The Last Movie

Director Dennis Hopper on the set

 

Hopper with cameraman László Kovács

 

Hopper on the set with Sam Fuller (with cigar)

 

Dennis Hopper and wife Daria Halprin at the Jack Tar Hotel, San Francisco

 

Hopper wth Jack Nicholson and Michelle Phillips. Phillips and Hopper were married briefly (all of eight days), and she appears in The Last Movie. She also dated Jack Nicholson, among other stars of that time.
 

THE LAST MOVIE               B-                   

USA  (108 mi)  1971  d:  Dennis Hopper

Very representative of the times (Nixon was in office), written, directed, edited, and starring Dennis Hopper (sensationally covered by the press), though not, however, the long lost masterpiece that many might have been hoping for.  While it’s certainly outside the Hollywood mainstream, nearly indecipherable in terms of content, showing prominent use of experimental or abstract techniques, yet there’s plenty of ugliness to this film, not the least of which is a blatant mistreatment of women, including several scenes of Hopper slapping women to the ground, which does not go unnoticed, as this kind of abusive mistreatment of women actually followed Hopper throughout his life and is not simply overlooked today as it was in the era when it was made.  Unfortunately, this is part of his long-lasting legacy (along with being a model of self-destruction), as it can’t be eradicated or easily removed from his artistic footprint, though to his credit, it’s rare for American directors to explore the effects of emotional violence, where his deplorable onscreen persona is more representative of the deranged psycho maniac that began to define Hopper’s acting choices later in his career, playing roles completely outside of and alienated from society’s mainstream.  While this became his specialty, he’s already fulfilling that role to some degree in this film, something of a follow-up to Easy Rider (1969), where the financial rewards from that film were so ridiculously excessive that Hopper’s descent into alcohol and drug abuse lasted well over a decade, typically consuming half a gallon of rum, 28 beers and three grams of cocaine daily, eventually shooting up speedballs (coke and heroin mixed), the lethal combination that killed John Belushi, almost always accompanied by an assortment of loaded guns he constantly waved around, chronicled in the rarely seen documentary The American Dreamer (1971), with Hopper obsessing over the film’s editing while in the throes of drug and alcohol addiction.  The film, however, is the initial descent into a metaphorical madness, given a million dollars and total artistic control by Universal Studios (which was cynically attempting to exploit the youth market), he set out for the unexplored realms of Peru, bringing along friends and coworkers, making something of a Billy the Kid home movie cowboy western starring Hopper himself (clean-shaven and with a new haircut) as an extra named Kansas in a film being made by an assertive cigar-chomping director, Sam Fuller, which features plenty of outlaws and bandits confronted by a fierce lawman, becoming a shoot-out spectacle of grandiose spills and pratfalls, almost ballet-like in its extended choreography, but an actor is accidentally killed on the set.  While no local Indians are included in Fuller’s film, they are a surrounding presence, like a Greek chorus, silently watching with interest.  Once the shooting’s finished, Hopper sticks around for a while, enjoying the majestic beauty of the mountainous landscape with a beautiful Indian girl from the local whorehouse, Maria (Stella Garcia), thinking he’s found paradise, but all is not as it seems, where his dream gets lost in a haze of alcohol and discontent, reeling from one disappointment to the next, lost in a seemingly mythical universe created by the Hollywood movie industry. 

