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Thursday, April 11, 2024

THE AMERICAN FRIEND / DER AMERIKANISCHE FREUND (1977)

A lethal cypher, the Zelig of con men, the blandest force of evil; that hasn’t stopped Patricia Highsmith’s RIPLEY novels from five substantial film adaptations and a new streaming multi-parter.  Andrew Scott’s the latest to try the enigma on for size (not seen here), this Wim Wenders film its most unlikely iteration.*  And unlikely is just the word for Dennis Hopper’s Ripley, standing out in any Berlin crowd with his Stetson cowboy hat, he's more like ‘bizarro’ Tom Ripley.  Hardly a man who can blend into the wallpaper, his natural eccentricity draws attention like a sideshow barker.  In Berlin to hustle forged paintings from ‘deceased’ painter Nicholas Ray, Ripley’s at a pricey art auction when he meets Bruno Ganz, art-restorer/frame-maker, a dying man who’s the perfect pigeon to take on a legacy payout job Ripley rebuffs, hitman for Gérard Blain.  Using his medical condition as cover, Ganz heads to Paris for a second medical opinion and a quick subway murder.  But as one murder is never enough, two more set killing pieces follow.  Best is a messed up rubout on a train, the action highlight of the film and remarkably funny in a decidedly Highsmith manner.  The following double climax (murder and car chase) less well executed.  But Ganz’s near operatic swoons & blackouts, all wonderfully caught in Robby Müller’s painterly pallette with only the freshest of Crayola crayon colors, carries us thru.  The film memorable, effective stuff on its own terms.  Maybe Wenders was right to take Ripley off the title.

SCREWY  THOUGHT OF THE DAY/DOUBLE-BILL:  *To believe Wenders, Highsmith, who initially disliked the film, later told him it was the best representation of Ripley on screen.  But as this was only the second Ripley (after Alain Delon in the overrated PURPLE NOON/’60), not that much of a compliment.  Anyway, who’d trust anything Highsmith said, a woman known to have smuggled live snails into England by ‘wearing’ them under her bosom.  Yikes!  For something closer to the real Ripley on screen, turn to Alfred Hitchcock’s Highsmith adaptation STRANGERS ON A TRAIN/’51.  But is it Robert Walker’s Bruno or Farley Granger’s Guy?

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