Der Amerikanische Soldat (1970) - film review

After serving in the American army in Vietnam, a former professional killer named Ricky returns to his hometown of Munich in Germany.  The town is in the grip of a serious crime wave, which the police seem incapable of containing.  Three renegade cops hire Ricky to kill the gangsters who are behind the crime wave, which he does with his usual professional detachment.  He takes time to visit his mother and brother, and also to amuse himself with a hotel maid.  Unfortunately, to cover their tracks, his employers decide that he too must be eliminated...

Arguably the most inspired of Rainer Fassbinder’s gangster films, Der Amerikanische Soldat is an extremely tongue-in-cheek deconstruction of the classic American film noir thriller which manages to be both hilarious and deeply unsettling.  A devotee of the French New Wave, Fassbinder is clearly influenced by the early films of Jean-Luc Godard and this film bears some striking similarities with Godard’s A bout de souffle (1959) and Alphaville (1965).  This is most apparent in the highly stylised death scenes and the subversive way in which the film blends humour and jokey eroticism with the familiar motifs of the hard boiled film noir.

Fassbinder’s fascination with form and his penchant for experimentation, the two characteristics that perhaps most define his short but brilliant career, are readily apparent in Der Amerikanische Soldat.  Most memorable is the final shot (which lasts around five minutes, i.e. six per cent of the film’s entire runtime) in which the (dead) main protagonist and his brother roll about on the floor, in a gruesome parody of a homoerotic love scene.  This is preceded by several more explicitly erotic scenes in which sex and death are inescapably intertwined – a stark visualisation of the dark sexual tension that underlies most of the great film noir thrillers.

In common with the original film noir B-movies, Der Amerikanische Soldat was made on a ludicrously tight budget and relies on lighting and inventive camera work to compensate for production weaknesses elsewhere.  This is more than a homage to film noir; it is an attempt to understand the precepts, the defining principles of the genre and to present a modern reinterpretation of these in an insightful and entertaining manner.  As the distinctive film noir look had its origins in German expressionism, it seems fitting that Fassbinder should complete the circle by making a German expressionist work that is itself inspired by film noir.

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