The American Friend
The American Friend

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- 74/100 based on 17,545 votes

Tom Ripley has a sweet deal with an art forger. The forger creates the paintings; Tom sells them. But another criminal business associate wants Tom to go in for an even riskier enterprise: murder. Tom suggests his associate ask a local picture framer instead. That man has a fatal disease, or so it's rumored. More, he has a wife and kid that surely he wouldn't want to leave penniless. Let this picture framer be a hit man, and no one will suspect. The terminally ill craftsman m... (Full plot summary below)

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Actors in The American Friend:

Dennis Hopper
Bruno Ganz
Lisa Kreuzer
Gérard Blain
Nicholas Ray
Samuel Fuller

Full Plot Details

Tom Ripley has a sweet deal with an art forger. The forger creates the paintings; Tom sells them. But another criminal business associate wants Tom to go in for an even riskier enterprise: murder. Tom suggests his associate ask a local picture framer instead. That man has a fatal disease, or so it's rumored. More, he has a wife and kid that surely he wouldn't want to leave penniless. Let this picture framer be a hit man, and no one will suspect. The terminally ill craftsman may agree to the misdeed, and several more, but he'll end up needing Tom Ripley in a pinch.

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Movie Reviews

Chicago Tribune - 10/10 by Michael WilmingtonSuperb adaptation of Patricia Highsmith's novel Ripley's Game, with Hopper as her amiably cynical hero.
Washington Post - 8/10 by Gary ArnoldAn absorbing but rarefied, introspective variation on traditional thriller motifs, it's probably not the synthesis between the personal and traditional that Wenders needs but it's a fascinating compulsively watchable experiment.
Chicago Sun-Times - 8/10 by Roger EbertThere's something cheerfully perverse about filming a thriller and then tossing out the parts that would help it make sense, but Wim Wenders has a certain success with the method in The American Friend.
Slant Magazine - 8/10 by Jordan CronkFrom its engagement with genre tropes (particularly film noir), to its tangibly grimy urban backdrops, to its archetypal hero/villain dramatic dichotomy, there’s no mistaking the film’s American influence.
The A.V. Club - 8/10 by Keith PhippsAdapting Ripley's Game, the third of Patricia Highsmith's Ripley novels, 1977's The American Friend knits Wenders' ongoing concerns into a thriller in the Hitchcock mold.
Chicago Reader - 8/10 by Dave KehrThe film has a fine grasp of tenuous emotional connections in the midst of a crumbling moral universe. Wenders's films (Kings of the Road, Alice in the Cities) are about life on the edge; this is one of his edgiest.
The New York Times - 8/10 by J. HobermanLike Taxi Driver, The American Friend was a new sort of movie-movie — sleekly brooding, voluptuously alienated and saturated with cinephilia.
Empire - 8/10 by Kim NewmanBruno Ganz is excellent as the victim deceived into committing murder.
User Review - 9/10 by cafergyWonderful fun watching Dennis Hopper and Bruno Ganz, as directed by Wim Wenders, in an existential noir retelling of a Patricia Highsmith novel, where an expat Yank gets an innocent accomplice to murder a gangster over an art forgery scheme.
User Review - 9/10 by JLuis_001Although at first it hardly seems to be the thriller and drama it ends up becoming. The American Friend was a total revelation, and above all, an excellent film. If you tell someone about the plot you might confuse them, in fact, even though I'd heard about the film for being one of the legendary Wim Wenders, it also intrigued me quite a bit. This is the story of a criminal and personal triangle involving an American who's involved in an artwork forgery scheme, who becomes an intermediary between a French gangster a German picture framer -who's dying of leukemia- to commit assassinations. That sounded pretty complicated, but that's the beauty of it, because it's also really good. Even though Wenders is not a direct narrator, the story does not let you escape, and that personally for me is very important. Because even when The American Friend never stops being a thriller, the title itself reveals to you what's the most important plot element that ends up deepening, and that's the friendship relationship that the American character (Dennis Hopper) and the German character (Bruno Ganz) end up forging.

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