Marquard Bohm, Peer Raben, Eva Ingeborg Scholz, Rainer Werner Fassbinder, Karl Scheydt, Irm Hermann, Gustl Datz, Hark Bohm, Jan George, Katrin Schaake, Marius Aicher, Ingrid Caven, Ulli Lommel, Margarethe von Trotta, Kurt RaabSee more
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Fassbinder's complex blend of American gangsterism and Godard-like comedy coalesces magnificently in this early work. An American Soldier returns to Germany after the Vietnam as a contract killer-but this is not a simple indictment of American violence. The magnificent agglomeration of artistic and political accumulate here-in a way it is Fassbinder's most alive film. It is here that you at last are allowed to witness pure cinematic naturalism with the vitality of the German New Wave. An incomparable masterpiece on many levels.
One of Fassbinder's early films, "The American Gangster" is part parody of cheap, hardboiled detective movies and part existential commentary on human loneliness. The real genius of the film is that it succeeds in making the viewer chuckle at the deadpan ways in which it spoofs film noir without trivializing the underlying theme of loneliness.
The plot is quickly told. Ricky, a native German who somehow wound up fighting in Vietnam, returns to Germany as a hitman hired by a trio of bumbling cops unable to stop the crimewave in their town. Ricky is a hard drinker and hard lover who dresses immaculately, speaks in a rough, low voice, and kills with cold efficiency. He's exactly the same kind of persona that you get from a Dashiel Hammet or Mickey Spillane--or for that matter, with just a bit more cooth, an Ian Fleming.
But the loneliness of Ricky's life and the lives of those he encounters is palpable. Ricky encounters a past and lost love; asks a woman to run away with him to Japan, only to wind up killing her on contract; opens the movie by a car spree with a hooker whom he eventually dumps by the side of the road; and is unable to make contact with his mother or brother because of the strange but palpable sexual tension between them. Margarethe von Trotta, the future German New Wave director, plays a hotel maid equally lonely, who allows herself to be seduced by Ricky and then kills herself when her lover deserts her. A gay gypsy criminal whom Ricky kills is the personification of loneliness--a gay man in the underworld, scorned by straights as well as "respectable" citizens. And on it goes. Everyone in the film is bubbled in solitude and doesn't seem to know quite how to break out. The only strategy that comes to mind is sex, and it seems relatively joyless--witness the final long scene, in which Ricky's brother, silently howling with misery and loneliness, embraces Ricky's dead body with such passion that for all the world it looks like the two brothers are getting it on.
The film noir ambience and the alienation are both underscored by the stark black and white photography Fassbinder uses in the film. Fassbinder himself plays a minor role.
Once more the merciless eye of Raibner Werner Fassbinder focuses in a German American Vietnam veteran hired for Munich police to murder local criminals .
Imagine a lonely man in a room with thousand mirros. The images are placed next to each other reflecting the ambiguities , the blame and revealing the horror and the hell of the war do not finnish in the battlefield.
A potent film and visceral drama. Do not miss this film of the early times of Fassbinder who literally gave a twist of fate to the Film Noir genre with this original work.
Reviewed in the United States on September 28, 2004
If you are not wild about Fassbinder's early films, you will still love 'the American Soldier'. The look of the film is taken straight from the great film noir tradition - brilliant use of light and shadows. The plot of the movie, as in Godard, is not of the greatest importance - and you can miss something and still pick up where you left off. One of the most significant features of the film is the ending - which clearly illustrates how Fassbinder liked to unite the themes of sex and death (it is perhaps most pronounced in his final film 'Querelle')
MESSAGE FOR A PRE-REVIEWER: ON THE COVER IS JAN GEORGE, NOT MARIUS AICHER! THIS FILM IS FOR ME BY FASSBINDER SECOND BEST AFTER "LOVE IS COLDER THAN DEATH". I LIKE FASSBINDER AS FRANZ WALSH IN HIS EARLY FILMS. AND I VERY LIKE HIS DARK HUMOUR. BUY IT!
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