The American Friend · reception & legacy
1977 · Wim Wenders
How The American Friend has been received, argued over, and remembered.
The arc
A hit at Cannes 1977 and a New German Cinema calling card even on release, it's only climbed since — the Criterion treatment and Robby Müller's sickly-neon Hamburg have made it the go-to answer for 'best Wenders' among people who find Paris, Texas too obvious.
What's debated
The eternal fight is Dennis Hopper's cowboy-hatted Ripley: a betrayal of Highsmith's suave sociopath, or the most alive Ripley ever put on screen?
Its footprint
Hopper sprawled on the pool table muttering 'I know less and less about who I am' into a tape recorder is one of the most screenshotted images in 70s cinema, and Müller's green-and-red color scheme gets cited whenever anyone talks about neon before neon was a trend.
Where it stands
A cinephile handshake — the arthouse-thriller crossover people push on friends who think 'slow European cinema' isn't for them, and a fixture of Ripley-adaptation ranking debates.
Named by the director
Influences Wim Wenders has publicly named — the director's own word, distinct from the inferred lines of influence.
- Nicholas Ray — Wenders cast his hero Ray in the film as an explicit homage to the American cinema that shaped him, and later made Lightning Over Water with him.
- Samuel Fuller — Fuller's casting as a gangster was Wenders' declared tribute to the tough American genre filmmaking he loved.