The American Friend (1977)

          German director Wim Wenders tends toward a certain voluptuousness in his storytelling, so even though his narratives are often quite intimate—exploring the emotional lives of small groups of characters—he’s prone to meandering scenes and slow pacing. Yet because Wenders also has a distinct visual style and a novelist’s instinct for using behavior to reveal character, the more-is-more approach often leads to fascinating results. The American Friend is a good example. Based on one of Patricia Highsmith’s acclaimed “Ripley” novels, The American Friend is nominally a thriller about art forgery, double-crosses, murders, and other such intrigue. As seen through Wenders’ unique prism, The American Friend is also a meditation on friendship, loss, and the need to value life as it happens instead of waiting for whatever’s coming down the road. The synthesis between the movie’s high and low instincts is not perfect, but cinematic artistry and thematic ambition elevate the piece far above the plane of mere pulp.

          The story is convoluted, so a brief rundown of key elements should be sufficient to hint at the content. In America, con man Tom Ripley (Dennis Hopper) acquires paintings by an artist who faked his own death in order to increase the value of his work. After traveling to Germany, Tom sells the paintings in an auction. Tangentially connected to this scheme is German everyman Jonathan Zimmermann (Bruno Ganz), an art restorer whose skills have diminished because of health problems. Jonathan now makes his living by framing artwork, and Tom is one of his clients. When Tom is asked by gangsters to find an expendable person who can commit a murder, Tom suggests Jonathan for the job. (Tom picks Jonathan as a patsy because of a social slight, taking petty vindictiveness to the extreme.) Initially, Jonathan refuses to kill for money—but after receiving a grim prognosis from his doctor, Jonathan accepts the job, hoping to provide for his wife and child. Little does Jonathan suspect that Tom pressured Jonathan’s doctor to exaggerate the gravity of his patient’s prognosis. Eventually, Jonathan and Tom form an unlikely friendship, which complicates the situation in peculiar ways.

         Shot by longtime Wenders collaborator Robby Müller, The American Friend is gorgeous to behold. Mostly employing static frames that evoke the aesthetics of still photography, Müller turns the streets of Hamburg, New York, Paris and other cities into canvases, painting with light and shadows to give the film equal measures of beauty and grit. And even if the pure suspense elements are merely serviceable—an altercation on a moving train feels like watered-down Hitchcock—Wenders’ odd little touches keep the picture humane and idiosyncratic and spontaneous. For instance, Wenders cast three real-life movie directors (Gérard Blain, Samuel Fuller, and Nicholas Ray) in supporting roles. In sum, The American Friend is not a potboiler, even though that label could be applied to the source material. Rather, the film asks questions about what might happen if everyday people somehow became embroiled in outrageous schemes. With Ganz providing vulnerability and Hopper representing the opposite end of the human spectrum, The American Friend is an offbeat character study masquerading as a genre picture.

The American Friend: GROOVY

Kid Blue (1973)

          Throughout the ’60s and ’70s, adventurous filmmakers stretched the boundaries of the Western genre in previously unimaginable ways, often using stories set in the American frontier as allegories for contemporary themes. Yet while such provocateurs as Peckinpah and Penn mixed irreverence with ultraviolence, some filmmakers dabbling in the postmodern-Western arena opted for a gentler approach. For example, consider Kid Blue, a ingratiating comedy of sorts starring Dennis Hopper. The picture was written by Bud Shrake and directed by TV veteran James Frawley, who capitalized on his experience with such lighthearted series as The Monkees to earn gigs directing a handful of ’70s diversions, including the silly The Big Bus (1976) and sublime The Muppet Movie (1979). Translation: Don’t dig too deep into Kid Blue for auteurist statement, because Frawley mostly just plays traffic cop for the peculiarity permeating the story.

          Hopper plays Bickford, a second-rate outlaw-turned-drifter who wanders into the small town of Dime Box, looking to quit the criminal life for something more predictable. Alas, Bickford quickly gets on the wrong side of Sheriff “Mean John” Simpson (Ben Johnson)—who, in Bickford’s defense, probably doesn’t have a good side—which means that living righteously turns out to be as much of a hassle as criminality. Still, Bickford finds solace in the friendship of a sensitive factory worker, Reese (Oates), who evinces qualities that suggest a closeted homosexual. (Oates plays the put-upon textures of this character beautifully.) Bickford’s life is further complicated by trouble with women, because Reese’s wife, Molly (Lee Purcell), is a hot-to-trot spitfire who wants more than Reese is able to give, and Bickford’s old girlfriend eventually shows up, as well. Meanwhile, Bickford befriends an eccentric by the name of Preacher Bob (Boyle), who lives on the outskirts of town while he constructs a flying machine that he hopes will take him up in the air and away from the provincial rhythms of Dime Box.

