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The American Friend

Der Amerikanische Freund (The American Friend)

1977

Wim Wenders

Bruno Ganz, Dennis Hopper, Lisa Kreuzer, Gérard Blain ...

7.2

9,249

Thriller. Drama Jonathan Zimmermann, a picture framer in Hamburg is diagnosed as having leu leukemia. Ripley, an American art dealer dealing in forgeries, uses this fact to arrange for a mob associate of his to recruit Zimmermann as a hit man. Zimmermann agrees to this because this would ensure his family's financial future. Zimmermann descends into a nightmare world of deceit and double dealing. The narrative acts as a metaphor for the relationship ... [+]

	Author	Review
United States	Michael Wilmington Chicago Tribune	"This is a Wenders masterwork--a chilling tale of painting, crime and forgery"	POS
United States	Pauline Kael The New Yorker	"Wenders' unsettling compositions are neurotically beautiful visions of a disordered world, but the film doesn't have the nasty, pleasurable cleverness of a good thriller"	NEU
United States	J. Hoberman The New York Times	"Like Taxi Driver, The American Friend was a new sort of movie-movie — sleekly brooding, voluptuously alienated and saturated with cinephilia."	POS
United States	Gary Arnold The Washington Post	"An absorbing but rarefied, introspective variation on traditional thriller motifs, it's probably not the synthesis between the personal and traditional that Wenders needs"	NEU
United States	Roger Ebert Chicago Sun-Times	"There's something cheerfully perverse about filming a thriller and then tossing out the parts that would help it make sense, but Wim Wenders has a certain success with the method in The American Friend."	POS
United Kingdom	Kim Newman Empire	"A fascinating mix of director Wim Wenders and author Patricia Highsmith (...) The result is an almost hypnotic suspense film"	POS
United Kingdom	Time Out	"Superb adaptation of Patricia Highsmith's novel Ripley's Game, with Hopper as her amiably cynical hero."	POS

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