Wenders’ breakthrough commercial production, an eccentric reworking of Patricia Highsmith’s tale of international crime, Ripley’s Game, is the work of a director infatuated with American movie lore yet still inextricably tied to his German roots. Two of the filmmaker’s homeland staples, Bruno Ganz and Lisa Kreuzer, star as a middle-class couple whose lives are upended when the former, believed to be suffering a terminal illness, is swindled by a smarmy continental art forger (Dennis Hopper) into an assassination scheme on the promise of a financial reward. The plot’s metafictional parallels to Wenders’ own assimilation into a larger, unknown market are not hard to detect, but the filmmaker exhibits none of his protagonist’s woozy trepidation in the altered territory. Shot in Hamburg, Paris, and New York City by Robby Müller and encompassing three different spoken languages, The American Friend is as much an evocative, painterly ode to its urban locales as it is an insightful dead-end portrait of a parasitic partnership, with Hopper’s manipulative crook gradually wringing the spirit from Ganz’s principled family man out of sheer lonely desperation. In a playful nod to his heroes, Wenders also casts Nicholas Ray, Samuel Fuller, and Jean Eustache in bit parts, all of whom effortlessly exude world-weary intelligence.