Wim Wenders based his first commercial film on Patricia Highsmith's “Ripley's Game” because, as he writes, “Her stories have a fascination for me that I normally have from movies, not from books. Her characters touch me, directly and deeply. It is from them that Highsmith's stories take form, not the other way around as in so many ‘mysteries'....” Bruno Ganz plays a Hamburg craftsman named Zimmerman, whose quiet home and work life are of a piece: he makes picture frames. Zimmerman's world is interrupted by the news that he has a blood disease, and only a short time to live. Into the moral vacuum created by the shock walks Ripley, the wandering American (Dennis Hopper) who offers enough money to set up the framer's wife and child after his death, in exchange for the murder by Zimmerman of an underworld associate. From this point, the setting moves from Hamburg to Paris but could at any point be New York; the story gets increasingly complicated, until (as in Hawks' The Big Sleep) we realize that the play is not the thing, and there is something in Wenders' unabashedly studied use of color and composition, of urban photography at its most tense and most beautiful, that speaks for the story as well.
Like Clement's Highsmith adaptation, Wenders' film is made in several languages, with an international cast. Highsmith's sinister confusion of national identities is fused with Wenders' more political preoccupation (found in all his works) with international non-identity: with the penetration of American culture into European cultures to a degree that one feels a foreigner in his own country; with “the American colonization of the German subconscious.” So The American Friend is at once a very American film, and a very cosmopolitan film, which in this case is not a contradiction in terms. (JB)