price of his art at auction; the auction is held in Hamburg. At the auction in Hamburg, Ripley meets Jonathan Zimmermann (Bruno Ganz), a gallery worker who frames artwork, but the two don't get along.

Ripley has his life, and gets approached by Raoul (Gérard Blain), a French gangster, as part of a murder for hire plot in the Paris Métro. Jonathan has his life, which isn't much, considering that he's been diagnosed with a blood disease that may or may not be terminal. And he's got a wife Marianne (Lisa Kreuzer) and young son to look after. Ripley isn't exactly pleased with the idea of killing this guy in Paris, but he has an idea which is to rope Zimmermann into killing the guy in Paris.

Raoul is no dummy, so he comes up with a good idea of his own to get Zimmermann to agree to do the murder. This is to take Jonathan to Paris for a second medical opinion, only to have the test results faked so that Zimmermann will believe he has a very short amount of time to live. So it won't really matter if he gets found out in the murder; he'll be dead soon anyway. That, and the money could leave his wife and kid financially secure.

Zimmermann is actually good at luring the guy to his death, but things get more complicated because Ripley and Zimmermann begin to form a friendship. So when Raoul wants to use Zimmermann to help commit another murder, Ripley is horrified. And he's right to be horrified, since this killing is going to set off a gang war that will leave Ripley in danger, but even more so the much less guilty Zimmermann who, after all, has been roped into something not of his own making.

The American Friend is a Wim Wenders film, which means that it runs at a leisurely pace and is more about the characters than the story. This may not be to everybody's taste. And, I have to be honest, I think I prefer some of the other Wenders films I've seen to The American Friend precisely because this one needs to be more story-focused. Hopper and Ganz both do a good job with their roles, and the film is visually interesting for its look at the late 1970s. But I think it could have been a better film.