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Bad Acting and worse Bad Screenplay

Pretty good movie overall. First half was nothing special but it got better as it went along.

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.

Much like Paris, Texas (the only other Wenders film I've seen), this is a very nicely shot film and I enjoyed most of it purely on aesthetics alone.However, I did not think the storyline was up to much and the fact that it hinges on a rather ridiculous scenario (that an average guy with a terminal illness would agree to kill two strangers in return for money to pay for his family after his death) made it all the harder to watch. It's not that the intention is all that ridiculous but the fact that he was so gullible as to believe these gangsters when they sent him to random doctors who told him he was going to die very soon yet his own doctor proclaimed otherwise. It was a bit like, well, they're OBVIOUSLY conning you and just paying these quack doctors to tell you that you are going to die, just to scare you & get you to do the job! Plus the possibility of getting away with it and the family not being in any danger either form the gangsters or the law afterwards was hard to believe also. I mean, we even saw that CCTV recorded him doing the first killing in the subway so he would have been caught anyway and if he died in the interim his family would still have been hounded by the law. So in that sense it was all rather contrived.The ending, as noted in one other review I have just read, was a weird change of tone and became almost (unintentionally?) comical and it also dragged out too much.All in all, I loved a lot of how the film looked but I don't think I could be bothered to sit through this film again.

From director Wim Wenders (Paris, Texas), based on the novel Ripley's Game, which I know was turned into a film with John Malkovich, this film featured in the 1001 Movies You Must See Before You Die book, so I naturally wanted to see it. Basically Swiss picture framer Jonathan Zimmermann (Downfall's Bruno Ganz) from Hamburg, Germany is slowly dying of the blood disease leukaemia, and American art forger Tom Ripley (Dennis Hopper), and they are introduced to each other at an auction. French criminal Raoul Minot (Gérard Blain) approaches Tom, he wants him to kill a rival gangster, but he refuses, but the criminal presses him that he owes him, so Minot suggests the idea to Jonathan, offering a lot of money to give his wife Marianne (Lisa Kreuzer) and son after he dies. Zimmermann originally turns down the offer, but remembering he may not have long to live, and tricked by Minot into thinking he is dying sooner than he think, he does agree to the murder. He manages to shoot the man in question at an underground train station without notice, and Ripley visits him before and after this happens to have a picture framed, Jonathan has no idea he is involved in the scheme, but the two become good friends. Tom is appalled by Minot after he wants Zimmermann to kill another rival gangster, this time on a moving train by strangulation, but he agrees again, only after he makes sure his wife will get the money whatever happens to him. He does not expect Ripley to be on the train as well though, and he commits the murder instead, along with a bodyguard, and after some near misses with passengers and other criminals on the train they do get away with it. When they return home Tom confesses to Jonathan his involved in the scheme, he declines an offer to take his money for the hit and he wants nothing more to do with his friend, he advises Jonathan he should tell Minot he acted alone. Ripley is later contacted by Zimmermann because his wife is becoming suspicious of his recent activity, she also believes the American man is corrupting him, also he believes the mafia are looking for him after some mysterious phone calls. After Minot tells Jonathan his flat has been bombed, and Tom takes him with him to the mansion where assassins are meeting them, they are ambushed but manage to kill the gunmen, and they plan a long distance journey to dump the bodies. Jonathan's wife tells him that he was deceived about his medical condition, and he agrees to have a proper talk about things after they have got rid of the bodies in the ambulance they have taken. They stop on a beach and Tom with them pours petrol all over the ambulance and sets it alight, but Jonathan and his wife drive off without him, but while driving on the road Jonathan suddenly loses consciousness, they crash, the wife is alive but he has died, and Tom is seen sitting on the dock, while Minot watching him walks away. Also starring Nicholas Ray as Derwatt, Samuel Fuller as American mobster, Peter Lilienthal as Marcangelo, Daniel Schmid as Igraham, Jean Eustache as Friendly man, Rudolf Schündler as Gantner, Sandy Whitelaw as Doctor in Paris and Lou Castel as Rodolphe. Hopper is great as the American Friend of the title, i.e. a loner with crime connections, and Ganz is also great as the man slowly dying and committing acts against his morals for the money he needs for his family, the story does has a resemblance to Strangers on a Train in moments, I will admit I got confused in the tiniest moments, but overall there were some exciting and eye-catching sequences that grip you, and overall it is a very watchable crime drama. Very good!

