Strangers On a Train

 

Alfred Hitchcock with his daughter Patricia

Hitchcock with Farley Granger

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

STRANGERS ON A TRAIN               B                                                                                    USA  (101 mi)  1951  d:  Alfred Hitchcock

Never as popular as Hitchcock’s more star-driven material, but this is one nasty piece of work, ultimately carrying extensive psychological implications, accentuating the irrational impulses that lie just under the surface in all of us, enlarging and expanding them into something larger-than-life, driven by an unsuppressed inner drive and personal obsession, with catastrophic consequences.  In this case, an ordinary man who feels he hasn’t accomplished anything in his life is driven to murder, as if that act calls attention to himself and somehow makes him important.  Living in the shadow of his mother and overly dominant father, Bruno Anthony (Robert Walker) has been forced to repress his inner impulses and desires, expelled from three colleges for drinking and gambling, leading a frivolous, overly protected life of aimlessness and leisure, almost as if conjured from the imagination of Truman Capote.  A chance meeting on a train with a total stranger opens the floodgates, taking full advantage, finally “doing something” for a change.  The man he meets is Guy Haines (Farley Granger), already intimately familiar with all facets of his life from having seen his picture cavorting with wealthy socialites in the society pages of the newspapers, as he’s a top-ranked amateur tennis player who’s divorcing his adulterous wife while romancing a Senator’s daughter, trading in his provincial small-town life for one that exudes power and prestige, ambitiously climbing the social ladder, perhaps even entering into the world of politics.  Enthralled by his success and public esteem, Bruno wants to share some of the glamor, first prying into his personal affairs, then completely out of the blue Bruno thinks he can help Guy, proposing a hare-brained idea of exchanging perfect murders, suggesting he would murder his ex-wife while Guy would murder his father, completely stymying police, knowing they each have no connection to the victims, as they don’t even know each other and have no motive for the murders, while also ensuring full-proof alibis.  Guy flippantly ignores such a ludicrous idea as utterly ridiculous, presented as a decent guy, but his subconscious wants to murder his irresponsible, no-good wife, and this dark side of him is channeled through the doppelganger of a nihilistic killer, where Bruno kicks into high gear, given his marching orders, finally offering meaning to his life, quickly carrying out his murder by strangulation, shown with extreme detail at an amusement park, then suffocatingly hounds Guy to carry out his end of the bargain, with that pressure drastically altering his life with increasing anxiety and dread.  Prior to this, the only other Hitchcock film to show a sustained murder sequence onscreen was a knifing sequence in Blackmail (1929) that was largely depicted in shadows behind a curtain, carried out by Anny Ondra, Hitchcock’s first icy blonde, in response to a sexual assault.  The vast majority of Hitchcock murders occur either offscreen or are suggested by a brief flash of a gun.  Hitchcock adds an overtly gay element to Bruno’s character, the male counterpart to the female homoeroticism in Rebecca (1940), viewed at the time as a social deviant, already submerged into the margins of society, basically suppressing his inner desires, where he is routinely overlooked and made to feel invisible, denied free expression.  Like Norman Bates in Psycho (1960) or Brandon Shaw in ROPE (1948), Bruno is a tortured and neurotic soul, the product of a doting and dizzyingly eccentric mother (Marion Lorne) and a dysfunctional childhood.  The act of murder is his sexual release, which is why he’s so drawn to the idea, an embodiment of the kinds of submerged desires that are subversive and dangerous and exist in all of us, yet they usually remain under the surface as idyll daydreams.  Guy recognizes early on that the man is an uncontrollable psychopath and tries to keep safely distanced from him, yet Bruno’s stalking presence tightens the noose around his own neck, perpetually joined at the hip, becoming one and the same, unable to shake him, like a shadow following him wherever he goes, seen standing like a statue on the massive white marble steps in front of the Jefferson Memorial, invariably threatening to implicate him in the murder.  While he had nothing to do with it, Guy is made to feel like he was the one who carried out the murder.  Hitchcock was particularly inspired by the cinematic possibilities of exploring dual criss-crossing relationships, which was such a prominent influence in Shadow of a Doubt (1943), but also Psycho (1960) and FRENZY (1972), while using a metaphor for cinema much beloved by Hitchcock (and DeMille), the moving train, giving way to one that would be popular with Hitchcock’s followers in the 70’s and 80’s, an amusement park ride.    

