Until the End of the World (Wim Wenders, 1991)

William Hurt and Solveig Dommartin in Until the End of the World 

Cast: Solveig Dommartin, William Hurt, Sam Neill, Rüdiger Vogler, Jeanne Moreau, Max Von Sydow, Chick Ortega, Elena Smirnova, Eddy Mitchell, Adelle Lutz, Ernie Dingo, Ernest Beck, Christine Oesterlein, Kuniko Miyaki, Chishu Ryu, Allen Garfield, Lois Chiles, David Gulpilil, Justine Saunders, Paul Livingston. Screenplay: Peter Carey, Wim Wenders. Cinematography: Robby Müller. Production design: Sally Campbell, Thierry Flamand. Film editing: Peter Przygodda. Music: Graeme Revell.

Wim Wenders's almost five-hour-long cut of Until the End of the World may be the most self-indulgent film I've ever seen, and I've seen Heaven's Gate (Michael Cimino, 1980). The original cut of Wenders's movie was 20 hours long, but it was reduced to just under three hours for its first European release and to a bit over two and a half hours for American audiences in 1991. It failed with the critics and the box office. Wenders finally re-edited it to the 287-minute version released in 2015 and now being shown on the Criterion Channel. But it really seems to me to be two movies stitched together by Sam Neill's voiceover narration. The first half is what Wenders himself has called the "ultimate road movie," a characteristic genre for the director of Alice in the Cities (1974), Kings of the Road (1976), and Paris, Texas (1984), starting in Venice and then bouncing to Paris, Berlin, Lisbon, Moscow, Tokyo, San Francisco, and finally Australia, where it settles for the second half. This half is a sci-fi film about experiments with perception and dreams that take place in the shadow of a potential nuclear holocaust. The first half is often funny; the second half isn't. I'm not prepared to call Until the End of the World a masterpiece, unless it's a masterpiece for cineastes, who can indulge themselves to the fullest in tracing the allusions and influences that shape the movie. The characters played by William Hurt and Solveig Dommartin, for example, spend time in an idyllic setting in Japan where they're tended by characters played by Chishu Ryu and Kuniko Miyaki, actors familiar from the films of Yasujiro Ozu. Hurt's character's parents are played by the iconic Jeanne Moreau and Max Von Sydow. Wenders even evokes his own past by casting Rüdiger Vogler, the star of Alice in the Cities and Kings of the Road. It's a witty film in many regards, but as I said, self-indulgent. And 287 minutes is a kind of forced binge-watch, which makes me think that Until the End of the World would have made a terrific miniseries for Netflix or Hulu if they'd been around in 1991.

The Lost Honor of Katharina Blum (Volker Schlöndorff and Margarethe von Trotta, 1975)

The Lost Honor of Katharina Blum (Volker Schlöndorff and Margarethe von Trotta, 1975)

Cast: Angela Winkler, Mario Adorf, Dieter Laser, Jürgen Prochnow, Heinz Bennent, Hannelore Hoger, Rolf Becker, Harald Kuhlmann, Herbert Fux, Regine Lutz. Screenplay: Volker Schlöndorff, Margarethe von Trotta, based on a novel by Heinrich Böll. Cinematography: Jost Vacano. Production design: Ute Burgmann, Günter Naumann. Film editing: Peter Przygodda. Music: Hans Werner Henze.

Wrong Move (Wim Wenders, 1975)

Peter Kern, Hanna Schygulla, Rüdiger Vogler, Nastassja Kinski, Hans Christian Blech in Wrong Move

Wilhelm: Rüdiger Vogler
Laertes: Hans Christian Blech
Therese Farner: Hanna Schygulla
Mignon: Nastassja Kinski
Bernhard Landau: Peter Kern
The Industrialist: Ivan Desny
Wilhelm's Mother: Marianne Hoppe
Janine: Lisa Kreuzer

Director: Wim Wenders
Screenplay: Peter Handke
Based on a novel by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
Cinematography: Robby Müller
Film editor: Peter Przygodda

