The American friend

Patricia Highsmith's mysterious, psychopathic and talented con artist Mr Tom Ripley has inspired varied film versions of her five novels featuring him (the "Ripliad"). With The American Friend, prolific German writer-director Wim Wenders presented Ripley as a cowboy American character played by Dennis Hopper in a Hamburg setting.

He's one part of a 1977 audience-maximising screenplay that also includes a French supporting actor, Gerard Blain. Conveniently, he can speak English, as can the lead character, a dying man Ripley recommends as a hired assassin. He's played well by the film's real star, Bruno Ganz.

Based on Highsmith's Ripley's Game (later remade by Lilianna Cavani as a vehicle for John Malkovich), the Wenders screenplay transforms amoral Ripley from an urbane and effete bon vivant into a petty criminal with a soft heart. Hopper makes him credible, but the quantum character leaps attributed to Ripley and the Ganz character (a picture framer with a terminal blood disease) are harder to believe.

Two famous film directors joined Wenders. Nicholas Ray played the supposedly dead painter whose "discovered" works are touted by Ripley, and Samuel Fuller is a Mafia boss whose operations are targeted by a suave French gangster (Blain, a star previously in Chabrol andTruffaut features).

Much of Wenders' two hours of mystery comprises eye-catching cinematography in which artful dabs of primary colours enrich dreary cityscapes and tawdry apartments. They're effectively alienation effects, deliberately drawing attention to specially-painted walls and carefully-positioned colourful props, clothing and autos.

When the screenplay's pace speeds up, as Ripley (an experienced killer) assists the picture-framer to kill and survive, Wenders lets the action and actors fill the screen without distractions, so masterfully that the plot's creaking illogicalities only strike the viewer at the end.