"So much tenderness is in my head": A review of Fassbinder's The American Soldier.
Watched the third movie in Rainer Werner Fassbinder's "Gangster Trilogy" or "Franz Walsch" trilogy (which I didn't know was part of a trilogy when I queued it up on Netflix...), The American Soldier (1970; original title: Der amerikanische Soldat) yesterday (Saturday, 7 July); the other two movies are Love Is Colder Than Death and Gods of the Plague (1969 for both). It's the first Fassbinder movie I've seen in at least ten years (last one I saw, on VHS, was Why Does Herr K. Run Amok?, 1970). Not sure why I've waited so long to watch more of his movies: it's not like I don't live within a half hour's drive of a hep video store that has a fair bit of his work for rental (they even have a VHS set of his Berlin Alexanderplatz mini-series, which apparently has yet to be released on DVD...); and my stint at university certainly made me more appreciative of his work than that of, say, Wim Wenders (*shudder*). *Shrug* It's just one of those things, I guess.
The American Soldier feels very much like a film school student's noodlings in the gangster/noir genres, but Fassbinder had already directed eleven movies -- eight of them feature films -- by the time he lensed The American Soldier. Let's clarify, shall we? That's eleven movies in four years, or eight feature films in two years. The American Soldier wasn't even his last movie shot and/or released in 1970; he would shoot and/or release two more feature films that year (Beware of a Holy Whore and Pioneers in Ingolstadt, if you're keeping track). Werner Herzog may have spent five years in the jungles of Peru filming the sodden mess of Fitzcarraldo (1982), perpetrating countless human rights abuses (to say nothing of basic labor law violations) upon his Indian laborers/extras in a camp he dubbed "Film or Death," but Fassbinder lived that sentiment -- without getting Amnesty International on his back.
That said, one shouldn't pop The American Soldier into the ol' media player expecting much in the way of plot, dialogue, or virtuoso acting; it's very much a minimalist sort of picture, with the same clip of the Jim Morrison sound-alike droning the same couple of verses repeating multiple times throughout the movie (and, at the end, multiple times in the same scene). If you're not in the mood for a mood piece or are not very interested in Fassbinder's work, stay away.
The titular character, Ricky, is played by a stocky Karl Scheyd, who apparently did a tour of duty in Vietnam as an American soldier (nothing in the movie suggests that he is actually American; his handful of English words don't roll off his tongue with anything but a rudimentary facility), and has returned to Munich (where Fassbinder grew up) to work as a hitman, a contract killer whose chief clientele appears to be a group of Munich detectives (Jan George -- that's him featured prominently on the DVD cover above -- Hark Bohm as the weedy "Doc," and a beefy Marius Aicher). While the detectives dress in old fashioned suits and all wear hats (the hat worn by Aicher's characters is particularly ill-matched with his suit), Ricky's got up in full 1930s/1940s drag, as befits a back-handed homage to the American gangster film, that makes the detectives' attire look, by comparison, positively swingin'.
Ricky bags the ladies without half trying, including the ringer sent by Jan George's character, Rosa von Praunheim (Elga Sorbas); he is also apparently the objet d'amour of his fag brother, Kurt (Kurt Raab). Ricky stages a mock execution on a prostitute (Irm Hermann) who tells him that "Americans fuck fantastically" (which was something of a surprise to me, since German males are usually held to be better hung than the average American), rides around with a boyhood pal named Franz Walsch (Fassbinder himself; while the character appears, played by Fassbinder as well as another actor, in the previous two movies in the trilogy, he also used the name for the editing credit on those movies that he edited), cunt-teases a hotel maid (Margarethe von Trotta, who reels off a Mother McRee that is the basic plotline for Fassbinder's Ali: Fear Eats the Soul [1974] and has one of the most unconvincing suicide scenes in film), kills a gypsy/Romany who actually "has the sight," Tony the Gypsy (a razor-thin Ulli Lommel; the German word "Zigeuner" is used for his character, which comes from the Hungarian "cigány; the French version carried into English as "tzigane"), Magdalena Fuller (Katrin Schaake) and her disbelieving, tuxedoed date, and, finally, the ringer-turned-girlfriend Rosa, before being gunned down in the Munich train station by George's detective, in front of his brother Kurt and their mother (Eva Ingeborg Scholz). (Franz gets it too.) What follows is what one reviewer called five minutes (it clocked somewhere between three and four minutes to me, but never mind; it feels much, much longer) of Kurt madly rolling around on the floor, clutching, kissing, and dry humping his brother's corpse, while their mother stands looking on, stock-still, like Joan Crawford risen from the grave. This beats anything in Rita Mae Brown's Rubyfruit Jungle all hollow, and can stand beside much of the taboo-breaking gross-outs of John Waters' early movies. In-fucking-credible.
I wish I knew more specifics about the socio-political climate in the BDR (Bundesrepublik Deutschland; or West Germany), specifically in Munich, in the late 1960s/early 1970s, so that I could have a better idea how seriously to take the implied satire of police corruption and aimless postwar West German youth in The American Soldier; but my ignorance didn't lessen my morbid, advisory enjoyment of the movie. If you are of a similarly bent frame of mind, you could do far worse than rent The American Soldier; Godard's Hail Mary, for one thing.