Product: The American Friend [VHS] (1977)
Rating: 5.0
highsmith and the cinema
Patricia Highsmith (who died in 1995) ranks as one of the most accomplished yet recondite writers of fiction to emerge from the United States in this century. Graham Greene, in a forward to a collection of her short stories, referred to her as "the poet of apprehension." Unfortunately, although a number of her novels have been adpated for the screen, beginning with Hitchcock's "Strangers on a Train" and most recently in Anthony Minghella's bastardized "The Talented Mr. Ripley", these attempts have almost exclusively been of a mediocre and inchoate standard. Wim Wender's 1977 film "Der Amerikanische Freund" is an overwhelming exception. Though the locations and plot lines of the original novel (third in the Ripley series) was substantially altered, Wenders was able to capture the essential character of the books two unlikely protaganists. Hopper's Ripley is brimming over with unstated homoerotic menace, while Ganz plays the naive and desperate Jonathan to perfection. The central attribute of a Highmsith novel is not a feeling of suspense so mauch as one of delocalized discomfort, unease that has no rational causal locus. Combine this with the film's aesthetic sensibility, the use of strong and unnatural filters to carnivalize the vision of seagulls soaring lazily over a Hamburg dawn, the effervescent green light of a paris metro station, and you have something no less than a low-key masterpiece.