The American Soldier
Picture: B- Sound: B- Extras: C Film: A
The films in America during the 1940’s and 1950’s heavily influenced
many directors outside of the U.S., especially that of Rainer Werner Fassbinder from Germany. He was strongly impressed by the work of Douglas
Sirk, but his tribute to the noir and gangster genre was in The American Soldier. There are many directors that show
tribute in their films and some do it in a very solid honorable way, while
others just simply hack it all to pieces.
Fassbinder was quite capable of doing mature work, even early in his
career. He understood cinema in a way
that few do. He understood life and was
always searching for answers in a world where being a homosexual just did not
seem to fit in.
The American Solider is in black & white, which was released in 1970
and deals with a man returning from Vietnam as a cold-blooded killer, where he
is hired by the Munich police to work for them.
Fassbinder was able to locate and outsider in all of his films. Looking back at his entire life’s work his
films always deal with a minority figure vs. the rest of the world. In Ali:
Fear Eats the Soul, we are introduced to a couple that is in love, but the
only problem is that the man is dark; while the woman is twice his age and is
white. They are painted by the society
around them. Fear of Fear also deals
with a woman who becomes afraid of everything and establishes herself as an
outsider.
Perhaps the strongest
point of The American Soldier comes
from its surprise ending, which was amazingly shot by cinematographer Deitrich
Lohmann, who was responsible for many films in Germany then did the work on the
European scenes in the 1988 series War
and Remembrance (reviewed on this site) and the American film from 1997
with George Clooney, The Peacemaker, an underrated terrorist
film. The film runs a short 80 minutes,
but never leaves out much and accomplishes much in such a short time.
The full-frame picture
looks dated, but not overly so. The
picture does not quite have the depth and detail as with Veronika Voss (part of the Fassbinder BDR Trilogy through Criterion).
Fassbinder did not like to shoot films in black & white with a lot
of grayscale, but liked to keep the film almost strictly black or white with
little in between. The biggest surprise
is how clean the print is with very little scratches or dirt, certainly a big
plus! Interesting enough a Dolby Digital
5.1 mix was created for this film, which was a shock. The mix is much more
spacious in comparison to Fear of Fear
or Rio Das Mortes and even
Criterion’s release of the BDR Trilogy
and Ali: Fear Eats the Soul. While it might not contain the punch of some
more modern sound mixes, this does do a nice job of giving more depth and
dimension to the film.
This might be a nice
starting place for those less familiar with this underrated, yet talented
director who never lived past the age of 40.
His death was tragic, but he left his impression with so many films and
was able to do so much in such a short time.
It is finally nice to see the American shores starting to get more
product from this individual and see tribute to him on the big-screen in films
like Far From Heaven, which was
directed by another homosexual director Todd Haynes. The American
Soldier is not to be missed at some point in time and this DVD from
Wellspring delivers with an edition worthy of purchase.
- Nate Goss
