Fassbinder called The American Soldier, his eighth feature (made in ten days) “the study of a perfect killer.” The protagonist, Ricky, is a Vietnam vet who returns to his native Germany and finds himself unable to change the lifestyle he has adopted. Recruited by three plainclothes policemen to knock off Gypsy, “an underworld connection who could embarrass them in the next political clean-up” (BFI), Ricky remains a hired killer, even when his final victim proves to be his girlfriend.
“Although the ingredients of Fassbinder's Sixties gangster films are still much in evidence...The American Soldier comes closer than any of (his) previous films to articulating the method behind its own coherent madness and to spelling out the moral, or at any rate the moral philosophy, behind its characters' seemingly amoral actions.... The gap between head and bed remains unbridgeable, and tenderness...finds its expression, warped but still recognizable, only in acts of violence. Although on the surface a long way from the Romantic tradition, Fassbinder's The American Soldier in fact harks back to that tradition by depicting an inescapable link between love and death. Its moments of greatest tenderness and compassion all involve corpses.... The characters in (this film) act out their frustrations in movie clichés but their creator has already moved far beyond them, fusing an unmistakable personal style from the most disparate and unpromising sources.” --Monthly Film Bulletin