The initial cut of a more conventional western was never released, though viewed and disparaged by his friend, fellow director Alejando Jodorowsky, urging him to re-edit the film with a more disjointed narrative that showed more cinematic ingenuity, which he apparently did.  When completed, the film was initially screened at the Venice Film Festival in a non-competitive year, with every entered film winning an award, but the studio was devastated at the results, finding a completely non-commercial film that was vilified by critics, quickly pulled from the theaters after a short run, and then remained something of an enigma for decades, something only spoken about but never seen, remaining in hibernation until a recent restoration was released nearly 50 years later.  Interestingly, the inspiration behind the film came from Hopper’s experience working on a John Wayne western directed by Henry Hathaway, THE SONS OF KATIE ELDER (1965), which was shot on location in Durango, Mexico, with Hopper wondering about the effect of the movie crew’s intrusion into the lives of the indigenous population, “I thought, my God, what’s going to happen when the movie leaves and the natives are left living in these Western sets?”  A few years later shooting in the small village of Chincheros located high in the Peruvian Andes (a region known at the time as the world capital of cocaine trafficking), a cadre of friends along with a boatload of cocaine were about to find out, as this becomes the central premise of the film.  The task at hand was having to manage seven tons of equipment that had to be sent to the top of an 11,000 foot mountain, some delivered by cargo plane, while having to negotiate with a military dictatorship that took a curious interest in watching a band of misfit American artists turn a remote mountain village into a drug infested, open-air brothel, all in the pretense of making a film about the adverse effects of colonialism.  Curiously, the movie runs for a full half-hour before the credits appear, “A Film By Dennis Hopper,” and then another fifteen minutes go by before the actual title appears.  This disorienting technique along with ignoring the script happens throughout, including magnificent mountain vistas shot by László Kovács, frequent flashbacks (jarring instantaneous images), flashes of “Segment Missing” onscreen, along with the use of overlapping dialogue and a strangely off-putting sound design.  These inventive techniques, however, are not particularly indicative of a thoughtful or inventive film, feeling clumsy throughout, narratively slight, not even well acted, as no performances stand out, especially the leads.  Instead it seems to survive on male bluster and raw bravado, more like Peckinpah than anything else, given a brush of the avant garde, feeling crude and strangely unfinished.  This is in stark contrast with Peter Fonda’s acid western with Warren Oates released the same year, The Hired Hand (1971), which is a gorgeous cinematic offering, artfully shot by Vilmos Zsigmond, creating dazzling imagery, where Fonda and Verna Bloom are simply brilliant together, often in wordless sequences.  It’s not mere coincidence that Fonda and Hopper were both obsessed and influenced by a fatalistic, existential element from the Gospel of Thomas (The Gospel of Thomas Collection - Translations and Resources) while making their respective films, though each responded quite differently.  To be fair, Fonda’s film is nearly as obscure and was equally dismissed by the critics, but it’s way ahead of its time, where acting and extreme artistic visualization take precedence over plot or narrative, actually foreshadowing the poetic work of Terrence Malick.

The opening sequences reveal a kind of rag-tag collective surrounding the film, given a documentary look as we peer into the makings of a film-within-a-film, with Fuller embracing a somewhat dictatorial style, shouting orders, giving directions, where all the people coming up and speaking to him after each shot feels more like concerted mayhem, a brief insight into the anxious hysteria surrounding filmmaking, where multiple things are continually happening simultaneously, where it’s hard to sense any order.  The refrains of a young Kris Kristofferson (an actor in the film) singing “Me and Bobby McGee” with Rita Coolidge (KRIS KRISTOFFERSON & RITA COOLIDGE - Me And Bobby McGee ... YouTube, 3:16) weave in and out of this opening section along with glimpses of the countryside, with Kansas riding his horse through the open terrain, eventually stumbling onto the movie set in town, getting scolded by the director for interrupting a scene, then falling in line and performing his duties until it’s a wrap, where they all get together for a rambunctious party afterwards (which is basically a collection of Hopper’s friends), featuring plenty of singing, including Michelle Phillips (who was married to Hopper afterwards, an LSD-laced misadventure that lasted all of eight days).  One of the more memorable sequences is a long tracking shot that reveals different singers in every room, each with a distinct character, with Kansas slowly wandering through the rooms, with the camera probing both inside and out, all feeling jumbled together, like a layered effect, each representing a different mindset or state of consciousness, where he breaks down in tears afterwards.  By morning they’ve all vanished, leaving him in the arms of Maria, riding out into the countryside, blending into an Edenesque natural world, seen getting naked and making love under a remote mountain waterfall, made all the more humorous as a band of young children march past on an overhead road led by the priest (Tomas Milian), who continually glances at the carnal scene as they walk by.  While the shot has all the elements of an exotic fantasy, especially as it’s used to enhance interest in Western audiences, it also holds a different meaning, symbolic of the white rape of the indigenous culture, bringing to mind a dictum of filmmaker Jean-Luc Godard, from an interview in 1970, “A movie is not reality, it is only a reflection.  Bourgeois filmmakers focus on the reflection of reality.  We are concerned with the reality of that reflection.”  This becomes more evident as their relationship evolves, as Maria becomes more and more interested in consumer culture, wanting to be showered with Western gifts, treated like a “white” girlfriend, claiming she must have regular beauty treatments, have a General Electric refrigerator, a fur coat, and even a swimming pool, where she can then put all these expensive items on display in front of her own people, like recognizable signs of success.  The most obvious example is a white mink shawl belonging to Mrs. Anderson (Julie Adams), an extravagantly wealthy wife of a millionaire American industrialist in town, repeatedly nagging him until he goes through the depths of raunchy depravity to get it for her, reversing roles, where he becomes the humiliated and sexually demeaned prostitute for a mindlessly sex-crazed American wife.

