Rainer Werner Fassbinder, “Der Amerikanische Soldat / The American Soldier” (1970)
A loosely stitched pastiche of elements borrowed from old Hollywood and French New Wave film noir flicks, “The American Soldier” has plenty to say about the relationship between the US and Germany (or West Germany at the time the film was made, during the height of the Vietnam War) and the hypocrisies of contemporary Western society and certain of its features that divide humans from one another and prevent them from being authentic and fully human. A professional killer, Ricky Murphy (Karl Scheyde) has just returned to Germany and is leading a desultory sort of life. Three corrupt cops, pressured by their bureaucrat police commissioner to do some real work and stamp down on their end of the national crime statistics, hire him to wipe out some crooks. Murphy does his job a little too efficiently and becomes a danger to the police in upstaging their crime-busting efforts. While the rogue cops figure out how to set him up, Murphy becomes a little too intimate with the prostitute girlfriend of one of the cops and they both plan to escape Germany and go to Japan.
There’s so much packed into the film’s 80 minutes, it could afford to lose those Humphrey Bogart / Ingrid Bergman “Casablanca” references: the nattily suited Ricky Murphy visits his old flame Inga at the Lola Montez club (familiar from Fassbinder’s “Gods of the Plague” gangster flick) and discovers she’s married to another man. Like Ricky in the 1940s thriller classic, Ricky Murphy is a lesser man not living up to his full potential as a human being but whereas Bogart’s character did redeem himself, Murphy resolutely remains a killing machine who (spoiler alert), living by the sword, eventually dies by it – or a gun, rather. The woman he plans to run away with comes to an unhappy end as well. In fact nearly all characters in this film, minor as well as major, are unhappy and disconnected from one another and from themselves, and are destined either to come to a sticky end or continue living hollow lives. Probably the only character who comes closest to being authentic turns out to be a hotel maid stood up by her boyfriend who kills herself in despair.
The acting is not very good and Fassbinder himself surfaces as Franz Walsch, Ricky’s partner in crime. Actors appear to be cold and robotic and this stilted manner of acting calls viewers’ attention to the alienation several characters feel and which some are driven to overcome. A number of elements and characters from Fassbinder’s earlier gangster films appear here: one of the police officers who romances the prostitute who takes a shine to Ricky is the same cop who encouraged Joanna in “Gods of the Plague” to rat on her ex-lover. On the other hand the cinematography is well done with good use of panning to capture the gritty atmosphere and seedy underground of Munich. The plot is very basic and is secondary to character portrayal and the loneliness and isolation felt by several of them. As in “Love is Colder than Death” and “Gods of the Plague”, characters display an obsession with money as a means to the freedom and the promise of new relationships and connections they strive for but probably never know. Society is revealed as corrupt: the three detectives use Ricky in an effort to bolster their careers for a bureaucrat who is under pressure himself from his unseen superiors. Ricky does not yet realise that he is as disposable as the people he kills. Everyone is demeaned in some way by the deals they do in pursuit of money and relationships and no-one is any happier at the end of the film than at the beginning.
The relationship between Ricky and the police officers reflects to some degree West Germany’s relationship to the United States since 1945 as Fassbinder saw it in 1970: the country had experienced considerable economic recovery and had become Europe’s largest economy and one of its richest, largely on the back of the US military which meant West Germany could divert money that might otherwise have been spent on defence into investing in social services and infrastructure, and improving people’s standard of living.
Unexpected humour is to be found in the film’s one sex scene where Ricky and the prostitute try to make out in bed while the hotel maid sits on the edge and recounts a story about a woman called Emmy who falls madly in love with a Turkish man called Ali and marries him; and in the film’s closing scene in which Ricky’s younger brother wrestles with the killer’s body in a way that suggests a wild homosexual encounter. All the films in Fassbinder’s gangster trilogy contain references to repressed homosexuality between men which say something about the nature of an otherwise permissive society that prides itself on being free and uninhibited in which his films are set.
For the most part the film has a less experimental style though its plot, concerns and stilted style of filming still mark it out as an art-house film. After “The American Soldier”, Fassbinder turned his attention to making melodramas and made-for-TV films and series.