Bruno Ganz – The Movie Gourmet

Bruno Ganz and Dennis Hopper in THE AMERICAN FRIEND

Dennis Hopper, in his Wild Man phase, brings electricity to the 1977 neo-noir The American Friend, an adaptation of the Patricia Highsmith novel Ripley’s Game. Highsmith, of course, wrote the source material for Strangers on a Train along with a series of novels centered on the charming but amoral sociopath Tom Ripley; her gimlet-eyed view of human nature, was perfectly suited for noir. You can catch The American Friend on Turner Classic Movies on July 29.

German director Wim Wenders had yet to direct his art house Wings of Desire his American debut Hammett or his masterpiece Paris, Texas. He had directed seven European features when he traveled to ask Highsmith in person for the filming rights to a Ripley story.

In The American Friend, Zimmermann (Bruno Ganz) is a craftsman who makes frames for paintings and dabbles in the shady world of art fraud, making antique-appearing frames for art forgeries. Here, Tom Ripley (Dennis Hopper) entangles him in something far more consequential – a murder-for-hire.

As befits a neo-noir, Zimmermann finds himself amid a pack of underworld figures, all set to double-cross each other with lethal finality. In very sly casting by Wenders, all the criminals are played by movie directors: Sam Fuller, Nick Ray, Peter Lilienthal, Daniel Schmid, Gérard Blain, Rudolf Schündler, Jean Eustache. Nick Ray is especially dissolute-looking with his rakish eye-patch. Sam Fuller, in his mid-60s, insisted on performing his own stunt, with a camera attached to his body on a dramatic fall.

As the murder scheme unfolds, there is a tense and thrilling set piece on a train, worthy of The Narrow Margin. Other set pieces include a white-knuckle break-in and the ambush of an ambulance.

Here’s one singular sequence. After a meeting with Ray, Hopper walks away from the camera along an elevated highway. Then Hopper is shown, still on the highway, in long shot from what turns out to be Fuller’s apartment, where Fuller interrupts the filming of a skin flick to deny having a guy shot on the Paris Metro. Then we see Hopper on an airplane, and then Ganz on a train. Finally, Ganz returns to a seedy neighborhood by the docks. It’s excellent story-telling – at once economical and showy and ultra-noirish .

Dennis Hopper and Nick Ray in THE AMERICAN FRIEND

Cinematographer Robby Müller pioneered use of fluorescent lighting in The American Friend. The nighttime interiors have a queasy eeriness that match the story perfectly. Müller, who died in 2018, was endlessly groundbreaking. He made the vast spaces of the Texas Big Bend country iconic in Paris, Texas. He was also responsible for the one-way mirror effect in Paris, Texas’ pivotal peepshow scene. For better or worse, he jerked the handheld camera in Breaking the Waves, spawning a legion of lesser copycats. Müller gave a unique look to indie movies from Repo Man to Ghost Dog; The Way of the Samurai.

The American Friend was shot in 1977, in the midst of Dennis Hopper’s tumultuous drug abuse phase. He had just directed his notorious Lost Film The Last Movie and arrived in Europe from the Philippines set of Apocalypse Now!, where he was famously drug-addled and out of control. After getting Hopper’s substance abuse distilled down to only one or two drugs of choice, Wenders gave Hopper carte blanche to take chances in his performance, and The American Friend has the only movie Tom Ridley in a cowboy hat. It paid off in a brilliant scene in which Hopper lies on a pool table, snapping selfies with a Polaroid camera; it’s a brilliant imagining of a sociopath in solitary, with no one to manipulate. John Malkovich, Matt Damon and even Alain Delon have played some version of Tom Ripley. Hopper’s is as menacing as any Ripley, and – by a long shot – the most tormented. Wenders is interviewed on Hopper at the Criterion Collection.

The American Friend is not a great movie. Zimmermann is motivated by a grave health issue, but too much screen time is wasted on that element, causing the movie to drag in spots. Movie auctions come with built-in excitement, but The American Friend’s art auction is pretty ordinary. And, other than Fuller, Ray and Blain, the directors are not that good as actors.

Still, the unpredictability in the high-wire Dennis Hopper performance, the look of the film and the action set pieces warrant a look.

The American Friend will be aired by TCM on July 29th and can be streamed from Criterion, Amazon, AppleTV and Fandango.

Albert Finney in BEFORE THE DEVIL KNOWS YOU’RE DEAD

Albert Finney burst into movie stardom as the face of young Brit alienation in Saturday Night and Sunday Morning (1960) and the strapping sex symbol in the bawdy Tom Jones (1963). I think that one of his later performances was his best, in Before the Devil Knows You’re Dead (2007).

Actress Verna Bloom didn’t make a lot of movies, but she starred in some of the most memorable movies of the 1970s. Her run began with Haskell Wexler’s groundbreaking Medium Cool , traveled through Clint Eastwood’s mysterious High Plains Drifter and was capped as Mrs. Dean Wormer in Animal House. My favorite Verna Bloom movie was also her favorite – Peter Fonda’s grievously underrated The Hired Hand.

Prolific character actor Richard Erdman (175 screen credits) is best known for playing Sgt. Hoffy Hoffman in Billy Wilder’s great Stalag 17. But Erdman’s best role (and my favorite Erdman performance) was as Dick Powell’s dipsomaniac wingman Delong in Cry Danger: “Sometimes I always drink too much“.