Wim Wenders' "The American Friend" stars Dennis Hopper as Tom Ripley, an American living in Hamburg, West Germany. Ripley deals in counterfeit artwork, manipulates markets, sells forgeries and promotes living artists as being dead in order to boost sales and engender exclusivity. Early in the film Ripley is introduced to Jonathan Zimmerman, a German art restorer. Ripley and another character, Raoul Minot (Gerard Blain), manipulate Jonathan into murdering a man. As Jonathan believes himself to be suffering from an incurable, life-threatening disease, he accepts the job with the understanding that his family will be paid 250,00 deutschmarks upon completion of the murder.On the surface, "The American Friend" is a fairly standard film noir. Look closer, though, and the film is another one of New German Cinema's raging allegory's for America's economic and cultural colonisation of Europe. One must remember that it was not until 1968 that the implications of America's cultural imperialism prompted West Germany to create a state-funded, television subsidised alternative film industry. Around this period, German students, extremists and protesters were themselves taking to the streets, demonstrating against the US and bombing US Army installations and officers' clubs. For many of the key figures in New German Cinema, Hollywood became both an antagonist and catalyst, the directors reevaluating the Hollywood they grew up with and contributing to an intense debate about West Germany's identity, its relation to the past, to fascism, its attitude toward socialism and capitalism, as well as about the relation of art to politics. The false unity of Germany's post-war years then gave way to a strong polarisation of intellectuals.And so "The American Friend" somewhat clunkyly paints Germans as pawns to manipulative, murderous Western cowboys, all the film's scheming bad guys are real-life film directors, old-school artisans are shown suffocating in the face of new media, German characters are tormented, manipulated and infected by duplicitous Westerners, art is commodified, bought, sold and traded like stock, Europe is portrayed as a consumer driven land of commerce and greed (of which cinema is an agent), and dominant world powers/cultures are shown to crassly pirate the trinkets of older civilisations, all of which are then made available to the highest bidder. Meanwhile, the distinctions between places like Hamburg, Paris and New York are blurred, all featureless and grey, while Jonathan goes through a character arc typical of such classic German films of the era (see Fassbinder), belittled, seduced and then dying at the feet of cowboy Tom Ripley. He leaves behind a son, Germany's tomorrow.Aesthetically the film is typical of Wenders. Wenders filmography, and much of Werner Herzog's, is explicitly concerned with borders, countries, cultures, crossing or skirting frontiers ("Kings of the Road", "Alice In The Cities", see also the films of Olivier Assayas), country-hopping, out-stations, extremities of place and situation ("Signs of Life", "Aguirre", Herzog's docs, "Even Dwarfs Started Small" etc), journeys, rivers, transportation, transgression, thresholds, marginality, circularity ("Kaspar Hauser", "Stroszek", "The American Friend") and the tensions between "inside" and "outside". Both directors also seem to go beyond the experience of travelling to highlight the futility of travelling, a facet best seen in films like "Stroszek". And while both tend to focus on outsiders journeying to other locales and experiencing a sense of estrangement and fear, "The American Friend" is relatively unique in that here it is the outsider/stranger/foreigner, who smuggles himself "inside" (ie Germany) and begins to torment the "insiders". But it is here where Herzog and Wenders diverge. Your typical Herzog hero seeks the experience of estrangement, of new cultures, of disconnection, and the pleasure of abandoning oneself completely, totally fascinated to the point of self-oblivion. For Wenders, though, estrangement, otherness and dissolution is a slow, festering, noxious sort of thing. If Herzog's films are about people turning away from or exiting society, from drop-out Timothy Treadwell to the outcasts consigning themselves to the ice caps of "Encounters at the End of the World", Wenders' are about a society which has itself turned away from people. Broadly speaking, and possibly because of his Christianity (Wender's fundamentalism results in some of his best and worst qualities), Wenders is drawn to homes, the problems "at home" and marginalised, suffering, estranged characters. Herzog's characters pack up, leave and attempt, somewhat romantically, to live on the "outside".Wenders cites Edward Hopper's noirish, existential paintings as an influence on his filmography, but aside from "Paris, Texas" and maybe "Land of Plenty", he can't compete with Hopper's sexy aesthetics. His manner of shooting landscapes (a disconnect between people and places) is also influenced by Antonioni, but again he can't compete.For the generation of Germans who grew up in the 1950s, American popular music and movies were, as Wenders put it, "life-savers". Think the autobiographical jukebox scene in "Alice In The Cities", in which a little boy seems to immerse himself in an alien world and language. Wenders' characters are themselves always quoting old songs and putting old songs on radios or jukeboxes. These are remembered moments. The memory of a time of simpler alienation, the sonic longings for another, more comfortable world. But the listener is always doubly alienated, sitting in solitude, made a stranger in his own world and forced to adopt as his own, as his most private and personal experience, the sounds and signs of an American culture that exists to him only as a set of signs/signifiers.Ironically, Wenders' next two films saw him collaborating with American friends. The first was a death-bed collaboration with director Nicholas Ray (another big influence), whilst the second was "Hammett", a film funded by Francis Ford Coppola. Coppola disliked Wenders' footage and, to the disdain of a much ticked-off Wenders, used his Executive Producer's clout to re-shoot much of the picture.8/10 – Worth one viewing.