NekoHomey Purely Joyful Movie!

Protraph Lack of good storyline.

Supelice Dreadfully Boring

Skyler Great movie. Not sure what people expected but I found it highly entertaining.

Horst in Translation ([email protected]) "Der amerikanische Soldat" or "The American Soldier" is a West German German-language film from 1970, so this one had its 45th anniversary last year. The writer and director here is Rainer Werner Fassbinder and like several of his earlier works, this is a black-and-white film. Also like some of his early works, it is a relatively short movie as it runs for 80 minutes only and this already includes closing credits. The title character is played by Karl Scheydt, who is probably (a couple years after his death) not really known to many anymore today, but he actually appeared in several Fassbinder films. The filmmaker had a tendency of choosing his regular male actors in a way that each of them gets one film to shine in and this is Scheydt's. The rest of the cast here include many actors who regularly appeared in Fassbinder's films. If you weren't nice, you could call it his posse. I will not mention the names as you can check these in the cast list yourself, but Jan George for example is the older brother of the late Götz George and he plays a pretty big role in here and also appears in other Fassbinder films which not too many people know.About the action, here we have the story of a man who is an American/German contract killer and he is in Germany after the Vietnam War to fulfill some assignments. We see him kill people, we see him meet his mother and brother again and we also see him hook up with a woman. It is a bit ironic that not this woman who was intended to bring him down is crucial in the end, but his own mother when it comes to who helped the police the most in catching him eventually. All in all, I must say that black-and-white film noir is not perfect for Fassbinder as his later films relied a lot on the use of color and it was a vital instrument to the stories he told. But this is not supposed to mean, he is not a good artist when it comes to essential filmmaking. I really liked the showdown at the end for example in this film, but I really struggled with caring for everything that happened earlier in the film. And ultimately I must say that sitting through the first hour is not worth it, even if the last 15 minutes are pretty good. That's why I give this one a thumbs-down, but to end the review on a positive note I still want to mention the great song used by another Fassbinder regular here: Günther Kaufmann, who does not act in here, but is a scene stealer with his music.

valis1949 American SOLDIER is certainly not among Fassbinder's greatest works. Fassbinder's oeuvre demands that his actors 'pose' rather than 'act'. Ordinarily, a successful dramatic performance allows the viewer to forget that an actor is 'pretending', but that one is witnessing a real depiction of emotions and reactions. However, Fassbinder strives for the converse of this process. He seems to aim for an almost militant lack of affectation, and his actors strike stylized poses which only represent authentic emotions. It's almost like German Kabuki Theater. It would seem that this form of acting technique would lend itself very well to the genre of Gangster Noir, but this film definitely missed the mark. The tale of three rogue police detectives who employ the skills of a heartless American Vietnam veteran is bogged down in an untidy avalanche of wacky details. Odd monologues, pointless car trips, enigmatic phone calls, and arguably the weirdest final scene ever brought to film, do not advance the storyline, but only confuse and perplex the viewer. Fassbinder's more successful films created surreal hyper-realities, but American SOLDIER only conveyed a feeling of disconnected opaqueness. Only for Die Hard Fassbinder Fans.

hasosch The München police cannot cope anymore with some of their underworld elements, so they hire Ricky Murphy alias Richard von Rezzori, a German who served for the US in Vietnam, to kill first a gypsy, then a porno-merchant (and by the way also her lover), and last the girlfriend of one of the police detectives. It happens to be exactly this girl who is sent to Ricky when he stays in a hotel and orders a girl. In the scene in the hotel we hear also the story of the house-keeper Emmy who married a much younger man from Northern Africa who killed her. This story has been filmed by Fassbinder with a different end a few years later under the title "Ali: Fear eats the soul". Just at the time of his arrival, Ricky meets his old buddy Franz, and they visit places where they had been together. Ricky also meets his mother and brother, and in this scene we have on the one side a coldness between Ricky and his mother that cannot be increased and a latent homosexual love between Ricky a his slightly retarded brother on the other side.However, after Ricky has done his duty for the detectives that engaged him, they must get rid of him because otherwise they would have to admit their incapability to solve their problems on their own in front of their boss, an ancient police-chief who seems to be in the hand of his officers. The end scene, in which Ricky and his buddy Franz lose their lives because of a simple "accident", I do not want to spoil here, because the end of "The American Soldier" is an end of such a magnitude of splendor that you will hardly find in any other movie. However, what I want to add is that the message of this movie goes way beyond that of Fassbinder's inclination towards American gangster movies from the 40ies: People who know Fassbinder's work also know that he gave his movies strong political and sociological messages on their ways. "I want my movies to go on in the heads of the audience after they have left the cinema", Fassbinder once said. In this movie, Germans engage an American-German with Vietnam-experience to do the dirty work in Europe, and after he succeeds, instead of paying him the promised sum, they kill him. It seems that Fassbinder just used the decor of Film noir to characterize the years after World II in Germany, since, for a man like Fassbinder, the liberation of Germany by the Allies was not an act of terrorism against the Nazi regime, but a deed for which the American soldiers who cleaned the mess up in Germany have never been adequately rewarded.

jcappy Yup, this is full of allusions to brilliant German directors, and French and American cinema, but "The American Soldier" is much more than a clever exercise-- and cuts deeper than film noir. For this, I think, is as much about the Vietnam War, misogyny, and German/American superiority as it is about an underworld hit man. In fact, the genre seems no more than a departure point.Ricky's inner power is in no way individuated---he's a type, a type produced by powerful entities. He's not a man born, but a male made. He's one of a multiplicity of monsters let loose on the world by the naked display of power--whether it be located in DC or Berlin. His immediate authority resides in his soldier past, and in his male identity--and more specifically, in his heterosexual male identity. He kills men as easily as he commands submission from women.But he's not a typical hit man. He's cool all right, and does cut the figure. But he seems cumbersome, as if new to his form, his movements contained as if by a low ceiling, his body by an uncomfortable suit. He's "the man" but he seems programmed--and is, simply following orders from his own "the man" who also happens to have state authority. He's detached, indiscriminate, naked in his actions, and impersonal--his mind almost narcoleptic. There seems to be some flaw in his design, as if the suit made to cover the soldier, and the soldier made to cover the killer, are not totally effective---not for him, not for those who control him. His murders have all the raw arbitrary-ness of the automated martial male, created in an era of war treachery that has no end.Ricky's females, a spectrum of femme fatales, have a malaise about them, as if narcotized by drugs, drink, sex, or more obviously, by a submissiveness to power. Ricky orders them in the same precise way he orders his Ballantine--and with the same certainty of availability. He takes them, literally dumps them, mocks them, uses them and, if they get too close, murders them. He has to drink whiskey before every sexual encounter to negate any emotion or doubt. Gay men suffer a similar scorn from the brute, his contempt for the powerless underwritten by the world of organized violence that created and controls him. "So much tenderness in my head, so much emptiness in my bed" is heard over and over during Ricky and his brother's final sex/death scene. Which might be interpreted that in a perverse world poisoned by super masculinity and violence, sex with the dead is more possible--or preferable than sex with the living.