Julie Adams‘ 60-year career included many, many Westerns and lots and lots of TV. She co-starred with James Stewart in Anthony Mann’s Bend of the River, with Elvis Presley and with Rock Hudson, five times. Her fate was to be most remembered for Creature from the Black Lagoon. My favorite Julie Adams performance was as the sexually rapacious trophy wife of an entitle American tourist in Dennis Hopper’s The Last Movie.

Swiss actor Bruno Ganz is most remembered for playing Adolf Hitler in Downfall, the first post-war German film to portray the Führer (it only took 59 years); Ganz was the best movie Hitler, even better than Anthony Hopkins in The Bunker with its Hitler learns … YouTube memes. Ganz became well-known when Wings of Desire became a US art house hit in 1987. My favorite Bruno Ganz movie, however was the earlier Wim Wenders The American Friend, where he was matched with Dennis Hopper.

Seymour Cassel’s singular performances were often eccentric and exuberant – and always no bullshit. The most recent of Cassel’s 213 screen credits was in 2015, but he is best remembered for his association with writer-director John Cassavetes. Two of my favorite Cassel performances are in Cassavetes’ Minnie and Moscowitz (1971) and The Killing of a Chinese Bookie (1976).

Bibi Andersson‘s performances were at the core of the Ingmar Bergman canon. My favorite Andersson film is one of her very first, that most accessible Bergman movie, Wild Strawberries, in which she plays both the young woman an old man encounters and, in flashback, the young love she reminds him of.

Anna Karina, the Danish-born model who became a primary leading lady of the French New Wave, made films for iconic European directors like Godard, Rivette, Visconti and Fassbinder. She was married to Godard when he was still making good movies in the early 1960s.

Rip Torn will be remembered for playing Garry Shandling’s colorful producer Artie in 89 episodes of The Larry Sanders Show; as Artie, and in so many of his roles, Torn was able to illustrate the joy that can come from misbehavior. Torn was an accomplished character actor whose career encompassed scads of television, and movie roles ranging from his Oscar-nominated turn in Cross Creek to Judas Iscariot in the Biblical epic King of Kings. My favorite Rip Torn screen performance was in The Seduction of Joe Tynan; Torn played the good-timin’ junior Senator from Louisiana covering for the impending senility of the revered senior Senator (Melvyn Douglas). Torn also guided his much younger cousin Sissy Spacek as she broke into acting. His birth name (Elmore Rual) doesn’t matter because he followed his father in taking the family nickname of Rip.

Robert Forster was a stalwart of 70s and 80s TV, starring in his owned short-lived period detective series Banyon and then Twin Peaks. But thank God for Quentin Tarantino, who revived Forster’s career with the character of Max Cherry in Jackie Brown; Max’s streetwise strength and basic Midwestern decency was a perfect fit for Forster.

Peter Fonda, well-known as a son and brother of film mega-stars, had a prolific career (116 screen credits) dotted with some spectacular successes. Fonda’s most eternal legacy will be Easy Rider, a film he wrote and starred in, which was the seminal film of the Counter-culture. Most importantly, Easy Rider propelled the staggering movie studios into empowering a new generation of auteur filmmakers.

Danny Aiello started acting when he was forty, with the fine TV movie Bang the Drum Slowly and as one of the Rosato brothers in The Godfather II. Aiello worked for directors as varied as Woody Allen, Sergio Leone, Norman Jewison and James Toback. He was Oscar-nominated for his performance as Sal the pizzeria owner in Spike Lee’s Do the Right Thing.

7’3″ tall actor Peter Mayhew’s screen career centered around one unforgettable role, under a mask and bushel of fur as Chewbacca in the Stars Wars franchise.

Actor Jan Michael-Vincent could have had more of a career. In 1970, at age 25, he starred in the fine TV movie drama Tribes, and his performance as a hippie going into the Vietnam Era US Army was memorable. His looks, of the hunky/dreamy variety, got him less challenging and more forgettable work in the 1970s. His alcoholism and drug abuse killed his career, and he suffered permanent injuries from three vehicular accidents in the 1990s. He appeared in only five more movies after his third accident and none after 2002.

At age 22, actress Edith Scob was haunting in 1960’s Eyes Without a Face, and, 52 years later, helped Leos Carax pay homage to that performance in his unhinged Holy Motors.

Michael J. Pollard appeared 116 times on screen, but will always be remembered for his scene-stealing as C.W. Moss in Bonnie and Clyde.

Rene Auberjonois started his career in the iconoclastic Robert Altman films MASH (where he originated the role of Father Mulcahy), Brewster McCloud and McCabe & Mrs. Miller. Then he went on to rack up 227 screen credits, mostly on TV.

Sid Haig began his horror picture career in 1968 with Spider Baby. He finished with over 130 screen credits, including character roles in Emperor of the North and Jackie Brown and lots of TV work. But Haig is most well-known for his horror, and it’s hard to top his portrayal of Captain Spaulding in Rob Zombie’s House of 1000 Corpses.

coming up on TV – Dennis Hopper and Robby Müller make things weird in THE AMERICAN FRIEND

2019 Farewells: on the screen