Classic Movie Review: Close Encounters of the Third Kind

Steven Spielberg has said that if he made Close Encounters of the Third Kind today the ending would be completely different. After becoming a father himself, he could no longer conceive of a father leaving his family to embark on the great journey that Roy Neary (Richard Dreyfuss) is about to take at the film’s end. But I think Spielberg’s mistake in such thinking is the presumption that everyone’s experience of fatherhood is identical to his own.

Classic Movie Review: The American Friend

In honor of the late Dennis Hopper, I took a look this week at 2 of his films. Hoosiers I'd never seen and The American Friend I'd seen but had virtually no memory of any single detail. Here I review the latter.

Wim Wenders’ 1977 film Der Amerikanische Freund (The American Friend) is loosely based on the Patricia Highsmith novel Ripley’s Game, the third of her novels to feature the sociopathic character of Tom Ripley. The novel was adapted several years ago with John Malkovich in the title role, but the Wenders film stars German actor Bruno Ganz as Jonathan Zimmerman and Dennis Hopper as Ripley.

This is perhaps one of the most inaccessible films I’ve ever seen. The film is almost all mood and atmosphere. After all, that was a primary effect of German New Wave Cinema of the 70s and 80s, of which Wenders (along with Werner Herzog and Rainer Werner Fassbinder) was a key director. It’s filled with opaque dialogue and lines that, upon reflection, probably served as inspiration for American independent film makers such as Jim Jarmusch and Hal Hartley. The most interesting lines are spoken by Ripley: “I like this room. It's got a good feel to it. It's quiet and peaceful;” and “This river reminds me of another river.” As read by Hopper, lines like these are sinister and forbidding.

A single viewing is probably not sufficient for following the story carefully. What you will get is a great sense of location as the action switches between Hamburg, Paris and New York. There’s Hamburg with its overcast skies and shipyards in the background, a setting as dreary as the subject matter of the film. New York is identified by the World Trade Towers looming in conspicuous solitude in the background as Ripley walks down the West Side Highway. And the Paris depicted is hardly the romantic postcard vision the movies normally provide. Wenders’ Paris is one in which organized crime bosses plan murder and doctors are complicit in medical deception. It’s got elements of film noir combined with a Hitchcockian thriller, which should come as no surprise as Highsmith also wrote the novel Strangers on a Train, most famously adapted by Hitchcock.