The American Friend

Wim Wenders's The American Friend (1977) is the film that brought the New German Cinema into dialogue with Hollywood, adapting Patricia Highsmith's novel Ripley's Game into a melancholy, neon-lit thriller. It competed at Cannes and remains one of the defining works of Wenders's early career, later inducted into the Criterion Collection.

Bruno Ganz plays the dying framer drawn into a contract killing, with the American director Dennis Hopper as a drawling, cowboy-hatted Tom Ripley — a startling, idiosyncratic take on Highsmith's character. Wenders casts the film with film-makers he revered, Nicholas Ray and Samuel Fuller among them, and shoots a wintry Hamburg, Paris and New York in the desaturated style of his cinematographer Robby Müller. The result is less a conventional thriller than a moody meditation on friendship, mortality and American influence on the European imagination.

Highsmith herself was reportedly moved by Ganz's performance, and the film has been hugely influential on subsequent Ripley adaptations and on the art-house thriller generally. Its fusion of genre mechanics with existential drift is pure Wenders. Atmospheric, sorrowful and quietly suspenseful, The American Friend turns a murder plot into a study of two lost men, and stands among the essential films of 1970s German cinema. Ganz and Hopper make an unforgettable odd couple, and the film's wintry fusion of Highsmith suspense with New German melancholy has shaped every screen Ripley since.