Like Maria, the local Indian village is equally corrupted by the influence of the movie, bringing chaotic violence and madness to the land, replicating their actions with handmade items resembling fake set construction and a wooden movie camera, with a local leader barking out the orders, while the townspeople play along, getting into fisticuffs, but for real, as they don’t buy into the idea that it’s fake, so people actually get hurt.  When the priest tries to intervene, offering a return to existing order, they ignore him, caught up in this wild new idea that allows them to play out their own indigenous fantasies of mimicking Hollywood.  But in projecting this new world, all moral order disappears, with villagers actually shooting and killing their neighbors (invoking a blood sacrifice).  The priest brings in Kansas to educate villagers about making movies, but he is ignored as well, suggesting cinema is not an educating mechanism, and instead he is thrown into the role of the actor chosen to die, where he grows fearful they may mistakenly kill him for real, ironically becoming the Fay Wray sacrificial figure from King Kong (1933).  Hollywood exports the sex and violence in movies almost exclusively for commerce, with little thought about the inevitable consequences.  The cultural insensitivity of this film is glaring, where the poisonous influence is immediate and crudely visceral, leaving a terrible stain of violent excess and moral decay that includes excessive drinking and Western debauchery, as Kansas spends nearly all of his time in raunchy bordellos and saloons, with a perpetual bottle in his hand, getting drunk, chasing other women, and then treating Maria like crap, thinking only of himself.  This myopic view symbolizes the senseless repetition of similar films coming out of Hollywood, refusing to develop a social conscience, instead it’s all about the bottom line, beholden to the almighty dollar.  Yet it’s clear society is influenced by what happens onscreen, creating stereotypes and myths that last for decades, like the mythological macho bravado of John Wayne as the virile cowboy on the range, while continually stereotyping Indians as savages, who get little if any character development, never perceived as “human” when for over a century they have been projected as “subhuman.”  Hollywood also provides fairy tale endings, like the handsome prince that always saves the young princess, which is little more than a fantasy, yet it becomes an intrinsic aspect of every young woman’s dreams, wondering why they never meet anyone as handsome or charming as the Hollywood elite, like Bogart, Clark Gable, or Errol Flynn, as their glamorous image becomes an impossible to replicate aspect of young girls growing up who are sure to be disappointed, yet the industry bears no responsibility whatsoever and rarely engages in a meaningful discussion with the audience, instead it’s a one-way conversation.  In that vein, Hopper insists upon providing no happy ending, making a film that is deliberately told out of order, accentuating the flaws and imperfections of cinema, turning his film into an abstract expression of grim futility, directly challenging the Hollywood notion of cinematic illusion and the idea of success, featuring the John Buck Wilkin song “Only When It Rains,”  The Final 'Only When It Rains' Segment of Dennis Hopper's 'The Last ...  YouTube (4:30).  At heart, this is a subversive take on the Hollywood dream, but the sloppy execution is a bawdy tale of drug and alcohol-fueled excess, perhaps not the right canvas to deliver this message.  

The American Friend (Der amerikanische Freund)

THE AMERICAN FRIEND (Der amerikanische Freund)         A-                   

Germany  France  (125 mi)  1977  d:  Wim Wenders

Located seventy miles inland on the River Elbe, Hamburg is Germany’s second largest city and Europe’s second largest port. The city was largely rebuilt after being devastated by Allied bombers in World War II. Its Reeperbahn neighborhood is renowned as a red-light district (now greatly reduced) and as the proving ground for the Beatles. With the move of the main dockland downriver, the old harbor front has become the site of HafenCity, Europe’s largest urban development project.

