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11 utilisateurs sur 13 ont trouvé ce commentaire utile :
Fassbinder's world, 24 décembre 2002

Auteur : Itchload de Mass

This is an early Fassbinder film, and from what I've seen, one of the best of his first 11 (which make up his first stage as a filmmaker). It's Fassbinder in gangster mode, and has been called an homage to film noir or even a parody of film noir. This isn't the case though. The movie is just film noir done by Fassbinder. There are little homages here and there, the beginning and end could be seen as being inspired by Breathless (taken to ridiculous extremes), and there are lots of filmmakers names used as characters, but Fassbinder isn't winking at the camera so much as just being himself, which back then, could be quite bizarre. In fact, this might be one of Fassbinder's most bizarre movies.

The camera stands still, characters occasionally deliver seemingly unrelated monologues, unusual plot lines are treated nonchalantly (Ricky's brother is in love with him?), people about to be killed don't seem to be worried, and the singlehandedly greatest song ever plays over and over again, crooning "so much tenderness is in my head, so much loneliness in my bed." To have this song play over scenes of a stone-cold amoral hitman (the title character) casually driving his car are perversely hilarious. Even better is when it plays in the end, in one of the greatest endings I've ever seen (you'll have to check it out).

The recent release of this film on DVD should help bring it some attention, as its now available for a pretty reasonable price from Wellspring. If you're looking for one of Fassbinder's more mature, professional, socially poignant melodramas, maybe this isn't the movie for you. If you're interested in an extremely unique unclassifiable early Fassbinder, by all means, check this out. Despite the occasional nods to past filmmakers, it's surprising how unique Fassbinder was from the start.

(for those who are Jim Jarmusch fans, it's apparent films like these must have inspired the detached humor in some of his more recent films).

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2 utilisateurs sur 3 ont trouvé ce commentaire utile :
The 2 Sides Of Fastbinder, 23 janvier 2009

Auteur : schweinehunder de Canada

I find it mind boggling how I can be so very impressed with some of Fastbinders films like "Chinese Roulette", "Warum Lauft Herr R. Amok" and the film "I only want you to love me" and see them not only as extremely polished well crafted and well conceived, but almost flawless. Like most directors, even those as mighty as Martin Scorcese, some types of movies he is extremely GOOD at making, and others, he fails miserably. In essence, Fastbinder is extremely GOOD at making mundane more or less boring films, and one thing I've learned from this movie, and his film "gotter Der pest", is that when it comes to crime dramas, he fails in almost every way when there is too much action, and simply cannot construct a movie with a coherent plot line.

I don't agree with the term "Art House" as being a true genre, but basically when you call a movie "art house" what you essentially mean to say is that events in the film make little or no rational sense which runs on similar lines to "surrealist cinema". These genres are SUPPOSED to have incoherent plots and illogical situations, which in a film utilising a standard approach, would make the film complete trash. The problem is where do you draw the line between recognizing a movie as being creative, and far out, or recognizing it as a poorly crafted movie with lousy plot development, plot holes, sub par acting, and flawed in general.

Indeed there are WAYS to pull off a good surrealist or "art house" type movie without going too far, and managing to achieve strong meaning, however films like these do not do that. It seems as though the director throws in insane off the wall moments as childish distractions to a movie being overall led by dull acting and no real point: moments such as the couple being shot while laughing hysterically. When the main character leaps up and kisses the maid who then falls into a deadpan trance. When the maid sits on the end of the bed and recants a meaningless story as the couple are making love. The moment where the main character almost french kisses his mother. The moment where he shoots blanks at a woman on the ground, and worst of all, the suicide, where a woman kills herself with one stab wound to the STOMACH, whereby she drops dead seconds later, which is more or less impossible. All of these things are pointless, having no other aim than cheap shock value, and all of them compiled into one film is simply too much to handle. The problem is that the result is, you simply cannot take anything in the film very seriously, and therefore cannot really find any meaning or poignancy to the film whatsoever, which is culminated in the ending where the man is rolling on the floor all about his dead brothers body who had just been shot. The only thing that passed through my mind was "oh.. another silly little thing to end the film on"

