The American Friend

"If you close up the doors they'll start coming in the windows."

"The Riplaid" is one of my favorite series in the crime genre (and if you haven’t read them, now would be an excellent time Random House has put out a new printing with covers and design that captures the tone of Highsmith’s work so perfectly I was frankly pissed that I'm not quite a big enough chump to buy the books again).











He’s a fascinating character. And one who filmmakers seem to find damn near impossible to capture on film. The thing that makes Ripley fascinating and frightening is that he simply has no motivations beyond convenience. He doesn't kill out of anger. He doesn’t hate the people he kills, normally he likes them, it’s just that well gosh its awful convenient for them to die. Ripley lives a life of comfort, gardening in his villa, painting in his spare time, occasionally traveling and fucking his French wife. And by God if he has to kill someone every couple of years to sustain that life, well then he’ll lose no sleep over it. And yet you still like Ripley you root for him. Why he’d probably like you too, right before he beat you to death with a fire poker. This is why Anthony Minghella’s version of The Talented Mister Ripley can best be described as a misinterpretation of epic proportions. Turning Ripley into persecuted victim. Turning Dickey Greenleaf into a sneering sociopath and Freddy Lounds into a tormentor. Making his first murder one of self defense. Giving him reasons. I can’t watch that movie without my brain screaming “WRONG WRONG WRONG WRONG.”

You can’t even cloak Ripley’s motives in philosophy (like Malchovich did in his fun but ultimately misguided performance in Ripley’s Game). He’s not a Nietzchien, or a Randian, or any kind of strong man. His greatest desire is to live in bourgeois, material contentment and occasionally get a chance to demonstrate his cleverness.

Dennis Hopper’s performance comes the closet to getting Ripley right. Its not quite there. While the vulnerability that Hopper and Wender’s decide to focus on, is decidedly canonical (unlike again Minghella's) they sacrifice one element of Ripley for another, capturing his vulnerability but not his supreme lack of a guilty conscienceness.



Still even if it doesn’t quite capture the stunning amorality of Highsmith’s world, The American Friend comes tantalizing close.

Combining threads from "Ripley Under Ground" and "Ripley’s Game", The American Friend follows Ripley as he perpetrates an art scam, forcing the great Nicholas Ray to create forgeries of a dead artist’s work, and enlists an ordinary man dying of cancer to commit some murders when the scheme complicates. (Sam Fuller also cameo’s, perfectly cast as a crime boss. Though sadly the two greats do not get to share a scene).

I have mixed feelings about Wenders. Though I am a great admirer of his early work in particular King Of The Road, Lightning Over The Water, Paris Texas, and Wings Of Desire are all flat out masterpieces, and The New German Cinema in general. I have reservations about him, as anyone who has actually sat through Don’t Come Knockin in the theaters must. Wender has spent the latter part of his career making not merely bad movies but movies in painted with a particular type of badness that call in to question what you liked about his work in the first place.

Still he’s in fine form here. Able to modulate his tone in a way I didn’t know he could do. The film is taught by his standards (and slow by any other). In a way it doesn’t matter that the film doesn’t quite capture Ripley as the film is much more Zimmerman’s (The unlucky dying man. Played in fine form by Bruno Ganz.) then it is Ripley’s. As Zimmerman weighs his decision, Ripley disappears from on screen for nearly an hour, as the film becomes meditative in a way that is completely unexpected in a crime filler. With Wender’s finding some shocking lyrical imagery.

Odd that the one detail from Highsmith’s work that Wender’s deliberately eschews is Ripley’s class, turning Ripley into a high living vagabond rather then Highsmith’s entranched (if on the borderlands) member of the upper class. I’ll admit its not quite a move I understand. Especially seen in context of the Germany this film was made in, in which class was such a touchy issue people were blowing each other up over it. Was he trying to “claim” Ripley as a hero? I don’t believe so, it doesn’t jibe with the Hopper as a symbol of American corruption that the film works so hard to cultivate from the title on down.

