SpuffyWeb Sadly Over-hyped

Matialth Good concept, poorly executed.

Claysaba Excellent, Without a doubt!!

Mathilde the Guild Although I seem to have had higher expectations than I thought, the movie is super entertaining.

Mopkin TheHopkin 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

Alex-Tsander 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.

Jona1988 I have read all the Ripley books and loved them. Always when seeing a film based on a book you have made up a picture of how it should be. The American Friend is very loosely based on the third book Ripley's game. Knowing that, I tried to take it just as a film on it's own, inspired by the book rather than based on it. I found it worked because even if this isn't at all as I imagined it when reading the book, I really liked this film. They have taken parts of the book and managed to turn it to a great, interesting and I think pretty different kind of thriller than the usual once. The American Friend is not better than the book but I wouldn't call it much weaker either, rather calling it different. Dennis Hopper is quite a lot different than Tom Ripley in the books and really great as the character they decided to make in this. He manages brilliantly to create the kind of character that one doesn't really know what to think of. He is mysterious, seams cold but then suddenly shows and emotional side that makes me think is it fake and what is he going to do. However Ripley is not the character which the main focus is on in this film, he is the mysterious background person. The lead is Bruno Ganz as Jonathan, which is also the character which one gets the real relation to. Ganz is great in make the right feel of the character, as viewer I feel really strong for what he is going through. As the main focus of the story he is the one I think you should strongest relate and be interested to follow. He succeeds brilliant in giving the film the real depth that it impresses with. The style of it also is something that not only works great but at least for me gives somewhat of a special feel. With many book adaptations the real interest for me resides in wanting to see how a story I already know looks like physically. Where sometimes I'm just irritated in the changes from the source material. In The American Friend I'm just focusing on what twists it itself will take. This is I shall state once again because they have brilliantly created something of it's own. The suspense scenes work great, to the level of being kind of frightening on and psychological level. Even if the suspense stuff is great I feel it is the character psychological weight that make this so gripping, the emotional depth is so impressive. It is a thriller but not the average kind. Sad rather than frightening, emotionally tough rather than suspenseful. The American Friend both amazingly impressive and interestingly different. 8/10

robert-temple-1 Patricia Highsmith began infusing the world of film with creepy stories as early as 1951, with Hitchcock's masterpiece 'Strangers on a Train'. Her novels about the criminal character Ripley have been popular with several leading directors, and here Wenders has a go at her novel 'Ripley's Game'. It is not totally successful, and it is 'a real downer', with its gloom unalleviated. But it is yet another of Wenders's great films, just terribly depressing and leaving a sickly taste in the mouth. But of course that was what Highsmith aimed at, and Wenders duly executed. The main theme of the film is complicity, and the sub-text is the thin veneer of morality that lies across the surface of most respectable people, which can be more brittle than we imagine and under stress can reveal a spider's web of myriad cracks which quickly reduce the most smoothly groomed personality to a crinkled mass, like a shattered mirror which hangs on in its frame and refuses to drop. Here the shattered mirror is played by Bruno Ganz, a respectable and moral person leading a quiet life as a picture framer in Hamburg (a marvellously gloomy city). Lisa Kreuzer, who had made several Wenders films already, plays his silent and worried wife with deep intensity, and requires no lines of dialogue to convey her fears. Ganz believes he is dying, so he takes drastic measures to secure financial security for his wife and child. Ripley is played with subtlety and genius by Dennis Hopper, as an amiable American in a cowboy hat with a worm in his soul, but who beneath the criminal levels of his personality has an overwhelming and desperate craving for a real friend who is a nice person. We then see the complicity between these two opposites evolve through a harrowing tale of murder and corruption, with the pathetic Ganz becoming increasingly brazen and the brazen Hopper becoming increasingly pathetic, thus merging into one another. We see Hopper's essential loneliness when he is stripped psychologically naked by events. Ganz thinks he needs Hopper, but it is Hopper who really needs Ganz. Highsmith was intrigued by concealed needs, subliminal agendas, and dominance swops. This is a deep psychological melodrama between two men who in normal life would never even meet, much less end up as buddies. Wenders plunges in and gleefully excplores this moral maze with all the eagerness of a ferret in a rabbit hole. What fun he has! And film director Nicholas Ray is marvellous in his cameo as an aged painter of forgeries, living under an assumed name after having faked his own death. Everything about this film is morally dubious, and that is the point. After all, isn't most of life morally dubious? And aren't most people, when put to the test? Here, two unlike objects are struck together and both surprisingly turn out to be flints, producing fire and setting the kindling alight. Watch the blaze.