As always, the factual city and the cinematic city overlap but are not quite the same. With gulls wheeling across the sky, a tang of North Sea in the breeze, and massive cranes towering over the harbor (which rarely seems more than a stone’s throw away from the action), Hamburg is German cinema’s signifier of flux. It is a city in transit and transition. It is a place of departures--whether by bulky container ship or sleek bullet train. Even more so, it is a place of arrivals, often by foreigners and outsiders--soulful Greek restaurateurs, seductive Italian chefs, mysterious Americans in cowboy hats--who come to imperil and invigorate the regime of German tradition and orderliness.

—Martin Rubin, City in Transit: Hamburg on Film - Gene Siskel Film Center

Following the magnificent Kings of the Road (Im Lauf der Zeit) Road Trilogy Pt. 3 (1976), Wenders has crafted another existential road movie about angst-ridden people, lost souls who search for identity against the bleakest of landscapes, ignoring plot for the most part, where the mystery of the journey matters more than the destination, where the influence of America is unmistakable, casting two legendary American directors, Nicholas Ray and Sam Fuller in minor roles, while pulling Dennis Hopper out of his self-induced drug and alcohol phase to play Ripley was a stroke of inspiration, as he brings a tormented mania to the role where his eerie presence spells trouble whenever he appears, like an Angel of Death.  Wenders, apparently, initially wanted John Cassavetes, but he turned it down and suggested Hopper for the role.  Creating a cinema of alienation that is almost exclusively men, lost in a world they don’t particularly understand, where even the film itself appears to meander aimlessly at times, drawn to painfully beautiful landscapes with endless shots of blank skies and featureless horizons, showing a fascination with flickering television screens and crumbling, deserted buildings, yet Wenders is a visionary director that allows the viewer to drift in and out of the intoxicating atmosphere.  While his 70’s films brought him international acclaim as the vanguard of German New Wave, along with Fassbinder and Herzog, with Wenders there is also indisputably an American influence, where the director grew up with a defeated Germany appalled by their Nazi past, and much like Kurosawa’s late 40’s and 50’s films, embraced the conquering culture of America, where you’re likely to find jukeboxes, coke machines, cowboy hats, neon signs, flashy American cars, and references to the American pop music of Bob Dylan or Chuck Berry.  But perhaps more importantly, Wenders belongs with the modernist tradition of European art film exemplified by Antonioni in L’AVVENTURA (1960) and RED DESERT (1964), who created dramas of alienation and emptiness, predominately shot out of doors, featuring characters that wander aimlessly through bleak city landscapes that provide a starkly beautiful backdrop, where according to cinematographer Ed Lachman, an assistant to Robby Müller on the film, he asserts that “light and landscape are actors” in Wenders’ films.  Made in Hamburg, Paris, and New York, much of it in English, the film is modern and experimental while paying tribute to the great film noir tradition of the post-World War II era, drawing upon gangsters and the suspense thriller, becoming something of a commercial success on the international markets, but especially in America.  It bears some similarity with Nicholas Ray’s BIGGER THAN LIFE (1956), where a character has been diagnosed with a rare blood disease and may only have a short time left to live, which leads to the inevitable catastrophes that follow. 

Nicole Huber and Ralph Stern explore the transnational wanderings of Wenders from Places Journal, April 2014, From the American West to West Berlin - Places Journal:

Emptiness, vacancy and a camera — whether still or movie — are the starting points for our own exploration of transnationalism and the German city. In the case of Wim Wenders, this framework lends structure and unity to a career that encompasses the early German and German-American “road movies” Alice in the Cities (1974) and Kings of the Road (1976), the later explorations of Paris, Texas, and the “vertical road movie” Wings of Desire (1987), and much later, Don’t Come Knocking (2005). The momentous events underscoring these films are not only associated with emptiness and with landscapes in turmoil but also, particularly in Wings of Desire, with the rise of National Socialism, the tumultuous destruction of World War II, and the resulting emptiness of postwar inner-city “ruin landscapes” (Trümmerlandschaften); an equally important unifying theme is the generational rupture between fathers and sons following such seismic historical events. In this framework, the American West (and the American Western) served a specific and telling purpose for the postwar German West: to envision both traumatic upheaval and utopian projection. This projection was as much of a socio-cultural project as it was a cinematic fantasy. Wenders has commented that his “first memory of America is of a mythical land where everything was much better.”

