The American Friend

The American Friend (Der amerikanische Freund, 1977) is Wim Wenders' crime thriller, free to watch online on iFILM. Jonathan Zimmerman, a Hamburg picture framer, is dying and barely keeping his shop afloat. At an art auction he snubs an American in a cowboy hat. That tiny insult sets everything else in motion.

The American is Tom Ripley, a dealer in forged paintings who can't say what he's living for. Dennis Hopper plays him as a drifting, sad-eyed con — nothing like the Ripley of other Patricia Highsmith films. Stung, Ripley feeds the gangster Raoul Minot the perfect name for a contract killing: a terminally ill man with nothing to lose and a family to provide for. Bruno Ganz carries Jonathan from quiet despair to a trembling figure with a gun on a moving train.

Wenders adapted Highsmith's novel Ripley's Game but bent it into a melancholy road movie about two exhausted men who, against all logic, drift into friendship. Directors Nicholas Ray and Samuel Fuller turn up in small roles. It's widely held up as a high point of New German Cinema. Stream The American Friend (1977) online on iFILM.