Adapting Patricia Highsmith’s first novel in 1950, acquired for the minimal industry fee of $7500, the film had a troubled background with multiple screenwriters, starting with Whitfield Cook, who initially converted Bruno from an alcoholic to a spoiled, overly repressed mama’s boy, adding a homoerotic subtext, then bringing in Raymond Chandler, thinking he needed a prestigious big name to sell the picture, but he and Hitchcock were continually at odds and never worked well together.  Some believe this film is fundamentally about homosexuality, and that the criss-cross agreement was never really about murder, but sex, and Chandler had a problem writing a screenplay with gay implications, while that was essentially what attracted Hitchcock to the material.  Additionally, Chandler relied upon realism throughout his career, where plausibility matters, yet Hitchcock could care less, finding it cinematically intriguing, where in his mind it plays out like a wish-fulfillment fantasy.  Turned down by Thornton Wilder, John Steinbeck, and Dashiell Hammett, who were not enamored by the story, Hitchcock finally tried Ben Hecht, but he was too busy, instead recommending his assistant, Czenzi Ormonde, who had never written a screenplay, but she collaborated with Hitchcock’s wife, Alma Reville, and production associate Barbara Keon, bringing substantially new life into the story.  While this is subversive filmmaking of the highest order, dialogue remains weak and the human element is altogether missing.  In addition, of the two lead characters one of them never really comes to life, with Farley Granger never once feeling substantial or that he matters, instead feeling vacuously wooden, out-acted by the more flamboyant Walker throughout, as Bruno is easily the more interesting character, with Hitchcock clearly identifying with his madness, becoming one of the iconic Hitchcock villains.  Yet despite the unsavory subject matter, it’s a fairly conventional style, with routine movie music written by Dimitri Tiomkin, nothing out of the ordinary, shot in an expressionist black and white style by Robert Burks, who does provide a few novel touches at the beginning and at the end, receiving the only Academy Award nomination, but most all the secondary characters feel lifeless and inert, particularly Leo G. Carroll as Senator Morton and Ruth Roman as socialite girlfriend Anne Morton, where watching them is like watching paint dry.  Hitchcock does add an intriguing element in Anne’s younger sister Barbara (Patricia Hitchcock, the director’s own daughter), who seems to thrive on bad taste and unsavory content, like a black sheep in the family, yet she physically bears a strange resemblance to the murdered wife Miriam (Kasey Rogers, though the studio changed her name to Laura Elliott), playing on Bruno’s fractured consciousness, figuring prominently in the outcome.  Extended screen time is given to filming a completely amateurish tennis match, Hitchcock’s favorite sport, apparently, and a visual metaphor for the entire back and forth structure of the film, yet it leaves the film in a state of suspended animation, generating no excitement or tension, though supposedly wrought with tension as Guy has an underlying motive to end the match early, as he’s on to the devious actions of Bruno, hoping to prevent him from planting incriminating evidence against Guy at the scene of the crime, as he has Guy’s personally engraved cigarette lighter from their initial train encounter.  This sequence is easily the weakest element of the film, where watching the match is like watching the inevitability of time passing, mirroring the plight of Bruno, who arrives at the amusement park early and has to wait until nightfall, growing increasingly impatient (extended even further when he drops the lighter down a sewer drain, frantically calling for help in retrieving it), needing the cover of darkness to carry out his dastardly scheme.  Hitchcock may have felt his back and forth editing strategy was ramping up the suspense by keeping viewers at bay, but this entire section falls flat and is only recharged once the match is over and Guy makes his way to the amusement park, inadvertently bringing with him an accumulating network of police that follow him every step of the way. 