[…] Other West German directors have explored America; Werner Herzog moves from a bizarrely distinctive Berlin milieu to an equally specific rural Wisconsin in Stroszek (1977), and Percy Adlon drops a lost Bavarian soul into the heart of the Mojave Desert in Out of Rosenheim / Bagdad Café (1987). But Wenders is the only German director who consistently negotiates the borders of past and present, city and country, Germany and the American West in his search for a postwar identity and a correlative mythology and imagery. Not unlike Travis, who mutely staggers into the frame after crossing the border from Mexico, Wenders and his generation were literally born into a “landscape in turmoil,” the ruins left in the devastating wake of world war; a topography of absence and vacancy, of lost traditions, generations and faith. Wenders has described postwar Germany in difficult terms: “I don’t think that any other country has had such a loss of faith in its own images, stories, and myths as we have.”

[…] Indeed, Wim Wenders has been characterized by both his “obsession with America” and his role in the New German Cinema, the “national cinema of aesthetic experimentation and political opposition” that includes also such luminaries as Rainer Werner Fassbinder, Werner Herzog, Volker Schlöndorff and Margarethe von Trotta.  By 1984, the year Paris, Texas opened and won the Palme d’Or at the Cannes Film Festival, Wenders had extensive experience with crossing the borders between West Germany, West Berlin and the American West. Born in 1945, just months after the end of the war, Wenders views his contributions to New German Cinema as shaped by his “distanced relationship to Germany as a ‘fatherland.'”  Belonging to a “generation without fathers,” without a “tradition of our own,” Wenders draws heavily upon non-German traditions, particularly (as we’ve seen) the American genres of the Western and the road movie.

While Wenders’ early films were often described as “angst, alienation and America,” THE AMERICAN FRIEND continues to explore earlier themes from Kings of the Road (Im Lauf der Zeit) Road Trilogy Pt. 3 like male friendship as well as a connection between Germany and America, while also consciously examining cinema itself, adapted from a popular 1974 novel Ripley’s Game by American novelist Patricia Highsmith, who also wrote the source novel for Hitchcock’s STRANGERS ON A TRAIN (1951).  As an indication of her popularity, the rights to all of Highsmith’s novels written up to that point had already been bought for various film productions, where Highsmith sent Wenders a draft manuscript before the book was even published.  The story centers around the dubious presence of Tom Ripley (Dennis Hopper), a dislocated American in a cowboy hat living alone in a massive estate in the German countryside outside Hamburg, where he’s involved with American art forger Derwatt (Nicholas Ray) in a criminal racket selling forged paintings.  Offended by a curt offhanded comment made to him by Jonathan (Bruno Ganz), an art restorer and picture framer who he learns has been diagnosed with a rare blood disease that may be incurable, so Ripley plots to involve Jonathan in some gangland murders, thinking he’s got nothing to lose, veering into John Cassavetes territory in The Killing of a Chinese Bookie (1978) which was made immediately “after” this film was released.  Jonathan’s shop is centrally located downtown, where what immediately stands out is the city itself, a dilapidated downtown harbor location in view of ships coming in and going out, with dozens of construction cranes dotting the skyline.  Impressively shot by Robby Müller, this is likely the most stylish Highsmith adaptation, where Wenders has shifted the story’s emphasis with the casting of Dennis Hopper as Ripley, certainly not the image that comes to mind for most readers, as Ripley has that calm demeanor of someone you can trust, while Hopper’s Ridley, even at his most restrained, is a bit wacko, adding a furious intensity that would otherwise not be there.  Wenders delves into his personal eccentricities as if it was part of the landscape, using his edgy, nervous energy that is always about to explode as the perfect contrast to the more politely refined Jonathan, a man with responsibilities who is married with a young son.  It is only the prospect of outlandish sums of money that he can use to take care of his family after he’s gone that lures him into the nefarious activities of this seedy underworld. 

