Christopher Longoria A quiet man who has a vary rare blood disease and is an expert in a certain painters oil paintings for a auction house. He owns and works in a frame shop gets involved with a man he despises, a collector who sells paintings. The quiet man moves from a stable life to a life of excitement and danger. Directed by Wim Wenders a movie that is exciting and brilliant. Bruno Ganz and Dennis Hopper are excellent together. This CANNES Film Festival Selection of 1977. This psychological thriller is equal to Alfred Hitchcock and Samuel Fuller and is gripping.

blanche-2 I loved "Ripley's Game," the American version of this starring John Malkovich, but I have to say "An American Friend" left me cold.I found the locations very interesting and the film itself endless and boring.I know Patricia Highsmith is a wonderful writer, but I have to say her Ripley series to me was always a little strange. In fact, one of the reviewers here wrote he didn't know if the movie was supposed to be taken seriously. That is how I felt when I saw The Talented Mr. Ripley where, instead of leaving the area, Ripley stays in the same place and at one point is inside a room playing two different characters while Philip Seymour Hoffman stood outside the room. I thought Ripley was a real idiot. So I can understand the reviewer's point.Ripley's Game is based on a similar absurd premise: That a dying man would agree to become a hit man. I know that's how I'd like to go - right after a couple of murders under my belt. Here, Tom Ripley (Dennis Hopper) has been selling forged art, but another associate wants him to knock someone off.Tom of course doesn't want to get his hands dirty so he goes to a local picture framer (Ganz) who has a fatal disease, he's heard. He has a wife and child and some big money for them after he dies would be a good thing. No one will suspect it. The framer eventually does agree, but he and Ripley end up forming an unlikely alliance.The film has many different locations, and uses French, German, and English throughout, which does make it interesting. It's a very dark movie about manipulation, desperation, and moral dilemmas but it's hard if you don't buy the premise up front. And it was just too long.I like Wim Wenders - I recently saw Paris, Texas and I liked it very much. He's multi-talented, but it was the plot of this film that was a turnoff.

chaos-rampant I'm pretty sure by now that Wenders is not a filmmaker for me to adopt. He tends to process appearances too much, while grasping in the blind what lies behind them. So, what's left is a synthetic beauty of images framed around space and usually a moderately above-par wrap-around into narrative. Oh, surely he's one of the most talented cinematographers we have. I guess that's enough to appreciate in one filmmaker.But all that is refuted by this film. I'm not sure how much it is that I bring to it, but no matter. It is one of the greatest narratives on karma.It's all tied together between these two people; one who lives in emptiness, another - a frame artist, charged with restoring - who works in form. Together, these two figments, comprise the one consciousness. Indeed, Wenders often frames them as dual counterpoints that complete into one.An artist is who he is, because he trusts the eye, the hand. Ripley is who he is, a hollow shell, because he trusts neither. So, we have the frame artist become framed inside an illusion operated by the other, a narrative that unfolds as gangster stuff around Europe. It's a wonderful film-within device; the movie illusion generated by the deceived mind's eye (he sees a telegram, but is it what he thinks?).Wenders is such a distinctly Western filmmaker though. Notice the notions. Ripley is empty, but empty in the sense that something essentially vital is missing. And the artist is not replenished by his work in form but frustrated for ambition and money, again our Occidental idea where an artist's worth measures in success and not the joy of work itself. It is a world reeled in by craving for things that are not there, implying a dissatisfaction with what is.Empty space is the balancing element, where we can flow into for release. It's magical in the two scenes of crime, extended wanderings in a subway and onboard a train, silent like Melville would have it. Le Samourai seems to be the inspiring visual text. It is about walls that enclose - whereupon we track and lose and find again, and life becomes this game of hide-and-seek, The poignant revelation of karmic wheels? Near the end, when Ripley reveals why the scheme, why the hapless stooge was dangling on unseen strings the whole time. However far-fetched it may seem or paint Ripley in a diabolic light, it is all about sowing seeds. And for Ripley as well, who realizes only too late that what completes him (who can, forgive the literal word play, 'frame', thus contain, his emptiness) is the connection with the man whose fate he has already set in motion.But the thing is this karmic connection that bounds these two together, the setting in motion. Having realized he values the connection, Ripley swoops - like the hand of god - inside the created narrative to assist him. Eventually, the connection is shown to wire them together across space, implying now a metaphysical communion.It's this that may keep the film at a distance; although effective in the sequences that resemble a thriller, it is a film metaphysically heavy and long with silence. It is not comfortably bittersweet, nor quirky like other Wenders films. This is why I value it so as opposed to those others, because it is a lucid picture.

richard_sleboe Let's start with the good news: Bruno Ganz, in the part of a tragic hero tricked into felony, will make it worth your while. But pretty much everything else about "The American Friend" will please only the most dedicated followers of art-house director Wim Wenders. Although this is one of his earliest feature-length movies, it is already riddled with his trademark allusions to the history and theory of moving images, ranging from a Zoetrope toy and ubiquitous surveillance cameras to the lead character putting himself "in frame" by hanging a picture frame around his neck. Against the backdrop of Hamburg's grimy port, Wenders indulges his obsession with American culture in the guise of Dennis Hopper. Posing as a fake cowboy, he feeds fake American paintings back to the American market by way of a German auction house. The final third of the story, from the moment Zimmermann gets on the train, is completely incomprehensible without prior knowledge of the book it is based on, "Ripley's Game". What little action we see is awfully shot; most of the time, it's slow-moving people mumbling lines from Bob Dylan songs as they go about their somber business in a parallel universe heavy with misery and meaning. What we need is filmmakers who care less about movies and more about life.