The general approach, riddled with these ridiculous moments aside, the plot is simply not very cohesive or well crafted. The entire film consists of the main character murdering people seemingly at random and for no reason while the police idly attempt to catch him. The film begins with the main character returning to the town, and the police suddenly become aware of him, apparently he is just that infamous which was given no background at all. Also the way he gets his tips from a random porn seller, the first person who's help he seeks is very contrived. All of this culminates with the ending, which is totally ludicrous; the most ill conceived amateurish "sting" operation ever, very badly directed and with an unrealistic finish. The worst aspect about this, is that there has been no attention to the efforts of the police who are trying to catch him. They just suddenly show up at a train station, conveniently waiting for him out of nowhere.

Fastbinder doing crime drama simply does not work, and I find it hard to believe how any scene in this half overdone half underdone film can resonate at all. The only thing to say about this film really is; there's nothing going on here.

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3 utilisateurs sur 5 ont trouvé ce commentaire utile :
Experimental and Justifiable Plagiarism, 10 décembre 2004

Auteur : Daniel Hayes (dphayes@dal.ca) de Halifax, NS

The European pseudo-noirs of the 60s and 70s reaped the benefits of being able to skip a number of steps in the writing process simply by adopting styles and themes from previous films. What was left was to add one's own spin to an existing story. Fassbinder was a genius at taking a style and making it his own, not in a superficially Tarantino-ish way, but in a way that was at once equally unique and dependent, retaining the benefits of a style and pushing it even further into his own territory.

In this sense, this film is an early experiment: a war veteran turned contract killer stoically carrying out his duties, but in a post-war German environment and with homoerotic undertones galore. But it's remarkably coherent and compelling considering how little the plot gives away explicitly. Indeed, this would become one of his trademarks.

4 out of 5 - An excellent film

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They're Coming To Take Me Away, Ha Haa!, 7 novembre 2009

Auteur : valis1949 de Etats-Unis

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.

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The directors first major film, should have ended his career., 2 novembre 2009

Auteur : Jay Harris (sirbossman6969@yahoo.com) de Etats-Unis

*** Ce commentaire peut contenir des spoilers ***

Can someone please explain how Fassbinder became famous after this atrociously badly written, acted & made waste of celluloid was released in 1970.

The title in English is: The American Soldier. That is an insult to the worst gangster films,None were this bad.

It is supposed to be a tribute to American film noir gangster films. What hallucinatory drug were these people on.

In all my 70 plus years of seeing movies, I doubt if I saw a worst film. It is deadly slow,no life whatsoever in any scene or performance. The ending scene ridiculous, it is actually revoltingly laughable. No character seemed to draw a sober breath, they were drinking continuously.

I could not care or give one hoot for anyone.

Ratings: 1/2* (out of 4) 13 points (out of 100) IMDb 1 (out of 10)

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an experiment in style and the mood of character, more than a plot-driven movie, 24 septembre 2009

Auteur : MisterWhiplash de Etats-Unis

The American Soldier has a story, maybe even a plot, but that's not why Rainer Werner Fassbinder made this movie, I believe. It's more about an attack or subversion on the style of a movie, in this case the film-noir. The black and white makes the comparison a little obvious, but it's also in the attitudes of the characters, the costumes and clothing that distinguishes a character like Ricky. But it also owes as much to New-Wave tactics like Godard and Melville (Le Samourai and Alphaville come immediately to mind), and to Fassbinder's own sense of alienation with the world as well as in his own films. It's sometimes hard to watch, since his character carry the same weight of angst and dread that they barely really show to one another, but it's still an intriguing trip.

The story that is there actually reveals more about a German viewpoint than that of it being American, though I'm sure its protagonist and its background is significant just for this reason. It's about a soldier back from Vietnam who is recruited by the government, who act much in the way of a discreet crime organization, to carry out killings of people who may (or may not?) be nefarious characters, or just people whom Ricky doesn't know why he's killing. The implication is somewhat more satirical than action-movie based (though I'm reminded, sadly, of Wolverine earlier this year and movies like it that don't get the message), that a killer keeps on killing if without the right sense of moral well-being or even self-worth.