Easily the best sequence is the murder itself, which comes early in this film, where even the opening sequence identifying the two lead characters is shrouded in mystery, showing only their shoes as they walk onto the train and sit down, where their shoes inadvertently touch, and suddenly the story kicks into life, with each politely introducing themselves.  While the film explores dark moral boundaries, the film differs radically from the novel, where Guy is actually blackmailed into killing Bruno’s father, ravaged by guilt afterwards, losing everything, a much more devastating outcome, but not something that motion picture studios would allow from their leading men, coinciding with a dubious morality purge during the wave of anticommunism from McCarthyism and Hollywood blacklisting and the heightened conservatism of the Eisenhower years when homosexuality was not only considered taboo, but a crime, as much a threat to society as communism.  Guy has an emotionally distraught scene with his spiteful ex-wife Miriam that does not go well, hoping she would agree to a divorce, which she had been insisting upon all along, but suddenly changes course and refuses to cooperate, blatantly sabotaging his plans, making things as difficult for him as possible, which he doesn’t take well, growing visibly upset in public, making threats against her.  This opens the door for Bruno, who follows her out to the amusement park, accompanied by two men, joining them from afar as they move from event to event, with Miriam picking up on his nefarious presence through steady eye contact, actually flirting with him, thoroughly enjoying herself in a night on the town.  The scene of the film is the Tunnel of Love, a boat ride in the amusement park where the opposite shore entitled Magic Isle has a reputation of being a lover’s lane, yet shadows are formed on the walls of the tunnel as they approach.  Miriam is on the first boat with two male friends while Bruno trails behind on another boat.  As Bruno approaches Miriam’s boat, we see his shadow overpowers and actually “swallows” Miriam’s shadow, creating an absurd sense of menace, adding a sinister implication of danger and lurking fear.  What follows is never transparent, as the scene of Miriam’s strangulation is portrayed through the view of the reflections of her glasses which have dropped to the ground, drowned out by the incessant sounds of the carnival organ.  This intentional distortion may symbolize Bruno’s psychotic mind while the consuming darkness of the image adds an elusive element of deviousness and uncertainty.  Furthermore, this shot conveys the ghastly horror that we are witness to, hearing her male friends playfully calling out for her, unsuspecting the presence of evil lurking nearby, discovering her lifeless body on the ground as Bruno quickly makes his escape.  Hitchcock is quoted as saying, “Film your murders like love scenes, and film your love scenes like murders.”  This scene perfectly encapsulates that description, as does the finale, returning to the scene of the crime, with Guy in hot pursuit of Bruno.  Hitchcock places the drama on a merry-go-round carousel that suddenly snaps, rapidly increasing out of control to a delirious speed, with the two rivals struggling to gain the upper hand, two men locked in an embrace with homoerotic implications, while innocent children are screaming in panic.  Hitchcock has a diminutive man actually crawl under the speeding carousel as the scene is being shot in order to access the controls, jeopardizing his life in the process, an act he regretted afterwards, as it was too close for comfort.  However, Hitchcock’s extraordinary visual composition and equally brilliant editing compacts the final action, heightening the emotional tension and suspense, drawing viewers into the center of the maelstrom, bringing the film to a jarring conclusion.  This film had a huge impact on Wim Wenders, who largely used it as an American reference point in making The American Friend (Der amerikanische Freund) (1977), with murder figuring prominently in both, each relying upon source material from Patricia Highsmith, yet Wenders’ absurdly expressionist stylishness lacks the psychological precision that drives the Hitchcock film, maintaining more of an existential mindset, which is typically European.  Sadly, Robert Walker died shortly after completing principal photography on the film at the age of 32, suffering an adverse reaction to a sedative, coupled with drinking, leading to an acute allergic reaction to the drug, unfortunately cutting his life all too short. 

Note

Hitchcock’s cameo comes early in the film, seen boarding a train carrying a double bass.

'Strangers on a Train': A Technically Perfect Psychological ...  François Truffaut interview with Alfred Hitchcock in Hitchcock by François Truffaut, published in 1967, from Cinephilia & Beyond

F.T.: Well, this brings us to 1950, when your situation is any­thing but brilliant. It’s very much the same as in 1933, when, right after Waltzes from Vienna, your prestige was re-established by The Man Who Knew Too Much. Now again, the consec­utive failures of Under Capricorn and Stage Fright will be followed by a spectacular come­back via Strangers on a Train.
A.H.:You might say that I again applied that old “run for cover” rule. For your information, Strangers on a Train wasn’t an assignment, but a novel that I selected myself. I felt this was the right kind of material for me to work with.

