The American Friend (1977): Wim Wenders Turns Ripley Into an Arthouse Tragedy

Wim Wenders has always been obsessed with America—the America of Edward Hopper paintings, of noir films, of rock and roll and endless highways. But he’s equally obsessed with how America looks from the outside, from a Europe both seduced and threatened by American culture.

The American Friend is the perfect expression of this obsession. It’s a German film about an American con man, shot in Hamburg and Paris and New York, adapted from a Patricia Highsmith novel about moral corruption. And somehow it’s also one of the most beautiful films about friendship ever made—even though that friendship is built on betrayal.

The Setup: A Con Man and His Mark

Tom Ripley (Dennis Hopper) is living in Hamburg, running an art forgery scheme with an old painter friend. At an auction, he meets Jonathan Zimmermann (Bruno Ganz), a picture framer who snubs him—perhaps because Jonathan has heard rumors about Ripley’s past.

Ripley’s response to this small insult is disproportionate: when a criminal associate needs someone to carry out an assassination, Ripley suggests Jonathan—a man with a terminal blood disease who might kill for money to leave his wife and son.

But here’s the complication that makes The American Friend more than a crime film: Ripley also seems to genuinely like Jonathan. His manipulation is cruel, but he keeps returning to watch, to help, to complicate his own scheme. By the end, they’re killing together—bound by blood in both senses.

Dennis Hopper: Ripley as Lost American

Patricia Highsmith’s Tom Ripley is one of literature’s great sociopaths—charming, murderous, utterly without conscience. Wenders’ Ripley is something stranger: a lost soul in a cowboy hat, wandering through European cities, unable to connect with anyone except through manipulation.

Hopper plays him with an undertone of sadness that Highsmith never allowed. This Ripley doesn’t enjoy his schemes—he seems almost compelled to them, as if corruption is the only way he knows to relate to people. When he records himself talking on a reel-to-reel machine, trying to articulate his loneliness, it’s genuinely moving.

“I know less and less about who I am, or who anybody else is,” he says to himself. It’s a confession the book’s Ripley would never make.

Bruno Ganz: The Innocent Corrupted

Ganz’s Jonathan is Ripley’s opposite: sincere, loving, dying. He adores his wife Sarah (Lisa Kreuzer) and son. He takes pride in his craft. He’s everything Ripley isn’t—rooted, genuine, moral.

Until he isn’t.

Watching Jonathan’s transformation is the film’s heart. The first assassination is horrifying for him—he can barely do it, trembles afterward, is consumed by guilt. The second is almost routine. By the end, he’s killing alongside Ripley with something like partnership.

Ganz makes this trajectory believable. We watch his face as morality erodes, as terminal illness combines with sudden wealth to unmoor him from everything he valued. He doesn’t become a monster—he becomes someone capable of monstrous things, which is worse.

Wenders’ Hamburg: Neon and Emptiness

One of Wenders’ great gifts is location. Hamburg in The American Friend is a city of glass and water, train stations and industrial docks, American diners and German formality. It’s both real and dreamlike—a space where identities blur.

The color palette shifts throughout the film. Early scenes are cold—blues and grays, the colors of Jonathan’s ordered life. As the crimes begin, red bleeds into the frame: neon signs, blood, the flush of fever and guilt.

Robby Müller’s cinematography finds beauty in ugly spaces—a parking garage, a metro station, a pornographic movie theater. Wenders always loved the American cinematographer’s work, and here it creates a Europe that’s already been colonized by American aesthetics.

The Train Murder: Hitchcock Filtered Through Art Film

The second assassination—set on a moving train—is Wenders’ explicit tribute to Hitchcock. The scenario echoes Strangers on a Train, the suspense mechanics are pure genre, the set piece is classically constructed.

But Wenders adds something Hitchcock wouldn’t: duration. The sequence runs long enough for discomfort to become meditation. We watch Jonathan’s fear, his hesitation, his final violent action, and then we keep watching. The aftermath matters as much as the act.

And then Ripley appears, unexpected, uninvited—joining the violence he set in motion. The two men dispose of the body together, and in that shared crime, something like genuine connection forms.

Cameos: The Directors as Criminals

In a typically Wenders touch, several directors appear in small roles as criminals and shady figures:

• Nicholas Ray (director of Rebel Without a Cause)
• Samuel Fuller (director of Shock Corridor)
• Jean Eustache (French New Wave director)

These aren’t stunt castings—they’re statements. Wenders’ criminal underworld is populated by American filmmakers, suggesting that American cinema itself is a kind of seduction, a con game that Europe can’t resist.

Ray, especially, is moving here—a dying legend playing a dying painter, his own mortality lending weight to scenes about art and authenticity.

The Ending: No Clean Resolutions

⚠️ Spoiler Warning: Discussion of the ending follows.

The American Friend ends on a beach, with Jonathan driving into the sea—suicide or accident, the film doesn’t clarify. Sarah watches from a distance. Ripley watches. Nobody can stop what’s been set in motion.

Earlier, Ripley had promised to protect Jonathan’s family, to ensure the money goes to them. Whether he keeps this promise—whether he can—remains unknown. The film ends with open questions, the two men’s strange friendship dissolved into salt water and uncertainty.

It’s not the thriller ending the plot demands. It’s the ending the characters require.

My Rating: 8.5/10

What works:

• Hopper and Ganz create genuine chemistry
• Hamburg becomes a character
• The slow corruption is psychologically convincing
• Beautiful cinematography throughout
• Takes Highsmith’s plot somewhere new

What doesn’t:

• Pacing will frustrate thriller expectations
• Some plot elements don’t fully resolve
• The tone shifts may disorient

If You Liked This, Try:

• Paris, Texas (1984) — Wenders’ American masterpiece
• The Talented Mr. Ripley (1999) — Minghella’s more faithful Highsmith adaptation
• Wings of Desire (1987) — Wenders’ Berlin angels
• Purple Noon (1960) — Clément’s earlier, sunnier Ripley
• Until the End of the World (1991) — Wenders’ globe-spanning epic

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The American Friend is ostensibly a crime film, but its real subject is contamination—how American culture infiltrates European identity, how friendship can emerge from betrayal, how moral corruption spreads like the disease already killing Jonathan.

Ripley and Jonathan are bound together by the worst things they’ve done. In Wenders’ vision, that binding is also a form of love—the only form these broken men can manage.

“I am an American. I know nothing,” Ripley says early in the film. By the end, he knows everything—and it hasn’t helped at all.

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References

• Highsmith, Patricia. Ripley’s Game, Heinemann, 1974
• Wenders, Wim. On Film: Essays and Conversations, Faber & Faber, 2001
• Cook, Roger. “Wenders’ America,” German Quarterly, 1983
• Kolker, Robert. “The American Friend” analysis in A Cinema of Loneliness
• Müller, Robby. Cinematographer’s notes and interviews