A quieter Hopper, in a European thriller
In Wim Wenders’ The American Friend (1977), Dennis Hopper plays Tom Ripley, the charming, amoral American created by novelist Patricia Highsmith. Ripley, living comfortably in Hamburg, deals in forged art and borrowed identities. When he meets Jonathan Zimmermann, a Hamburg picture framer who is dying of leukaemia, Ripley draws the sick man into a criminal bargain: commit a murder for money, and leave his family provided for. What follows is not a conventional thriller of chases and twists, but a slow, atmospheric study of two men who recognise something in each other — loneliness, a willingness to cross a line, and a strange, reluctant loyalty.
Hopper’s Ripley is very different from the polished, anxious Ripley of later adaptations. He is relaxed, sun-worn, and almost boyish, a man who wears a cowboy hat in Germany as if it were the most natural thing in the world. He speaks softly, he smiles easily, and he makes murder sound like a practical arrangement. That ease is what makes him unsettling. Hopper understood that Ripley is not a monster who hides behind charm; he is a man for whom charm and danger are the same instrument.
Ripley and Zimmermann: an unlikely friendship
The film’s centre is the relationship between Ripley and Zimmermann, played by Bruno Ganz. Zimmermann is a craftsman, a husband, a father — a decent man facing an indecent choice. Ripley, who has introduced him to a forger and to a French gangster, watches him with a mixture of amusement and something close to affection. In the film’s most famous sequence, set on a moving train, the two men must deal with hitmen sent to kill them, and the violence is clumsy, frightening, and strangely intimate. They are not professionals; they are improvising, and their survival depends on a trust neither of them expected to feel.
Hopper plays those scenes with remarkable restraint. He does not raise his voice. He does not grandstand. He watches Zimmermann, he waits, and when he acts, he acts quickly and without visible emotion. That restraint was a revelation for audiences who knew Hopper mainly as a wild, volatile screen presence. Wenders, a German director steeped in American genre cinema, gave Hopper room to be still, and Hopper repaid him with one of the most controlled performances of his career. The cowboy hat, which could have been a joke, becomes a symbol: Ripley is an American abroad, carrying his mythology with him, even when that mythology no longer fits.
Hamburg, Paris, and the world of the film
Wenders shot The American Friend in Hamburg, Paris, and New York, and the film is full of the textures of 1970s Europe: rain on cobblestones, neon in shop windows, the long corridors of train stations, and the quiet rooms where deals are made. The cinematography, by Robby Müller, gives the film a cool, melancholy beauty, and Hopper fits that world perfectly. He looks like a man who has travelled a long way to be lonely in a beautiful place.
The film also features cameo appearances by several great directors — including Samuel Fuller, Nicholas Ray, and Jean Eustache — as if Wenders were paying tribute to the American cinema that had shaped him. Hopper, who had worked with Ray and Fuller and who carried the legacy of James Dean, belongs in that company. The American Friend is, among other things, a film about American influence in Europe, and Hopper, as the American friend of the title, embodies both its attraction and its danger.
Why Tom Ripley endures
Tom Ripley endures in Hopper’s hands because he is not explained. We never learn exactly why Ripley does what he does, or whether he feels guilt, or whether his friendship with Zimmermann is real. Hopper leaves those questions open, and that openness is the performance. In later Ripley adaptations, the character is often a puzzle to be solved; here, he is a presence to be watched, a man whose smile never quite reaches the place where a conscience might be.
For Past Tunes readers, The American Friend is a reminder of Hopper’s European years, when he worked outside Hollywood and found roles that used his intelligence as well as his intensity. It is also a reminder that the 1970s were a genuinely international decade for American actors: a man who had ridden a motorcycle across the American desert could, a few years later, be forging paintings in Hamburg and making it feel entirely natural. Hopper’s Ripley is an American abroad who never quite leaves home behind — and that, in the end, is a very Hopper character indeed.
Watch The American Friend for its silences first, and then for its violence. Notice how little Hopper says, how much he watches, and how the film’s final scenes, on a beach in the North Sea light, leave Ripley alone with a friendship he may have ruined and a freedom he may not want. It is a thriller that ends not with a twist, but with a look — and Hopper’s look, in that moment, is unforgettable.
There is a further pleasure in The American Friend that is easy to overlook: its sense of place. Hamburg in the film is not a postcard city but a working port, full of warehouses, cranes, and damp streets, and Paris, when it appears, is similarly unglamorous — a city of stairwells, offices, and train platforms rather than monuments. Wenders films those places with the patience of a man who has actually lived in them, and Hopper moves through them like a man who has lived in many places and belonged fully to none. That rootlessness is central to Ripley: he is at home everywhere and nowhere, he collects identities the way other men collect stamps, and he treats a new city as a new chance to begin again. Hopper, who had himself lived between Hollywood and Europe for years, understood that feeling from the inside. His Ripley is not a tourist in Hamburg; he is a resident who has never quite unpacked, and that small, sad detail — a life lived out of suitcases, in rooms that never quite become home — is what gives the thriller its melancholy undertow.