I’ve read it; it’s a good novel, but there must have been lots of problems in adapting it to the screen.
There were-and that raises another point. Whenever I collaborate with a writer who, like myself, specializes in mystery, thriller, or suspense, things don’t seem to work out too well.

You’re referring to Raymond Chan­dler?
Right; our association didn’t work out at all. We’d sit together and I would say, “Why not do it this way?” and he’d answer, “Well, if you can puzzle it out, what do you need me for?” The work he did was no good and I ended up with Czenzi Ormonde, a woman writer who was one of Ben Hecht’s assistants. When I com­pleted the treatment, the head of Warner’s tried to find someone to do the dialogue, and very few writers would touch it. None of them thought it was any good.

I’m not at all surprised; it’s often oc­curred to me that had I read the story, the chances are I wouldn’t have cared for it. Here is a case where you really have to see the picture. As a matter of fact, I think that the same story made by someone else wouldn’t have been any good at all. Particularly when you consider the many Hitchcock emulators whose attempts at the thriller genre have been disastrous.
It’s been my good fortune to have something of a monopoly on the genre: nobody else seems to take much interest in the rules for that form.

What rules?
I’m talking about the rules of sus­pense. That’s why I’ve more or less had the field to myself. Selznick claimed I was the only direc­tor whom he could trust completely, but when I worked for him, he complained about what he called my “goddamn jigsaw cutting.” I used to shoot the one piece of film in such a way that no one else could put the pieces together prop­erly; the only way they could be edited was to follow exactly what I had in mind in the shoot­ing stages. Selznick comes from the school of film-makers who like to have lots of footage to play around with in the cutting room. Working as I do, you’re sure that no one in the studio is going to take over and ruin your film. That’s the reason I won out in the argument over Suspi­cion.

One senses that control in your pic­tures; it’s obvious that each shot has been made in a specific way, from a specific angle, and to run for a specific length of time. The only ex­ceptions, possibly, are courtroom scenes or scenes that require crowds.
That’s inevitable, it can’t be helped. That’s what happened with the tennis match in Strangers on a Train, and it shows the risk in overshooting material. There’s too much foot­age for you to handle by yourself; you turn it over to the cutter to sort it out, but you never know what’s been left unused. That’s the risk.

One of the best things in Strangers on a Train is the exposition, with the follow shots on feet going one way and then the other. There are also the crisscrossing rails. There’s a sort of symbolic effect in the way they meet and separate, and that’s also true of the direction arrows in I Confess. You often open your pic­tures on a symbolic note.
The direction arrows exist in Quebec; they use them to indicate one-way streets. The shots of the rails in Strangers on a Train were the logical extension of the motif with the feet. Practically, I couldn’t have done anything else.

Why not?
The camera practically grazed the rails because it couldn’t be raised; you see, I didn’t want to go higher until the feet of Farley Gran­ger and Robert Walker bump together in the railroad car.

That’s what I mean. That accidental collision of the two men’s feet is the point of departure for their whole relationship, and the concept is sustained by deliberately refraining from showing their faces up to that point. In the same light the separating rails suggest the idea of divergent courses-two different ways of life.
Naturally, there is that as well. Isn’t it a fascinating design? One could study it forever.

In several of your pictures, I’ve no­ticed, you will enhance a surprise situation with an additional twist; in other words-and I’m not thinking only of Psycho—you will use a bit of trickery to create a small suspenseful diversion so that the surprise that comes immediately af­terward is even more startling.
What do you have in mind?

Well, in Strangers on a Train, Farley Granger agrees to kill Robert Walker’s father, although, in fact, he really intends to warn the old man against his son. So Granger breaks into the house at night; the father’s room is upstairs. Now, if he simply tiptoed up the staircase, the public would try to figure out what’s going to happen next, and they might even guess that upstairs Granger will find Bruno instead of his father. So you dispose of that anticipation by creating a suspenseful diversion in the form of a huge dog in the middle of the staircase. In this way the question becomes: Will the dog let Far­ley Granger get by without biting him or won’t he? Isn’t that right?
Yes, in that scene we first have a sus­pense effect, through the threatening dog, and later on we have a surprise effect when the per­son in the room turns out to be Robert Walker instead of his father. I remember we went to a lot of trouble getting that dog to lick Farley Granger’s hand.