          The filmmakers play heavily into Hopper’s offscreen persona, portraying Bickford as a hippie unfairly constrained by the Establishment’s rules; in one key moment, Bickford undoes his ponytail and shakes out his long tresses like a Woodstock Nation resident letting his freak flag fly after a long shift at a 9-to-5 gig. And if the superimposition of ’70s ideas and themes onto the Western milieu is a bit forced, that’s a small price to pay for the enjoyably strange textures of Kid Blue. Dime Box is unlike the towns in most Westerns, because it’s filled with believably individualistic people—who, with the obvious exception of Preacher John, are defined more by their troubled inner lives than by their peculiar outer behavior. Dime Box has more than its share of shortcomings, including a slow pace, a deficit of big laughs, and an unmemorable ending. Furthermore, Hopper’s performance can be grating at times, so the actor fails to generate much audience empathy despite his character’s sad-sack plight. Nonetheless, while it’s unfolding, Kid Blue takes viewers to novel places, and it does so with charm and compassion.

Kid Blue: GROOVY

The American Dreamer (1971)

          At the historical moment when this lyrical and revealing documentary was made, Dennis Hopper seemed poised for elevation to godlike status in popular culture. Still riding high on the success of his directorial debut, Easy Rider (1969), Hopper had just completed shooting a bold new feature, The Last Movie, which he not-so-humbly envisioned as a revolutionary step forward in world cinema. The American Dreamer captures Hopper during the protracted editing process of The Last Movie, although filmmakers L. M. Kit Carson and Lawrence Schiller are only peripherally interested in the actual method by which Hopper and his cutters assemble footage. Instead, the filmmakers seek to capture the soul of an artist at his creative peak.

          Therefore, much of the documentary comprises Hopper delivering improvised monologues about his aesthetic and spiritual philosophy. And while Hopper is insufferably contradictory and pretentious and self-aggrandizing, creating excuses for indulgent behavior by characterizing every action he takes as a manifestation of his rebellious creativity, the seemingly unrestricted access Carson and Schiller gained to Hopper’s life makes The American Dreamer important. The content of The American Dreamer’s best sequences is so interesting that the documentary’s excesses—not least of which is fawning hero worship—can’t diminish the project’s informational value.

          Set mostly around a home in Taos, New Mexico, where a bearded Hopper supervises editing whenever he’s not indulging in sexcapades with the myriad willing ladies who drift in and out of the place, The American Dreamer is almost equally divided between narrative scenes capturing action as it unfolds, and poetic passages juxtaposing Hopper’s voiceover with shots of the actor/director driving, walking, or, in some cases, pulling performance-art stunts like stripping off his clothes while he strolls through a suburb. (In some of the most bracing scenes, Hopper has group sex with various nubile women, although the doc stops short of depicting anything X-rated.)

          The through-line of The American Dreamer is Hopper’s stream-of-consciousness speechifying, and there’s no question he’s a compelling speaker even when his rhetoric gets ridiculous. In cogent moments, he invents hip slogans, e.g., “It’s very difficult at times if you believe in evolution not to believe in revolution.” Elsewhere, he spews drug-casualty non sequiturs, e.g., “Can you go in a corner and not think about a white bear for five minutes? Is that possible?” And this was before Hopper reached rock bottom. Much of Hopper’s extemporizing seems consciously designed to burnish the myth of Hopper as a soldier for social change (one of Hopper’s real howlers: “Society’s made me a criminal”). Meanwhile, some of the actor/director’s chitty-chat comprises glorified pick-up lines, as when he explains to a Playboy Bunny that he’s so concerned about female orgasms he thinks of himself as a lesbian.

          At his worst, Hopper embarks on sky-high ego trips, referring to himself in the third person as “the artist” and equating his work to that of Orson Welles. (The filmmakers goose these delusions of grandeur by lacing the soundtrack with original folk songs about Hopper’s quest to reinvent cinema.) The deification gets a bit much, but nestled within The American Dreamer is a poignant portrait of a uniquely talented man testing the outer limits of his universe, thereby inadvertently arriving at the place where maverick artistry becomes megalomania.

The American Dreamer: GROOVY

The Last Movie (1971)

          One of the most notorious auteur misfires of the ’70s, this misbegotten mind-fuck was Dennis Hopper’s follow-up to Easy Rider (1969), the surprise blockbuster that not only transformed Hopper from a journeyman actor to an A-list director but also established him, for a brief time, as a leading voice of the counterculture. Alas, Hopper’s poor choices as an actor, co-writer, and director turned The Last Movie into a metaphor representing the way some people, Hopper included, fell victim to the excesses of the drug era. In trying to escape the constraints associated with conventional cinema, Hopper created a maddening hodgepodge of self-indulgent nonsense and uninteresting experimentation.