With his presence in Alice in the Cities (1974), Wrong Move, and Kings of the Road (1976) Rüdiger Vogler became as essential to Wim Wenders's films of the mid-1970s as Robert De Niro was to Martin Scorsese's work in the late 1970s and the 1980s. His homely everyman face is perfect for the self-centered loners of the first and the third films in Wenders's "road trilogy," men who find themselves having to come to terms with a world -- or at least a Germany -- they can't fully accept. But Vogler feels miscast in the middle film -- too old to be playing the young writer out to discover himself, a character drawn by screenwriter Peter Handke from Goethe's Wilhelm Meister's Apprenticeship and thrust into modern post-Nazi, post-Wirtschaftswunder Germany. There is no naïveté left in Vogler's face, there are no illusions to be lost. Yet Wenders sends his 30-year-old Wilhelm on the voyage from northern to southern Germany, from Glückstadt to the Zugspitze, and into encounters with the world of art and politics that might have disillusioned a 20-year-old. Which is not to say that Wrong Move is a failure. It remains a film that tantalizes with its non-realistic narrative, its sense of of a world grown alien to people who think and feel, and of a country haunted by its desperation to escape from a terrible history. No surprise that a good part of its dialogue consists of people telling one another of their dreams, for the film itself has a liminal dreamlike quality. Would a fully awake and aware Wilhelm really pay the train fare for the con artist Laertes and his mute traveling companion Mignon? Do people really fall in love when their eyes meet between trains traveling on different tracks, and then somehow manage to get together after all? Do strangers really decide to travel together and wind up by mistake in the mansion of a suicidal industrialist? Or does all of that happen only in dreams? Wenders's film is touched by the mysterious angst that afflicts the characters in Antonioni's films -- the scene in the concrete caverns of Frankfurt evokes the bleak modern Rome of a film like L'Eclisse (1962), for example. In the context of a film so beautifully shot, so eccentrically put together as Wrong Move, even the miscasting of Vogler feels like not so much a mistake as a provocation.

Filmstruck Criterion Channel

Kings of the Road (Wim Wenders, 1976)

Rüdiger Vogler and Hanns Zischler in Kings of the Road

Bruno Winter: Rüdiger Vogler
Robert Lander: Hanns Zischler
Pauline: Lisa Kreutzer
Robert's Father: Rudolf Schündler
Man Whose Wife Killed Herself: Marquard Bohm
Paul: Hans Dieter Trayer
Theater Owner: Franziska Stömmer

Director: Wim Wenders
Screenplay: Wim Wenders
Cinematography: Robby Müller, Martin Schäfer
Film editing: Peter Przygodda

Three hours is a considerable chunk of time to invest in a film whose plot and characters are going nowhere, but Wim Wenders somehow pulls it off in Kings of the Road -- a title that seems inevitable for a film that ends with Roger Miller's song, "King of the Road," but whose German title is a little more descriptive: Im Lauf der Zeit, "in the course of time." For time is what the central character, Bruno Winter, has plenty of. All he has to do is drive from one small German town to another, servicing the projectors in movie houses. These are towns set aside from the Wirtschaftswunder that Rainer Werner Fassbinder, for example, satirizes in his films: They are in decline, and the sparseness of the population Winter encounters is striking. They are also along the border between West and East Germany, a split that's taking a psychic toll on their residents. Though he's very much a loner, indeed wallowing in his loneliness, Winter takes in a companion, Robert Lander, whom he encounters one day trying to kill himself by driving his speeding VW bug into the Elbe. The car refuses to sink until Lander finally climbs out through the sunroof and wades ashore with his suitcase. In the course of time, Winter and Lander become friends, and Kings of the Road becomes a very German version of the buddy movie. They're not Butch and Sundance, but simply two malcontents who find themselves cast together by circumstance. Much of Kings of the Road was improvised, with Wenders confessing that he would lose sleep at night worrying about what he might shoot the next day. It becomes a portrait of a generation, the one born at the end of World War II, in search of itself, as well as a portrait of a country trying to recover from that war's lingering traumas. Inevitably, both Winter and Lander confront the past: Lander in a visit to his father, from whom he has been estranged for several years, and Winter by a visit to the abandoned house on an island in the Rhine where he spent his childhood. Though its length and plotlessness inevitably result in some slackness, the film feels to me oddly more resonant than some of Wenders's more tightly constructed ones.