Ray’s BIGGER THAN LIFE is a portrait of domestic oppression, with seemingly no way out, while Jonathan’s fascination with a life in crime becomes pallitable only as a response to the rigidity of his own domestic plight.  According to Robert Phillip Kolker and Peter U. Beicken in The Films of Wim Wenders: Cinema as Vision and Desire, 1993:

For Nicholas Ray, and many other American filmmakers of the 50’s, domesticity was itself a kind of abandonment, a slippage into the comfortable and necessary at the expense of male freedom.  Wenders stretches this ambivalence across the poles of the characters’ despair.  They remain, even more than Ray’s characters, lonely and hopeless in solitude or in domesticity; adventure exists only as momentary and inauthentic respite.  “Pity the poor immigrant,” Ripley sings (recalling the old Bob Dylan song) as he sits abandoned by Jonathan, who has gone off with his wife to die, alone on the beach near Hamburg — like Philip Winter on the Jersey shore at the beginning of Alice in the Cities (1974). 

Hopper’s Ripley is turned into a lone cowboy with no wife or servants and none of the busy domestic life as portrayed in the book, instead he spends lots of time alone in his house talking into a tape recorder, asking himself ponderous questions aloud, or taking Polaroid selfies as if he’s trying to figure out who he is, shouting out to no one in particular, “I am confused.”  Vulgar and crass, while also ambiguous and manipulative, he defines himself with the phrase “I make money,” suggesting shady dealings and a career in criminality while at the same time Hopper is associated with the 60’s American counterculture of Easy Rider (1969), actually singing a few verses of Ballad of Easy Rider, “The river flows/It flows to the sea/Wherever that river goes/That’s where I want to be.”  His residence has a green Canada Dry neon sign overlooking the pool table and jukebox, where he becomes synonymous with American symbols like Coca Cola, his cowboy hat, a Thunderbird car, a yellow New York taxicab, or Marlboro cigarettes, all of which have an influence on European culture.  Ganz’s deliberately underplayed Jonathan, on the other hand, is quiet and introspective, preferring to work alone where he uses his hands and becomes familiar with the feel of wood and the various scents involved with his profession.  While Hopper is manic and explosive, the picture of unpredictability, adding a sense of danger throughout, Ganz, more of an established star of the German stage at this point in his career, is methodical and intellectual, where he meets with his doctor and discusses the results of his lab tests with the calm reserve of a business transaction.  Jonathan is besieged by thoughts of dejection and desperation, where he can’t stop this feeling of his whole world disappearing, where initially, the idea of murdering someone for money seems preposterous, but the thrill of excitement running through his veins adds an element of vitality back into his step that he can’t explain, certainly not to his wife, who begins to suspect something foul is afoot with his sudden association with Ripley, something that is otherwise unthinkable for a cultured and sophisticated man.  His initial disgust at the certainty that the Derwatt painting was a fake quickly fades into the past as he develops an amicable relationship with Ripley, where both share a deep sense of alienation and existential anguish, exchanging small gifts as peace offerings.  Together they comprise a running commentary on the often testy relations between America and Europe.  

Ripley is initially approached by French underworld figure Raoul Minot (Gérard Blain) to murder some rival gangsters, but he defers, suggesting Jonathan for the job, spreading rumors of his impending demise, creating a palpable sense of paranoia creeping into his life, where themes of real and fake from his professional career start intruding into his personal life as well, where there is literally no one he can trust.  This uneasy frame of mind makes it easier to enter into a surreptitious lifestyle of secret deals with the criminal underworld, as if he already has one foot in the grave where he is subconsciously communicating with the dead.  This otherworldliness offers him a sense of hope and freedom that otherwise escapes him, where Ripley visits him in his store both before and after the hit, never letting on his connection to the crime, where they develop a curious friendship.  Minot is so impressed with the job that, to Ripley’s surprise, he orders another hit, this time taking place on a moving Parisian Metro train.  Minot is a modernist gangster that probes the psychological state of mind of his young protégé hitman, continually playing upon his weaknesses, alternately coaxing him while offering substantial bribes, raising the incentive by promising to get him into a prestigious hospital in Paris for a second medical opinion, which apparently seals the deal.   Highsmith’s initial reaction to the film was utter disgust, particularly with Hopper as Ripley, but after seeing it a second time, she became convinced that the film captures the essence of the Ripley character better than any other film adaptation, praising Hopper’s performance, calling the film stylish, where she was especially impressed with the scenes on the train, which rival any Hitchcock production.  It’s a thrilling and exhilarating sequence with plenty of tension and suspense, where Jonathan’s near panic in such cramped, claustrophobic quarters closing in around him when things don’t go as planned is a beautifully edited, tightly compressed murder scene.  While it remains unclear just who Jonathan is killing, or what connection they have to anyone else in the film, the real connection is to film noirs of the 40’s, where the atmosphere is so thick you could almost choke on it.    

