esrosedotblog

SAM

What a wonderful surprise. Just two days after I wrote about him (again), Sam Fuller appears as a sort of criminal godfather in this Wim Wenders NYTimes Best1176 Picture:

Amerikanische Freund, Der / The American Friend (1977)

It is not a big part but he is obviously relishing the attention. I enjoyed his appearance immensely. A lot of young directors brought him on their sets to strut their Fuller-influenced stuff. He often stayed to put in a cameo.

Oh! What about the film? It stars Bruno Ganz and is really quite good. German New Wave is not always very accessible but this one is. There are many unanswered questions, they ultimately do not matter.

Roger Ebert writes cogently on the film and the Wave. I did not find as many chunks missing as Ebert, actually.

Dennis Hopper is in this too. Ebert says he seems to be recovering from the motorcycle crash in Easy Rider. True.

When it comes right down to it, Hopper has always been a one-note actor. He is in a lot of art film and was able to parley his Easy Rider thing into a career of sorts. He is seldom a welcome part of a picture for me. In this one he is somewhat sedated; so his craziness is reigned in.

Fair warning though; if you like DH, go for it. If you do not, you may have a few gritty-teeth moments. He hones his psycopathic chops and, in the process, chews a bit of scenery.

Now, here is something else! The film is an adaptation of a Patricia Highsmith Tom Ripley novel; Ripley's Game! This is Hopper. He is a fake art dealer and general all around con-man. I think that the Highsmith sensibility is in the film. I didn't get it until the ending credits! Even though Hopper's character is Tom Ripley. Jeez. This thing is filled with surprises.

There is another wonderful surprise toward the middle of this mostly serious picture. There is a sequence in a moving train involving garroting, shooting, throwing of bodies out the door and so on. It is almost farcical with the opening doors, closing doors, people coming down the corridor, the need to produce tickets at an inappropriate moment and many more tiny tricks. It owes a lot to the Three Stooges or Mac Sennet somehow.

Another oddity here is that there are three languages spoken in the film. It is subtitled for English so little is missed. They obviously are working around Hopper's monolinguality. He is the only one who is American. Well, he is the friend!

I enjoyed this film very much and will give it a 4 out of Netflix 5.