The American Friend (Wim Wenders, 1977)

Bruno Ganz and Dennis Hopper in The American Friend

Tom Ripley: Dennis Hopper
Jonathan Zimmermann: Bruno Ganz
Marianne Zimmermann: Lisa Kreuzer
Raoul Minot: Gérard Blain
Derwatt: Nicholas Ray
The American: Samuel Fuller
Marcangelo: Peter Lilienthal
Ingraham: Daniel Schmidt
Rodolphe: Lou Castel

Director: Wim Wenders
Screenplay: Wim Wenders
Based on a novel by Patricia Highsmith
Cinematography: Robby Müller
Music: Jürgen Knieper
Film editing: Peter Przygodda

When I called Point Blank (John Boorman, 1967) "stoner noir" yesterday, I thought I had pretty much exhausted the genre with the exception of Robert Altman's The Long Goodbye (1973). But then I watched The American Friend and realized my error. Actually, the plot and milieu of The American Friend, loosely adapted from Patricia Highsmith's Ripley's Game, is material more for a thriller than for film noir's brooding exploration of the lower depths of criminality. Here we are in what might be called the upper depths: art fraud and murder for hire. But mostly The American Friend is an exercise in watching the phenomenon that was Dennis Hopper, who came to the set fresh from the horrors, the horrors of working on Apocalypse Now (Francis Ford Coppola, 1979). It is, as most of Hopper's performances were, an exercise in self-destruction. And perfectly cast against him, in what was his first important film, is Bruno Ganz, struggling to keep his head. Ganz and Hopper eventually came to blows off-set, and then spent a night drinking their way into a fast friendship and an entertaining tandem performance. There is a blink-and-you'll-miss-it character to the film's set-up exposition about why mild-mannered picture framer Jonathan Zimmermann gets caught up in the manipulations of Tom Ripley and Raul Minot, but it doesn't matter much. Zimmermann's first job for Minot is beautifully staged, with just enough eccentric touches -- Zimmermann colliding with a dumpster and a stranger (Jean Eustache, one of the director cronies Wenders cast in his film) offering him a Band-Aid -- to make it more than routine thriller stalking. And the sequence on the train is a classic of cutting between on-location and studio set filming, culminating in Zimmerman's exhilarated scream from the view port on the engine. To my taste, The American Friend is a little too loosey-goosey in exposition and a little too self-indulgent in its director cameos, making it catnip for cinéastes but maybe not solid enough for mainstream viewers. The thriller bones show through, making me want to see the material done a little more slickly and conventionally. But as personal filmmaking goes, it's fascinating.

Watched on Filmstruck Criterion Channel  

Alice in the Cities (Wim Wenders, 1974)

Yella Rottländer and Rüdiger Vogler in Alice in the Cities

Philip Winter: Rüdiger Vogler
Alice: Yella Rottländer
Lisa: Lisa Kreuzer

Director: Wim Wenders
Screenplay: Wim Wenders, Veith von Fürstenberg
Cinematography: Robby Müller
Film editing: Peter Przygodda

The Alice of Wenders's movie, played by 9-year-old Yella Rottländer, is not the plucky Victorian girl of Lewis Carroll's books, but I think they might recognize one another. Both find themselves cast adrift in a strange world in which what little guidance they have is decidedly eccentric. In Wenders's film, Alice has come to America with her mother, Lisa, who is caught up in a relationship that's not working out. Having decided to return to Germany, Alice and Lisa find themselves at a ticket counter with a German writer, Philip, who is also going home after flubbing an assignment to tour the States and write about his experiences. Flights to Germany have been canceled by an air traffic controllers' strike, but Philip helps Lisa book tickets on the same flight he's taking to Amsterdam, where they hope to make it home by ground transportation. Because Lisa speaks no English, he also helps her book a hotel room that he ends up sharing with them. And then Lisa decides to make one last effort to connect with her boyfriend, and leaves Alice with Philip, saying that she'll meet them in Amsterdam. Which she doesn't do. Philip, a cranky egotistical loner, now has a 9-year-old girl on his hands. Moreover, she hasn't lived in Germany for several years and remembers only that she has a grandmother whose name she doesn't know but who she thinks might live in Wuppertal. And off this unlikely pair goes on an oddball odyssey. What makes the film work is Wenders's lack of sentimentality, Rüdiger's depiction of Philip's gradually eroding self-centeredness, and Rottländer's entirely natural portrayal of a child in search of roots that she has never been taught she should have. It's shot in a documentary style by Robby Müller, who captures Philip's experience in an America where every place -- gas stations, fast-food joints, cheap motels -- tries to look like every other place, as well as Philip and Alice's journey through a Europe that's beginning to develop the same syndrome. Like Wenders, Philip takes photographs of urban desolation, but in the end his essential humanism prevails.