Not one of Fassbinder's best, but certainly worth a look for those interested in the man's work. In mood and style, it's reminiscent of Godard's Alphaville, and my reactions to both films are similar: I am intrigued, but a bit bored. And I don't think either succeed in the end. The American Soldier concerns a haughty German-American soldier, fresh from Vietnam, who struts around killing people for reasons which are kept mostly obscure (he's some kind of gangster or hitman). The police are after him, though the police seem just as wicked. I didn't care much about what was going on – no compelling reason was ever given for me to care. However, many elements of the film impressed me. Fassbinder's idiosyncratic sense of pace and mood pervades. The performances are pretty good. Fassbinder himself appears in a small role and, as usual, he delivers a remarkable performance. He has to be the best actor/director of all time. Peer Raben never seems to write a lot of music for Fassbinder's films. Instead, he just writes one theme that is used several times throughout the given picture. They are always exceptional, and his theme (and also theme song, which is the same tune with lyrics added) is excellent here. And then there's this ending. Fassbinder has a talent for unique and notable endings, and the end of this film is one of the weirdest and most remarkable I've ever seen. 7/10.

For me the very start and the very end of this hilarious parody of gangster films were the most suspenseful parts. The start because it was the first time in a VERY long time that I had sat down to a film not knowing if it was going to be in black & white or colour (happily it turned out to be in black & white); the ending because I found myself wondering just how long Fassbinder was going to hold the incredible slow motion final shot as Kurt Raab thrashed about on the ground.

With 'Der Amerikanische Soldat' Fassbinder finally made a film that's fun to sit through. With stylish film noir photography by Dietrich Lohmann and a tremendous score by Peer Raben, its imagery and tone seems to draw more on recent pastiches by continental cineastes like 'Alphaville' and 'Le Samourai' than the Hollywood originals that Godard & Melville had drawn upon. Most of the cast look either stoned or hung over. I don't know how seriously Fassbinder and his chums were actually taking it, but I found it a blast.

Yup, this is full of allusions to brilliant German directors, and French and American cinema, but "The American Soldier" is much more than a clever exercise-- and cuts deeper than film noir. For this, I think, is as much about the Vietnam War, misogyny, and German/American superiority as it is about an underworld hit man. In fact, the genre seems no more than a departure point.

Ricky's inner power is in no way individuated---he's a type, a type produced by powerful entities. He's not a man born, but a male made. He's one of a multiplicity of monsters let loose on the world by the naked display of power--whether it be located in DC or Berlin. His immediate authority resides in his soldier past, and in his male identity--and more specifically, in his heterosexual male identity. He kills men as easily as he commands submission from women.

But he's not a typical hit man. He's cool all right, and does cut the figure. But he seems cumbersome, as if new to his form, his movements contained as if by a low ceiling, his body by an uncomfortable suit. He's "the man" but he seems programmed--and is, simply following orders from his own "the man" who also happens to have state authority. He's detached, indiscriminate, naked in his actions, and impersonal--his mind almost narcoleptic. There seems to be some flaw in his design, as if the suit made to cover the soldier, and the soldier made to cover the killer, are not totally effective---not for him, not for those who control him. His murders have all the raw arbitrary-ness of the automated martial male, created in an era of war treachery that has no end.

Ricky's females, a spectrum of femme fatales, have a malaise about them, as if narcotized by drugs, drink, sex, or more obviously, by a submissiveness to power. Ricky orders them in the same precise way he orders his Ballantine--and with the same certainty of availability. He takes them, literally dumps them, mocks them, uses them and, if they get too close, murders them. He has to drink whiskey before every sexual encounter to negate any emotion or doubt. Gay men suffer a similar scorn from the brute, his contempt for the powerless underwritten by the world of organized violence that created and controls him. "So much tenderness in my head, so much emptiness in my bed" is heard over and over during Ricky and his brother's final sex/death scene. Which might be interpreted that in a perverse world poisoned by super masculinity and violence, sex with the dead is more possible--or preferable than sex with the living.