I believe you used a trick shot there. Isn’t the image slowed down?
Yes, I think that’s so.

One of the most remarkable aspects of the picture is the bold manipulation of time, the way in which it’s contracted and dilated. First, there’s Farley Granger’s frantic haste to win his tennis match, and then Robert Walker’s panic when he accidentally drops Granger’s lighter in a manhole. In both these scenes, time is tightly compressed-like a lemon. Then, after Walker gets to the island, you let go, because he can’t proceed with his plan to frame Granger in broad daylight. So when he asks one of the men in the amusement park, “At what time does it get dark around here?” everything is decompressed. Real-life time takes over while he waits for nightfall. That dramatic play with time is really stunning. On the other hand, I have some reservations on the final scene, when the carrousel runs amok, though I understand the reason for it. I guess you needed a paroxysm, is that it?
That’s true. After so many colorful parts, it seems to me it would have been poor form not to have, at this point, what musicians refer to as a coda. But my hands still sweat when I think of that scene today. You know, that little man actually crawled under that spinning car­rousel. If he’d raised his head by an inch, he’d have been killed. I’ll never do anything like that again.

But when the carrousel breaks…
That was a miniature blown up on a big screen. The big difficulty with that scene was that the screen had to be angled differently for each shot. We had to move the projector every time the angle changed because many of the shots of the merry-go-round were low cam­era setups. We spent a lot of time setting the screen in line with the camera lens. Anyway, for the carrousel breakdown we used a miniature blown up on a big screen and we put live people in front of the screen.

There’s a certain resemblance between the situations of the heroes of Strangers on a Train and A Place in the Sun. I couldn’t help wondering whether the Patricia Highsmith novel was influenced by Theodore Dreiser’s An American Tragedy.
It’s quite possible. As I see it, the flaws of Strangers on a Train were the ineffectiveness of the two main actors and the weakness of the final script. If the writing of the dialogue had been better, we’d have had stronger characteri­zations. The great problem with this type of pic­ture, you see, is that your main characters sometimes tend to become mere figures.

Algebraic figures? You’ve just raised what I believe is the key dilemma for all direc­tors: a strong film situation involving dull char­acters, or else the characters are subtle, but the situation in which they move is a static one. All your movies, I think, are hinged on strong situ­ations, and Strangers on a Train is actually mapped out like a diagram. This degree of styli­zation is so exciting to the mind and to the eye that it’s fascinating even to a mass audience.
I was quite pleased with the over-all form of the film and with the secondary char­acters. I particularly liked the woman who was murdered; you know, the bitchy wife who worked in a record shop; Bruno’s mother was good, too-she was just as crazy as her son.

The only flaw, to my mind, is the film’s leading lady, Ruth Roman.
Well, she was Warner Brothers’ lead­ing lady, and I had to take her on because I had no other actors from that company. But I must say that I wasn’t too pleased with Farley Gran­ger; he’s a good actor, but I would have liked to see William Holden in the part because he’s stronger. In this kind of story the stronger the hero, the more effective the situation.

Yet, since Granger was appealing in Rope and not particularly appealing in Strangers on a Train, I assumed this was intentional, that you meant him to be seen as an opportunistic playboy. By contrast, Robert Walker gives a rather poetic portrayal; he’s undoubtedly more attractive. There is a distinct impression that you preferred the villain.
Of course, no doubt about it.

In many of your pictures-and Stran­gers on a Train is a case in point-there are, aside from coincidences and implausibles, many elements that are arbitrary and unjustified. And yet, in the light of a cinematic logic that is strictly personal, you impose them in such a way that once they’re on the screen, these are the very elements that become the film’s strong points.
The cinematic logic is to follow the rules of suspense. Here we have one of those stories that automatically bring on that old com­plaint: “But why didn’t he tell the police all about it?” Don’t forget that we’ve clearly established the reasons for which he can’t go to the police.

There can be no argument about that. This picture, just like Shadow of a Doubt, is sys­tematically built around the figure “two.” Here again, both characters might very well have had the same name. Whether it’s Guy or Bruno, it’s obviously a single personality split in two.
That’s right. Though Bruno has killed Guy’s wife, for Guy, it’s just as if he had com­mitted the murder himself. As for Bruno, he’s clearly a psychopath.

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.”