The American Friend (1977)

He framed himself, both figuratively and literally! And framing is what directors do as well! And that's Nicholas Ray and Jean Eustache! And Tom has come to sell a 'European' painting that's actually been done by an American to European collectors, yet it ends up being bought by a Texan… just as the European Wenders is making a French-American noir and selling it back to the US. Ho ho! And Jonathan ends up being able to make a lot of money, but it distances himself from his family, made literal through the 'Midas touch' of the gold leaf laid onto his hands!

I didn't have a fun time with this one. Whether you consider this smart, self-reflexive filmmaking or shoddy fanboying is, of course, up to personal interpretation: I tend towards more of the latter than the former. Shorn of its associations to the Ripley canon, The American Friend is a decidedly uneven noir, made almost comically unstable by the textual and paratextual presence of Dennis Hopper's self-indulgence. Indeed, Wenders himself indulges his love of American kitsch throughout, and there's an essay-length piece to be done about how this has soured a little over the years. Indeed, I wonder how this kind of Americophilia struck West Germans at the time.

As Ripley tapes and listens to his own existential babblings [and] snaps his own bleary-eyed image on a polaroid, Hopper reflects the kind of alienated mechanized narcissism that our rugged individualism has become. With his sensitivity, self-indulgence and high cheekbones, Hopper captures the precise mixture of irresponsible evil and boyish charm that makes this archetype so dangerously appealing.

— Marsha Kinder (Film Quarterly)

For all that Hopper’s casting and costuming (he’s often seen wearing an outlandish cowboy hat) stand in for an idea of Americanness and for a style of independent filmmaking, his unpolished performance as Ripley transcends any symbolic function to reveal the character’s raw but unpredictable sensitivity.

— Katherine Connell (Reverse Shot)