The American Friend comes tantalizingly close to nailing down one of the most elusive characters in modern literature. That it doesn’t quite succeed makes it no less of a fascinating film.

Street Of No Return

As is a matter of record, I love Sam Fuller.

Fuller is one of those directors who is completely and utterly themselves. No matter how many bits and pieces of his aethestic end up in the films of Tarantino and Scorsese, Fuller shall always remain Fuller. Never to be imitated. I mean how the hell could you? No one could ever duplicate his particular alchemy of life experience, pulp training, and yellow journalism.

Street Of No Return is his final film (Fuller did direct a TV movie and a TV episode based on Patricia Highsmith after this, but this was his last feature). And like all last films it carries with it a certain weight of expectation. A directors last film (especially when they know it will be their last film) doesn’t merely need to work on its own, but instead must act as a capstone to their entire body of work.

Street of No Return accomplishes this. Showcasing what a truly weird director Sam Fuller could be. Something that often gets overshadowed by his tough guy sensibilities, but it was always an integral part of Fuller's identity (Google his original plan for the opening of Underworld USA sometime). Take the scene in which the two main character’s tender post coital bliss is intercut with the heroine riding a white horse in the alley sans explanation and clothing, save a thong.

Opening with the image of a black man getting hit in the face with a hammer, and getting markedly less subtle from there, Stree Of No Return tells the daringly non linear story of a pop star played by one of the lesser Carradines, who goes for revenge after his girl is killed (?) and his throat slashed. And also stops a race riot (?)

As you might be able to tell if there’s one thing that Street Of No Return doesn’t have, is Fuller’s usual narrative drive. Fuller’s films are usually utterly relentless affairs. It’s a rare film of his that clocks in at over an hour and a half. Street Of No Return is more of a member of the bunch of stuff that happens school of narrative. Suggesting perhaps that Fuller was spending a little too much time listening to his admirers in France. First Carradine is a pop singer. Then he and his girl are being punished for crossing a mobster. Then he’s accused of killing a cop, then he homeless and looking disconcertingly likea drunken Christopher Lambert. And then there’s twenty minutes left so fuck I guess he better go out and get revenge. And hell you might as well have him stop a cadre of Black Militants while your at it.

Its worth mentioning that the one and only Mutherfucking Bill Duke (Official name) is amazing in this. And in his best scene gets to give a speech to a row of prisoners that would make R. Lee Emery blush.

Fuller’s images retain their potent sensuality. And they’re the film’s saving grace. There’s not a shot in the piece not cloaked in sweat, shadow, or violence. Its an overwhelming technique (why oh why did Fuller never direct a Tennessee William’s play?)

Like this review, Street Of No Return is a jumbled mishmash. But it is a completely exhilarating affair. A film that grabs you by the balls (when its not shooting them off) and refuses to let go. It may not be anything more then a master having fun. But damn it sometimes that’s enough.

Someone Asked Me To Be An Expert In Something Part 2: Underworld USA

As you might remember from last month, thanks to my work as a print critic someone has inexplicably asked me to program the front half of a film noir retrospective. In response to this baffling turn of events, last month I played Out Of The Past. Today I'm doing Underworld USA, one of Sam Fuller's most overlooked films. Once again apologies for syntax it was written for speech yadayadayada hope you enjoy.

Of Sam Fuller, Martin Scorsese once said, “It’s been said that if you don’t like The Rolling Stones then you just don’t like Rock and Roll. By the same token, I think that if you don’t like the films of Sam Fuller, then you don’t like the cinema. Or at least you don’t understand it.” I happen to agree.

Sam Fuller is one of the most important and least well known directors in American film. His influence can be felt in innumerable filmmakers work, including unsurprisingly the likes of Scorsese and Jim Jaramusch… and even less surprisingly Quentin Tarintino. He has also ended up an influence over seas, he was one of the first directors that the French wrote about as an Auteur; and has been cited as an influence by Goddard and Bertolucci. There’s another well known Rock axiom that states, “Though only a thousand people bought The Velvet Underground’s first album, all of them started bands of their own.”

