THE SCREEN
Westerbeck, Colin L. Jr.
and pieces of society together in a conflict with only two sides, to make their war a general war, and to end the peace. But this is peacetime and we are in no mood for rallying cries. The...
...They obscure ordinary distinctions between right and wrong, innocence and guilt, on which most of us rely...
...From moments like these the film builds up a correspondence between Jonathan's disease and his criminality...
...Perhaps more telling, however, is the correspondenee which also develops, often from the same moments in the film, between Jonathan and Ripley...
...but the very convolutions he has produced in Jonathan's life so remove us from Ripley's responsibility for it, we find it hard to keep his guilt in mind...
...When Jonathan kills his first victim on an escalator, and then turns to run back down it to escape, what was an establishing shot earlier becomes a climactic shot now...
...The ambiguity that Wenders has created about his two main characters is, like the feeling of doom that hangs over their lives, classic film noir...
...One reason is that, besides giving an air of inevitability to Jonathan's life, these details suggest similarities between the normal and criminal aspects of that life...
...At the end of the film the two men have driven to a lonely beach to dispose of three other gangsters they have murdered together, but there Jonathan drives off and leaves Ripley stranded just as suddenly as Ripley showed up to help Jonathan on the train...
...In addition, it has a wealth of shopping tips: where to buy climbing and caving gear, canoes, even dog sleds and parachutes...
...As the film's title indicates, Ripley becomes Jonathan's friend...
...I think our immediate instinct is to give all our sympathy to Ripley at this moment and feel that Jonathan has betrayed him, even though the plain truth is that Jonathan has only assumed at last those values by which Ripley has been living right along...
...Ripley's self-portraits are a gesture of introspection more in keeping Commonweal: 725 with Jonathan's nature, we would have thought, than with Ripley's own...
...A combination wilderness encyclopedia and catalog, it gives romantic (to me) and practical information about backpacking, ski and river touring, and all sorts of wilderness adventures and survival...
...7.95...
...The partisans of the environment, social justice, peace, tax and welfare reform, energy and arms control send out their appeals, but receive only half an ear...
...THOMAS POWERS DARK THOUGHTS O 0 0 0 O O 0 0 0 0 0000 In Wim Wenders's The American Friend, as I was saying last time, the atmospheric detail makes the fate of one of the characters seem inevitable...
...6.95...
...From such a gesture we see how casually this gentle man has saturated his life with the senseless violence of gangsters...
...For reasons even he cannot understand, he feels so badly about having involved Jonathan with his gangster friends that he suddenly turns up to help on the train where Jonathan is to commit the second murder...
...These details seem prescient...
...Our house was filled with books on birds and ferns, mushrooms and flowering plants...
...As a special treat, we could leaf through a portfolio of valuable Audubon animal prints...
...It results from the first overture that the gangsters make to Jonathan, a fake telegram in which an associate of Ripley's plays on Jonathan's fears about his disease...
...He becomes Jonathan's demon-a doppelgiinger, a twin brother, an alter-ego, an antiself...
...And in a roundabout away, the initial visit we see to the doctor is the beginning of Jonathan's decline and fall...
...The person that fingers Jonathan for a life of crime is a purveyor of art forgeries named Ripley (Dennis Hopper), who is more the hero of the film than Jonathan in a sense...
...In several scenes there are moments when Ripley exclaims how confused he is about himself, and it is his association with Jonathan that has apparently brought on this identity crisis...
...Inside, the inscription reads: "From Father, for Christmas...
...Boston, which puts out trail guides to other New England states as well...
...My father would have enjoyed Trails to Nature's Mysteries (Dodd...
...All ages...
...My father, Dr...
...In two brief scenes that bracket the second murder Jonathan commits, we see how this is happening...
...The summer woods and water remained his greatest pleasure, relaxation, his "church...
...This is a treat with which to dream through the winter...
...The Baader-Meinhof gang is only frightening and sad...
...By the time the film is over, we can never tell where the line is between exploitation and friendship or respectability and criminality...
...They make us feel as if in some eerie way it has been clear all along that Jonathan would commit these crimes...
...The series of escalators Jonathan runs down on the way to visit his doctor in Hamburg, and another escalator he rides up in the airport in Paris, both return to mind when he shoots his first victim on an escalator later...
...The similarity between the painting of a train which we see Ripley with in the opening scene and the picture of a train on a lampshade in Jonathan's apartment suggests even before these two men have met that their lives are somehow linked...
...We have our private concerns but no appetite for general undertakings...