Again, Robert Phillip Kolker and Peter U. Beicken in The Films of Wim Wenders: Cinema as Vision and Desire, 1993:

We may recall the sequence in The American Friend in which Jonathan Zimmermann, urged on by Ripley, makes contact with a French gangster, who urges him to assassinate an alleged American mafioso, “an American Jew from New Jersey.”  And he does it, in a chase sequence through the Paris Metro that somewhat disguises what Wenders is doing: demonstrating how easy it is for a German petit bourgeois to become a tool in somebody else’s scheme and reenact the past political crimes of his culture, abandoning conscience, reason, and humanity…

So amid the shared pain of unhappy heterosexuality, Wenders’ men seek solace with each other and attempt to find the oedipal roots of their unhappiness.  They finally look past women to the search for their father, and through their father, toward Germany’s history and its manifestation of cinema.  For cinema, as always in Wenders’ films, is the mediation through which his characters attempt to discover themselves and the expression of the possibilities of their salvation.  As Wenders said, “ No other narrative treats the idea of identity with greater urgency and justification than cinema.” 

This trip into the lurid underworld both fascinates and repels, where the perspective of Jonathan’s wife Marianne (played by the director’s wife Lisa Kreuzer), is perhaps the most unclouded, as she peppers her husband on his lies and secret affairs that most definitely affect her and their son, especially with Ripley hanging around the apartment as if he owns the place, where she notices a substantial change in her husband’s behavior, where for her, there is a greater fear of the unknown.  Nonetheless, Jonathan trots out the door after the aforementioned Ripley, leaving his wife in a state of unanticipated hysteria, as none of this makes sense to her.  By the time she figures it out, she makes an amusing reappearance, figuring prominently in the apocalyptic finale.  The film provides a host of cinematic tributes, not the least of which are cameo roles of Sam Fuller and Nicholas Ray, but also French director Jean Eustache, while also starring Gérard Blain as underworld figure Raoul Minot, an actor with a connection to the French New Wave, working for both Truffaut in his short LES MISTONS (1957) and Chabrol in LES COUSINS (1959), while also taking a page out of Godard’s PIERROT LE FOU (1965), with both films ending with explosions on deserted beaches where the surviving character is named Marianne.  Taking a peek into the home of lead character Jonathan (Bruno Ganz), he has a zoetrope, while his son has a lampshade that animates a color version of the infamous locomotive in Buster Keaton’s THE GENERAL (1926) (http://www.doctormacro.com/Images/Keaton,%20Buster/Annex/Annex%20-%20Keaton,%20Buster%20%28General,%20The%29_04.jpg), while Jonathan and Tom Ripley exchange gifts of optical toys that are themselves references to cinema.  Sam Fuller plays a cigar-chomping crime boss, with a femme fatale girl constantly in tow, who amusingly runs away at the first sign of trouble.  Who knew that a man on the verge of death by an incurable disease would make a great hitman, or that murder would invigorate him?  Wenders creates a visually suggestive look of Hamburg that is highly atmospheric throughout, creating an expressionist red-colored sky at one point following a death, making excellent use of the zig-zagging escalator in the train station, reminiscent of the devastating final scene of Fassbinder’s FOX AND HIS FRIENDS (1975) which was shot in the Munich subway, but the shifting storyline only grows more hallucinatory, veering into a world of cinematic poetry.  Near the end, Ripley sings the opening line of the Dylan song, “I pity the poor immigrant who…” before his thoughts wander off, while what’s not shown are the lyrics that follow, that perfectly describe Ripley’s state of mind, “…wishes he would’ve stayed home, who uses all his power to do evil, but in the end is always left so alone.”