Synopsis
Tom Ripley, an American who deals in forged art, is slighted at an auction in Hamburg by picture framer Jonathan Zimmerman. When Ripley is asked by gangster Raoul Minot to kill a rival, he suggests Zimmerman, and the two, exploiting Zimmerman's terminal illness, coerce him into being a hitman.
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Cast
- Dennis HopperTom Ripley
- Bruno GanzJonathan Zimmermann
- Lisa KreuzerMarianne Zimmermann
- Gérard BlainRaoul Minot
- Nicholas RayDerwatt
- Samuel FullerThe American
- Peter LilienthalMarcangelo
- Daniel SchmidIgraham
- Sandy WhitelawDoctor in Paris
- Jean EustacheFriendly Man
Recommendations
- 100
Chicago Tribune
This is a Wenders masterwork--a chilling tale of painting, crime and forgery. [19 Jan 2007, p.C5] - 90
Time Out
Superb adaptation of Patricia Highsmith's novel Ripley's Game, with Hopper as her amiably cynical hero. - 80
Chicago Reader
The 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. - 80
Empire
Bruno Ganz is excellent as the victim deceived into committing murder. - 80
The New York Times
Like Taxi Driver, The American Friend was a new sort of movie-movie — sleekly brooding, voluptuously alienated and saturated with cinephilia. - 75
Chicago Sun-Times
There'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. - 75
Washington Post
An 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. - 75
The A.V. Club
Adapting 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.