...Yet it is a bizarre, almost disturbing location too--a succession of escalators, in fact, that seem to go down endlessly in this peculiar building where the doctor's office is located...
...He was a professor at the Harvard Medical School, and it was his boyhood love of wildlife and wildflowers, his keen curiosity and meticulous eye, that led him from nature's mysteries to the unraveling of medical mysteries, the discovery of the cure for pernicious anemia and the Nobel Prize...
...While Jonathan, the framemaker and art restorer who always dealt with life as mere images, has now become a murderer, it seems that the criminal Ripley has become an image-studier...
...Indeed, in ways that make it harder and harder for us to decide who is hero and who villain in this film, Jonathan and Ripley exchange personalities...
...After awhile our mood will change...
...The new edition can be found at camping stores or by writing to the A.M.C...
...The dark and illimitable atmosphere on the sets in these films always transfers itself to the morality in them as well...
...In the first, the night before the murder, Jonathan lies on his back in bed and points a pistol he's been given at his own face, as if he might, in an idle moment, commit suicide...
...This little book has stayed with me wherever I have lived and has gone up many a mountain with my children too...
...He took my sister and me to hunt for wild Maine orchids and Pitcher Plants, to watch for birds...
...We can't help feeling as if Jonathan is descending into the abyss when we see him here...
...The first one serves only as an establishing shot to tell us whenever Jonathan, who has leukemia, is going to see his doctor...
...We are content with dull newspapers and private lives...
...in which Ross...
...Exotic butterflies flew about the library, hatched from cocoons sent by mail from South America...
...Yet at the same time such details make everything seem unclear too...
...Similarly, some routine settings and incidentals of the plot, little visual asides early in the film, turn ominous in retrospect...
...It lists many trail and walk guides available for all parts of the United States, including suburban areas, as well as books and magazines devoted to every kind of outdoor exploration...
...It is the movies' perfect equivalent for so many of the collective guiRs and uncertainties we ourselves have come to feel...
...Source Book compiled by Explorers, Ltd., edited by Alwyn T. Perrin and published by Harper...
...Something I would have loved when young is the Explorers, Ltd...
...These pictures seem to foreshadow the unlikely turn his life takes, and therefore to imply that that turn was unavoidable...
...Consider those escalators, for instance...
...in I I I ELIZABETH MINOT GRAVES, a previous contributor, is a freelance writer and children's book editor...
...Before Jonathan (Bruno Ganz) has been lured into becoming a hit man for gangsters, certain pictures of trains that figure in the story anticipate the real trains where he will commit his murders...
...E. Hutchins 11 November 1977:726...
...An establishing shot is by definition a normative view of reality, but this one has served as the lead-in to a scene in which nothing is normative anymore...
...We are never sure where the characters crossed from the one into the other...
...In the second scene, which occurs the night after the murder, Ripley lies on a pool table at his house in the same posture Jonathan assumed in bed and shoots himself in the face with a Polaroid camera, one latent self-image after another falling onto the table around him...
...The scene at the doctor's and the scene of the murder blend, at least symbolically, in a way that begins to make it hard for us to differentiate one aspect of Jonathan's life from another...
...COLIN L. WESTERBECK, JR CHILDREN'S ]BOOKS FOR THE TRAIL "' Wildflowers and the Stories Behind Their Names," by Phyllis S. Burch ; illus, by Anne Ophe~ia Dmoden (Scribners) ELIZABETH MINOT GRAVES "The trail leads uphill past farm buildings and bears right through an overgrown field . . . water is found one mile up at a brook crossing . . . . The view from the summing is especially fine...
...but as Wenders's treatment of the relationship between them indicates, Ripley also becomes more than that...
...Even though many trails are closed during the winter snows, I can think of no happier gift for Christmas...
...In all the films of this genre, including The American Friend, the glistening darkness that we see is in truth the dark night of the soul...
...Parallels Wenders creates in Jonathan's life before and after he meets Ripley make it hard for us to see just where Jonathan went wrong...
...We are in no mood for war and struggle...
...George R. Minor, taught my sister and me to love and observe nature...
...They render the moral universe in which Jonathan lives murky and indefinite...
...Even gentler champions get nowhere...
...He may have gotten Jonathan into this mess in the first place...
...12-adult...
...The difficulty we have judging the characters in this film stems partly from the fact that Ripley's volunteering as he does here is the only magnanimous action anyone ever takes...
...hese words, which never fail to give me a thrill, come from the Appalachian Mountain Club White Mountain Guide...
Vol. 104 • November 1977 • No. 23
