The American Friend

The American Friend

There is something pleasantly wrong about making a thriller and then throwing away its ability to be understood, but this method works for Wim Wenders in “The American Friend.” He challenges us to acknowledge that we watch (and read) thrillers for the atmosphere as much as the plot. And then he gives us so much atmosphere we are drowning in it; this was the most expensive film of the New German Wave in 1979, and one of the richest visually.

But then the New German Cinema (late 1960s-early 1980s) often looked weird and artificial. In that sense if no other it resembled the great days of German expressionism which were ended by Hitler: They use extremes of color and lighting, they follow characters to the far shores of human behavior, they relish a sometimes self-conscious use of the camera. As with The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (1920), they seem to give an additional dimension deliberately artificial to their characters and stories; flat realism does not interest them.

Maybe that’s why they were the most interesting new force in European cinema since the French New Wave twenty years before and maybe too, that’s why audiences shied away from them. They make movies where you have to make up your mind; you can’t just sit there and let them rub you down.

The key directors were Werner Herzog, Rainer Werner Fassbinder, Volker Schlöndorff, Margarethe von Trotta, Reinhard Hauff and Wim Wenders. Of them all, Wenders is probably the most accessible, the most direct-and – he claims it himself the most “Americanized.” And since “The American Friend” is mostly in English and in color ,and has a Hollywood star or two (Dennis Hopper ,looking about half recovered from being shotgunner at end of “Easy Rider”), it doesn’t throw up the barriers of some of Herzog’s and Fassbinder’s work.

The trouble is, however, that it doesn’t show Wenders at his best. His “Kings of the Road” (1976) is one of the great films of the ‘70s. “The American Friend” lacks the same intensity and unsparing eye. It’s deliberately murky, I guess, in its story about a criminal and personal triangle involving an American who becomes a middleman between a French gangster and a German picture framer. The gangster wants to hire a hit man; the German takes the job because he thinks he’s dying and wants to leave his family provided for; and things get sticky when it turns out the Frenchman faked the diagnosis.

Do you understand this? Don’t try too hard; Wenders skips chapters of the story to focus on the characters’ emotion and their cities (the film moves through New York, Paris, Hamburg and Munich, sometimes without telling you where it is). He shows the growth of friendship between a German man and an American a friendship with dangerous potential for both men’s lives that recalls the Orson Welles and Joseph Cotten characters in “The Third Man.”

But look at it: The colors are bright and deep. The lighting and the exaggeration of setting are overdone. Some scenes have extraordinary subtlety. Others are aggressively cheap and garish to look at. That’s pretty much what Wenders has done here, and maybe it isn’t enough. He understood them better when he made “Kings of the Road.” He had more style in “The American Friend,” but there were missing people.

Still, it is interesting to see this movie in context of some later Wenders films that show an even greater realization that people live in cities. Think about Berlin in “Wings of Desire” (1988) and its sequel “Faraway, So Close!” (1993); Los Angeles in “Hammett” (1983); Tokyo in “Tokyo-Ga” (1985), which nobody saw; or a man who just hangs out with nothing to do but get drawn into daily life while hanging around Lisbon in “Lisbon Story” (1995).

They alternate with road movies like “Kings of the Road,” “Paris, Texas” (1984) or an odyssey through 20 cities called “Until the End of the World” (1991). His favorite subject seems to be: A man roams alone through the cities of the world looking for either big or little truths.

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