The American Friend

Dennis Hopper in Hamburg as forgery dealer Tom Ripley (the character from a then-unpublished Patricia Highsmith novel) has grown interested in terminally-ill highly-regarded picture framer Jonathan (Bruno Ganz), after an unpleasant first encounter, Gerty Molzen the customer, in Wim Wender’s The American Friend, 1977.

Bruno Ganz as the Hamburg picture framer Jonathan, with Winter (the American singer David Blue) bidding, and Dennis Hopper quietly as the forgery purveyor (Patricia Highsmith’s “Tom Ripley”), Rudolf Schündler the owner of the house, Stefan Lennert the auctioneer and Lisa Kreuzer as the clerk, Jonathan’s wife, a finely wrought scene from Wim Wenders’ The American Friend, 1977.

With notes about the restoration, and calm and clever as can be, writer-director Wim Wenders opens his treatment of the unpublished Patricia Highsmith novel, in which he cast directors and actor-directors as the criminals, with Dennis Hopper as Tom Ripley in New York visiting Nicholas Ray as the forger “Derwatt,” in The American Friend, 1977.

Wild intersections of personages and events, in New York, with Nick Ray as the forger “Derwatt,” Dennis Hopper as Ripley is not quite observed by Samuel Fuller, introduced here, shooting a porno, taking a call about a hit we’ve just seen committed by terminal patient Jonathan (Bruno Ganz)in Paris, who returns to his wife (Liza Kreuzer) and child in Hamburg, in Wim Wenders’ The American Friend, 1977.