By that token, comparatively few people have seen Sam Fuller films, but he left his mark on everyone who has. But Fuller still maintains a style that is distinctly his own, perhaps summed up best when he said, speaking about phoniness in Hollywood War movies when compared to his own “ I don't cry because that guy over there got hit. I cry because I'm gonna get hit next. All that phony heroism is a bunch of baloney when they're shooting at you.” Despite all his influence, there remains something truly unique about the Fuller style. There are countless imitators but not a single duplicator.

Fuller wasn’t just a movie man, he was a pioneer journalist in the early decades of the twentieth century, and then fought across Europe serving in The Big Red One, before eventually turning to movie making. This coincidently makes his Autobiography one of the most entertaining I have ever read.

Once he started making films, he started making every kind he could In his career he made Westerns, Gangster films, Noirs, War films, and a few ones so strange they can’t really be labeled by any genre. After finding the studio system too constricting Fuller became one of the first independent American Filmmakers.

So after so much big talk about Fuller, just what is it that makes him so special? Many things set Fuller apart from the filmmakers of the time, his bold style, his utter lack of sentimentality, and his fearless nature in tackling subject matter that the production code and mores of the day normally considered taboo. He was truly ahead of his time in just about every way possible.

Fuller wrote about his harshness in his own inimitable style in The Third Face. “I’m not dealing her with kings, ravishing princesses, charming princes who ar born with castles, jewels, and juicy legacies. Ever since my characters where born, their lives have been harsh and unfar. They have to fight to survive. They are anarchists turned against a system that betrayed them.”

But to me its his energy, some would argue his vulgarity, that really makes him special.

And that’s why I chose to show Underworld USA today. Its not one of his most well known films, nor is it one of his most respected. Its almost something of a curiosity, a B Side. Naked Kiss better showcases how ahead of the time he was in subject matter, it takes him 80 minutes to accomplish what it takes Von Trier two hours and forty minutes to not accomplish in Dogville. Shock Corridor portrays his radical techniques. Pick Up On South Street is a showcase for his hard bitten style and unsentimental treatment of his material, as well as being for my money one of the best Noir films ever made, and arguably the best film the fifties produced. But I think its because it doesn’t have those distracting elements that Underworld acts as such a supreme showcase for all the talents that made Fuller such a special filmmaker.

The story of the film you’re going to see today really isn’t anything that special or original. It’s the average revenge story something you’ve probably seen a dozen times before. but the way its told, the stark images, the lean story, the way it flies at you off the screen is really something incredible.

The things that do set Underworld USA apart is the way it shows Organized crime as something truly institutional. It really wasn’t until Coppola’s Godfather that most movies began to look at Organized Crime as something intertwined in American life. As Fuller put it, “Not Thugs, but tax paying executives.” The old school gangsters of the thirties boom where always individualists who burned out as they tried to one up society, think Cagney bursting into flames as he yowled, “Made it Ma, Top Of The World.” By Underworld USA the paradigm has shifted as one of the gangsters says in the film…

“There’ll always be people like us. But as long as we don’t have any records on paper, as long as we run National Projects with legitimate business operations and pay our taxes on legitimate income and donate to charities and run church bazaars we’ll win the war. We Always have.”

In Fuller’s world crime and corruption are not the aberrations they’re the norm. It’s a thoroughly noir world view. There is no way to escape the darkness because there is no alternative to it. Its all dark.

The dark unmistakably noir heart of the movie though is its revenge, and the way Tolly’s utter single minded pursuit of it drives off or destroys everything else in his life. Robertson, best known today for his portrayal as the kindly Uncle Ben in Sam Raimi’s Spiderman films, radiates a kind of menace and driven obsessions shocking to anyone not familiar with his earlier career. Robertson captures the mania perfectly. Fuller reports that a real life Mob Boss upon viewing the film said to Fuller, “If only my Son had that kind of affection for me.”