          Hopper stars as Kansas, the horse wrangler for a Hollywood film crew that’s shooting on location in Peru. After a fatal on-set accident, Kansas drops out of his Hollywood lifestyle to start over in South America, hooking up with a sexy local girl (Stella Garcia) and scheming with a fellow U.S. expat (Don Gordon) to get rich off a gold mine. Kansas also romances a beautiful upper-crust American (Julie Adams), with whom he engages in gentle sadomasochism, and he gets roped into a bizarre situation involving Peruvian villagers who are “shooting” their own movie using primitive mock-up cameras and microphones made from scrap metal and sticks. (One of The Last Movie’s myriad pretentious allusions is that the “fake” film crew is making more authentic art than the “real” film crew.)

          Simply listing the trippy flourishes in The Last Movie would take an entire website, so a few telling examples should suffice. Early in the picture, a Hollywood starlet (played by Hopper’s then-girlfriend, former Mamas and the Papas singer Michelle Phillips) conducts a ritual during which she pierces a Peruvian woman’s ear with a large pin while people stand around the scene wearing creepy masks and chanting. Later, Kansas leads a group of Americans to a whorehouse, where they watch a grimy girl-on-girl floor show; this inexplicably drives Kansas into such a rage that he ends up slapping around his long-suffering female companion. And we haven’t even gotten to the weird one-shot bits that are periodically inserted into the narrative. At one point, Kansas leans back while a woman shoots breast milk from her nipple to his face. Elsewhere, while getting his hair trimmed, Kansas shares the following random remark: “I never jerked off a horse before.” Good to know.

          The whole movie culminates with a befuddling barrage of images, including scenes of Kansas getting beaten by members of the “fake” film crew, as if the Hollywood runaway is some sort of martyr for art. It’s all very deliberately weird. During the final stretch, for instance, Hopper cuts to silly things like “scene missing” placeholders and outtakes of actors consulting their scripts. The idea, presumably, was to deconstruct Hollywood filmmaking so that a new art form could emerge from the ruins, but Hopper missed the mark in every way. That said, it’s worth noting that Hopper brought interesting friends along for the ride. Cinematographer László Kovács, who also shot Easy Rider, does what he can to infuse Hopper’s scattershot frames with artistry, and the cast includes ’70s cult-cinema stalwart Severn Darden (who does a musical number!) as well as maverick B-movie director Samuel Fuller, who plays a version of himself during the scenes depicting the making of the Hollywood movie.

The Last Movie: FREAKY

Mad Dog Morgan (1976)

          A low-budget Australian effort noteworthy for the presence of Hollywood leading man Dennis Hopper, Mad Dog Morgan offers an Ozzie spin on the cliché of the antihero outlaw. Based on the real-life exploits of John Fuller, a criminal who operated under aliases including “Daniel Morgan” in mid-19th-century Australia, the picture romanticizes certain elements of the protagonist while still depicting his violence in a vivid way. Morgan was a “bushranger,” living in the wild and subsisting on loot from robberies. He also developed a fierce reputation for the savagery of which he was capable when inebriated.

          Director/cowriter Philippe Mora elicits early sympathy for Morgan by featuring a prologue in which the character is brutalized while imprisoned. The image of Morgan getting branded is hard to shake, and the abuse he suffers behind bars goes a long way toward explaining why he subsequently shuns law and order. Whether this portrayal accurately reflects the real Morgan’s character is open to debate, but the strategy works on a narrative level: Even as Morgan becomes more and more dangerous, we recall why he resents authority and values his freedom.

          Hopper was ingenious casting, since his work in Easy Rider (1969) made him an icon for the rebel spirit of the counterculture era, and he gives one of his most disciplined ’70s performances here. It’s possible that having to maintain a pidgin Irish/Australian accent forced Hopper to concentrate on his dialogue instead of tumbling off into formless improvisation, but whatever the case, he’s ferocious and focused from start to finish.

          The movie’s plotting is rather ordinary, the usual business of a crook forming unexpected alliances and outsmarting pursuers until an inevitable showdown, so what makes Mad Dog Morgan arresting, aside from Hopper’s performance, is the movie’s rich Australian texture. Shot on location by cinematographer Mike Molloy, the film’s widescreen images present untamed regions of the land down under as a striking alternative to the familiar settings of Hollywood-made outlaw pictures. Lit naturalistically and shot on grainy film, Molloy’s frames feel like vintage photographs come to life. Furthermore, an ominous soundtrack featuring the eerie aboriginal wind instrument called the didgeridoo gives Mad Dog Morgan an otherworldly air.

          The supporting cast is fine but not spectacular, though Ozzie stalwart Jack Thompson contributes his usual commanding presence in the small role of Morgan’s main pursuer, and Aboriginal actor David Gulpill (Walkabout) is amiably enigmatic as Morgan’s outback sidekick. (Gulpill also performs the soundtrack’s didgeridoo music.) Thanks to strong execution elevating potentially humdrum material, Mad Dog Morgan offers an exotic new spin on a durable genre.

