Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #87083 in DVD
• Released on: 2002-11-19
• Rating: NR (Not Rated)
• Aspect ratio: 1.33:1
• Formats: Color, Dolby, DVD, Full Screen, Subtitled, NTSC
• Original language: German
• Subtitled in: English
• Number of discs: 1
• Running time: 80 minutes

Amazon.com
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 Ali: Fear Eats the Soul. --Sean Axmaker

Customer Reviews

Intriguing early Fassbinder film
The American Soldier (1970), Fassbinder's revisionist homage to gangster movies and film noir, is alternately playful and deeply disturbing. The DVD, from Wellspring, is of very good quality; although bizarrely the cover shows Marius Aicher, who co-stars as the leader of the corrupt detectives, NOT Karl Scheydt who plays Ricky, the titular "American Soldier."

The film tells the story of Ricky, a professional killer, who returns to his German hometown from America, where he fought for the US in Viet Nam. Three detectives covertly hire Ricky to kill the people behind a crime wave which, humiliatingly, the police have been unable to stop. Although it seemed glacially paced on a first viewing, in subsequent days I found myself thinking about its haunting images many times. At times, it feels almost like a ghost story, with phantoms drifting through a literally shadowy world. Fassbinder and his frequent cinematographer Dietrich Lohmann bring an effectively creepy look to the film, shot on a limited budget in stark, high-contrast black and white.

The American Soldier follows Fassbinder's two earlier thrillers, Love is Colder Than Death (1969; his first picture) and Gods of the Plague (1970), but it is foremost an homage to the American gangster movies which always fascinated him. There are traces of his early passion for Jean-Luc Godard (Breathless, Pierrot le Fou), whose ironic style he adopts in staging the murders, with victims crumpling as if they were children playacting at death. But visually and dramatically, it focuses on the classics of film noir. Ricky brings to mind the amoral, unstoppable antiheroes of Samuel Fuller's Pickup on South Street (1953) and especially Robert Aldrich's stunning Kiss Me Deadly (1955). Perhaps the most intriguing element is Ricky's and his unnamed brother's (Kurt Raab, who specialized in playing Fassbinder's most offbeat characters) relationship with their enigmatic mother (Eva Ingeborg Scholz). Her half-smiles suggest volumes of dark family mysteries, and recall the twisted oedipal streak in Raoul Walsh's White Heat (1949).

But too often The American Soldier seems to beg for "footnoting" - putting it in the context of the many extraordinary films which it quotes or revamps - rather than presenting an immediate experience. Of course, Fassbinder often wants to distance the viewer from his films, forcing us - as do Brecht and Godard - to confront the picture's, and hence our own, social and psychological assumptions. But in this film, Fassbinder's sources and his strikingly original vision do not come together as effectively as in his best work.

The film's climax is an unforgettable exception, but I do not want to spoil its considerable shock value. All I will say is that connecting it with the earlier, sometimes even playful, tone gave the film enormous, and deeply disturbing, emotional resonance. This is one of Fassbinder's most intriguing early works, and it points the way to his even greater films in the years ahead.

A Great Introduction to Fassbinder
This is a very funny film. From the dark but humorous beginning to the endless ["So Much Tenderness"] ending (you have to see the movie). For late-night viewings only, I would think.

Pulp Fiction before "Pulp Fiction"
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.