This month, “The American Friend,” a classic from German director Wim Wenders that until now was probably lesser known than his touchstones “Paris, Texas” and “Wings of Desire,” comes to the Criterion Collection. As you’ll read below, it’s a grubby little story of antiheroes and their patsies and we, predictably, adore it, and while its particular mix of independent gritty ’70s aesthetic, European setting and director, American star and Patricia Highsmith source material makes it feel highly singular, it in fact belongs to a long, packed tradition: the European neo-noir.
READ MORE: The 35 Best Heist Movies
If the precise definition of film noir is a consistent cause for debate, the categorization “neo-noir” is even looser. It’s generally accepted to apply only to the post-noir “proper” heyday (which ran from the early ’40s to the late ’50s, or in filmic terms, from “The Maltese Falcon” to “Touch of Evil.”) Classic noir encompasses elements like directional lighting, ’40s/’50s settings, cynical heroes, femme fatales, crime/murder stories, distrust of authority, fatalism and as much moral ambiguity and investigation into psychological perversions as the Hays Code would allow. But neo-noir, which really started to flourish in the more permissive and experimental 1970s, was liberated from some of these constraints, while finding in others a useful conduit into commenting on contemporary society.
And so neo-noir often looks and feels very different to classic noir: less artificial, looser and less tightly plotted — all of which holds true for “The American Friend”— but the genre’s heart remains dark and its outlook on inevitability, dumb luck and the fatal flaw remains just as deliciously bleak. At the same time (if you can refer to such a vague affiliation as a movement), neo-noir was spearheaded by filmmakers who had come of age consuming the (largely Hollywood-produced) noirs of the mid-20th Century, and so it’s one of the genres that is manna to cinephiles: this is second-wave noir in which the filmmakers are often as much commenting on the archetypes of classical filmmaking as they are telling their seedy little crime stories.
This feels especially true of the many European auteurs, of whom Wenders is one, who came to the genre with not just a generation or two, but also the Atlantic Ocean separating their sensibilities from those of the classic Hollywood noir filmmakers (even if many of those guys were European emigrés themselves). It gives rise to a fascinating, endlessly dissectable shift in perspective, as some of Europe’s brightest talents co-opted and repurposed this most Hollywood of concepts, thereby contributing so much vitality to the evolution of noir into neo-noir. As a result, it’s a genre that is thriving all over the planet (just look at recent Korean cinema), to this day.
Here’s a curated selection of just ten European neo-noirs (out of many hundreds) for your consideration, all of which we can recommend from the bottom of our black, black hearts.
“The American Friend” (1977)
An adaptation of “Ripley’s Game” (which was made under that name by Italian director Liliana Cavani in 2002), Wim Wenders‘ version is perhaps the most convincingly de-glamorized of Patricia Highsmith’s better-known big-screen outings. Without the rich chiaroscuro of “Strangers on a Train,” or the sun-dappled beauty of “The Talented Mr Ripley” and “The Two Faces of January,” let alone the glowing gorgeousness of “Carol,” the look and spirit of “The American Friend” feels closer to that of then-contemporary American independent cinema. Some of that is down to the fact it stars Dennis Hopper, one of the defining actors of that movement, here bringing his own unique presence to the oft-essayed role of Tom Ripley. That any one character could have been played by such different actors as Hopper, Alain Delon, John Malkovich and Matt Damon suggests a lot about Ripley’s chameleonic nature, but Hopper’s interpretation of him here is one that Highsmith herself (on a second viewing, mind you) embraced. He’s ably abetted by Bruno Ganz playing Zimmerman, the ailing picture framer whose life Ripley pretty much ruins in petty response to a perceived slight, before reconsidering when the two men start to become friends. The U-turn in Ripley’s attitude toward Zimmerman is really what elevates a narrative that is rather convoluted otherwise, turning “The American Friend” into a surprisingly successful portrait of a character whose defining trait may be his uncategorizable nature. Trundling around gray Hamburg locations and marked by the grimy realism of the film’s fight and killing scenes, Wenders evokes perhaps better than any other Highsmith adaptor (he also wrote the script) the sour-tasting desperation of these little people, scrabbling around for advantage and self-interest in a monolithically uncaring, mostly ugly world.