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American Soldier (Sub)
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by New Yorker Video
Sales Rank: 113988
Price: $29.95
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Rainer Werner Fassbinder's tribute to American gangster films is an exercise in pure pulp fantasy. Ricky (Karl Scheydt) is a German hit man who returns home after a stint in America and is hired by renegade police detectives to assassinate Berlin criminals they have been unable to nab. Ricky wistfully revisits his old neighborhood and attempts to reconcile with his estranged mother and brother--but on the job, this antihero is a hard-boiled, stone-cold killer. Complications set in as he falls for a call girl, unaware she's actually his boss's girl sent to keep tabs on him. Shot in sharp, high-contrast black and white, this self-consciously stylish crime thriller recalls American film noir and gangster films with its heavy shadows and pools of light. Fassbinder's sleazy Berlin underworld is populated by denizens named after his favorite directors (Walsh, Fuller, Murnau), all dressed as if they just stepped out of a Humphrey Bogart detective movie. It's a playful lark from a director who had yet to complete his first masterpiece, but Fassbinder's developing style comes across in crisp images, terse dialogue, and a stunning, unexpected climax. Future director Margarethe von Trotta plays a suicidal chambermaid telling the story of an elderly German woman who marries a young Turkish man, a tale Fassbinder later transformed into <I>Ali: Fear Eats the Soul</I>. <I>--Sean Axmaker</I>
Viewer Reviews
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.
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American Soldier (Sub)
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