THE AMERICAN FRIEND

"The American Friend" is Wim Wenders' great existential thriller about a dying man hired to commit a murder so that his family can be looked after when he's dead. The source was Patricia Highsmith's novel "Ripley's Game" though Tom Ripley is something of a secondary character. The central character of the dying killer is Jonathan Zimmermann, (beautifully played by the late Bruno Ganz), and the film is less of a thriller, though the murders, (there is more than one), are brilliantly handled by Wenders if not by the killers, (there's more than one), than it is about how doing things contrary to our nature can be a form of catharsis.

It's also another love letter to the cinema from its movie-loving director who casts Dennis Hopper as Ripley and the directors Nicholas Ray and Samuel Fuller in smaller parts and using locations in Paris, New York but mostly Hamburg to brilliant effect but unlike other directors who might find themselves classed as 'fanboys' Wenders never draws attention to his homages; they are just there, intrinsically worked into the film's fabric. He also doesn't make a big deal out of killing someone or of dying of leukemia; his genius has always been for observation and by making the act of murder something mundane he honors the legacy of Highsmith. A great film by one of cinema's great masters.