Mad Dog Morgan: GROOVY

Tracks (1977)

          Iconoclastic filmmaker Henry Jaglom’s second feature, the Vietnam-vet drama Tracks, is infinitely more coherent than his previous film, the interminable A Safe Place (1971) but it suffers the same pretentious excesses as all of his films. To Jaglom’s credit, his interest in human behavior is broad and genuine, and he gives actors room to run wild with Method-style flourishes. But unfortunately for viewers, Jaglom’s stories amble from one angst-ridden episode to another while unpleasantly self-involved characters mope, scream, and whine about feelings that somehow remain mysterious even after being explained to death.

          Tracks stars Dennis Hopper, at his most gratingly unhinged, as Sgt. Jack Falen, a traumatized soldier escorting a friend’s corpse home for burial. Most of the picture takes place on a train as Falen heads toward his destination and kills time with a swinger (Dean Stockwell) who wants Falen to play wingman while he woos eligible ladies. Despite being inexpressive and moody, Falen somehow hooks up with an innocent hippie chick (Taryn Power) and a randy liberated woman (Topo Swope), which means that viewers get not one but two scenes of Hopper extending his tongue and flailing it at women’s faces in a soggy simulation of kissing.

          Between sexcapades, Falen engages in psychobabble-filled chats with assorted passengers, and he periodically succumbs to psychotic episodes in which he imagines seeing things like gang rape, which prompts him to whip out his sidearm and threaten people. When this pedestrian PTSD shtick reaches a climax, Hopper strips naked and runs through the train; a bit later, he gets off the train and climbs into a grave that he mistakes for a foxhole, at which point another freakout ensues. None of this has much impact, however, since Hopper is so creepy that it’s impossible to care what becomes of his character. Watching Tracks will make most viewers want to make tracks—away from the movie.

Tracks: LAME

Apocalypse Now (1979)

          One of the definitive cinematic statements of the ’70s, Francis Ford Coppola’s Vietnam War drama is indulgent, pretentious, and undisciplined, but the film’s narrative excesses perfectly match its theme of men driven mad by an insane world. Famously adapted from Joseph Conrad’s novel Heart of Darkness by gonzo screenwriter John Milius, then rewritten by Coppola and sprinkled with evocative narration by Michael Herr, the harrowing movie follows the journey of military assassin Captain Willard (Martin Sheen), sent by his U.S. Army masters to take out a rogue Green Beret, Colonel Kurtz (Marlon Brando), who has established an ultraviolent fiefdom in Cambodia. The irony of the Army condemning one of its own killing machines for being too bloodthirsty is just part of the film’s crazy-quilt statement about the obscenity of war in general and that of the Vietnam conflict in particular; even though the narrative wanders into many strange places along the way, it always returns to the maddening central idea that murder is acceptable as long as it’s done according to plan.
          Moving away from the classicism of his early-’70s triumphs and entering a vibrant period of expressionist experimentation, Coppola oversees a string of bold and inspired sequences, many of which have become iconic. The opening salvo, with hallucinatory intercutting of jungle imagery and a sweaty Saigon hotel room while the Doors’ menacing song “The End” plays on the soundtrack, goes beyond masterful and enters the realm of tweaked genius. And how many scenes in other movies match the audacity of the helicopter attack scored with Wagner’s “Flight of the Valkyries”? The film’s dialogue is just as vivid, from “I love the smell of napalm in the morning” to “The horror, the horror.” Sheen is extraordinary, channeling his intensity and remarkable speaking voice into a performance of perverse majesty, while supporting players Robert Duvall and Dennis Hopper match him with crystalline personifications of two different brands of lunacy. Famously overpaid and uncooperative costar Brando gives Coppola fragments of brilliance that the director stitches into something weirdly affecting, and the fact that Brando’s performance works is a testament to the heroic efforts of a team of editors including longtime Coppola collaborator Walter Murch.
          Speaking of behind-the-camera participants, it would be criminal not to sing the praises of Vittorio Storaro’s luminous photography, which somehow captures not only the heat but also the suffocating humidity of the jungle. Actors Sam Bottoms, Laurence Fishburne, Albert Hall, and G.D. Spradlin all contribute immeasurably as well, and Harrison Ford pops up for a bit part. After consuming the powerful 153-minute original version, consider exploring the fascinating (and even more indulgent) 202-minute extended cut titled Apocalypse Now Redux, and by all means seek out Hearts of Darkness: A Filmmaker’s Apocalypse, possibly the most illuminating behind-the-scenes documentary ever made.

Apocalypse Now: OUTTA SIGHT