Style! Cine! Swashbuckling!

The Wim Wenders Collection:

The American Friend

Lightning Over Water

Notebook on Cities and Clothes

Previously unavailable on Region 1 (U.S.- and Canada-friendly) DVD, these three seminal films by Wim Wenders make up some of the director's most exhilarating work in his pre-Wings of Desire era. The American Friend, from the novel by Patricia Highsmith, features Dennis Hopper as Tom Ripley, a far cry and a bit of a jolt for those used to Matt Damon's towheaded, amoral sneak (here, Ripley's an art forger). Hopper is teamed with Rebel Without a Cause director Nicholas Ray, who would die two years after the film was made. (Sam Fuller also turns up, briefly.) Wenders' commentary track reveals that John Cassavetes was his first pick for the role and that Highsmith personally offered him the rights to her book after he discovered every other Highsmith work had already been optioned. Wenders' regular Bruno Ganz inhabits the picture more than Hopper, though; with his furrowed brow and flaccid face he's the very picture of a dying satellite to the art world (his character Zimmerman is a professional picture framer). Wenders reunited with Nicholas Ray for Lightning Over Water, a documentary on Ray -- currently the subject of a MOMA retrospective, by the way -- shot in NYC as the great man was dying of lung cancer. The film opens with a direct lift from the opening of The American Friend, with Wenders stepping in for Hopper and the then-new twin towers rising in the background. Ray, who had been more or less banished from Hollywood following a debacle on the set of his last major film, 55 Days at Peking, in 1965, ached to make one more film in the wake of five years clean and sober after a lifetime of drink. What he got was Wenders' semi-doc (the film includes some dramatized scenes), a film simultaneously worshipful and plainspoken, with Ray, still raspily inhaling the cigarettes that nearly had him down for the count, holding forth, grizzled and scrawny, on his work and personal history. Following on the heels of Wings of Desire was Notebook on Cities and Clothes, Wenders' 1989 documentary on Japanese fashion designer Yohji Yamamoto, which comes up short when compared to the director's more personal works. Wenders was contracted by the Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris to make the film, and while Wenders' film has much to say on the intersection of fashion and popular culture (one cannot exist without the other), it's still an enervating production, with musings on the nature of identity interspersed with endless shots of Yamamoto clipping cloth. All three DVDs include above-average director's commentaries, deleted scenes, and various lengthy extras.