Fassbinder amps up some clichés for the film-noir aesthetic by making it a pulpy-crime story, where a prostitute falls in love with Ricky even as she shouldn't or might just get in the way. He also casts his parts very well, especially with Karl Scheydt as Ricky (makes Glenn Ford look like a wimp) and Elga Sorbas as Rosa, the attractive but uncertain prostitute who falls for Ricky (there's an engrossing scene where he calls up to ask for a girl to his apartment room, she comes and undresses, and then the two just lay in bed while a maid is in the room telling a somber story about a romance gone bad). All of the cinematography is at least interesting, and at best represents a maturity in film-making for Fassbinder after his first couple of films (Love is Colder Than Death, Katzelmacher) that were just a series of static shots.

Some have brought up criticisms of its tedious nature, or that it's just boring. It's hard to argue it since it's based on taste; the same scene that could make on bored (and, frankly, it's not a good movie to watch when tired at two in the morning) could also make a Jim Jarmusch fan gripped to the chair one's sitting at. Characters in The American Soldier don't move too realistically - it's more like in Fassbinder's own The Merchant of Four Seasons; people move and talk and look like they've come out of a shell-shock, or may still be in one. Even the cop characters, or Ricky's mom and brother, are in a slight daze as they speak, and this is deliberate. It ends up making for a more intellectually satisfying experience than an emotional one; I wasn't so much moved by the ending, where we see a character's death (one usually typical in a film-noir of the 1940s in America, as in bad-guy-gets-his by the end) in the context of a poetic mourning, but it did fascinate me.

It's sometimes tough going, and its rewards are for a real geek for black and white New-Wave inspired crime films that have such gimmicks as a rock song that repeats in lieu of a usual orchestral sound, and its not for someone looking for fast action and conventional thrills. It is, in its dimensions, arty, and fine with it.

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The American in us, 28 février 2009

Auteur : hasosch de Etats-Unis

*** Ce commentaire peut contenir des spoilers ***

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.

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under the genre, 4 mars 2008

Auteur : jcappy de ny-vt

*** Ce commentaire peut contenir des spoilers ***

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.

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4 utilisateurs sur 8 ont trouvé ce commentaire utile :
For fans only, 7 septembre 2003

Auteur : zetes de Saint Paul, MN

Not one of Fassbinder's best, but certainly worth a look for those interested in the man's work. In mood and style, it's reminiscent of Godard's Alphaville, and my reactions to both films are similar: I am intrigued, but a bit bored. And I don't think either succeed in the end. The American Soldier concerns a haughty German-American soldier, fresh from Vietnam, who struts around killing people for reasons which are kept mostly obscure (he's some kind of gangster or hitman). The police are after him, though the police seem just as wicked. I didn't care much about what was going on – no compelling reason was ever given for me to care. However, many elements of the film impressed me. Fassbinder's idiosyncratic sense of pace and mood pervades. The performances are pretty good. Fassbinder himself appears in a small role and, as usual, he delivers a remarkable performance. He has to be the best actor/director of all time. Peer Raben never seems to write a lot of music for Fassbinder's films. Instead, he just writes one theme that is used several times throughout the given picture. They are always exceptional, and his theme (and also theme song, which is the same tune with lyrics added) is excellent here. And then there's this ending. Fassbinder has a talent for unique and notable endings, and the end of this film is one of the weirdest and most remarkable I've ever seen. 7/10.

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3 utilisateurs sur 7 ont trouvé ce commentaire utile :
great parody of suppressed german culture, 29 juin 2003
Auteur : webgrind-2 de vancouver island

This is a very funny attempt by the director to deal with the "klischee"( german spelling) of the american man, or at least how the proletarian german man is looking across the atlantic. All americans are good in bed? goodlooking? violent and yet cool? Why is there a need to put ketchup on a shot person's shirt? Would you really believe then that somebody was actually killed? I agree with other viewers that this not a movie that could be considered enjoyable at all times, but it beats movies like "the patriot" or "frida" any time, because it doesn't take itself serious. And that in itself is exactly the director's criticism of american culture ( what an abuse of the word culture!) and their consistant effort to tell you everything is allright and we are the good guys. Here, have another Diet coke, or would you like a Big Mac with your Whitney Houston?

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