The American Soldier

The German-born American GI Ricky (Karl Scheydt) returns to Munich from Vietnam and is promptly hired as a contract killer. Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s experimental noir is a subversive, self-reflexive gangster movie full of unexpected asides and stylistic flourishes, and features an audaciously bonkers final shot and memorable turns from many of the director’s rotating gallery of players.

Germany
1970
80 minutes
Black & White
1.33:1
German

Available In

Collector's Set

Early Fassbinder

DVD Box Set

5 Discs

$48.96

Cast & Credits

Cast

Karl Scheydt: Ricky
Elga Sorbas: Rosa
Jan George: Jan
Hark Bohm: Doc
Marius Aicher: Cop
Margarethe von Trotta: Chambermaid
Ulli Lommel: Gypsy
Katrin Schaake: Magdalena Fuller
Ingrid Caven: Singer
Eva Ingeborg Scholz: Ricky’s mother
Kurt Raab: Ricky’s brother
Irm Hermann: Whore
Gustl Datz: Chief of police
Rainer Werner Fassbinder: Franz Walsch

Credits

Director: Rainer Werner Fassbinder
Screenplay: Rainer Werner Fassbinder
Cinematography: Dietrich Lohmann
Editor: Thea Eymèsz
Art direction: Rainer Werner Fassbinder
Art direction: Kurt Raab
Music by: Peer Raben
Song “So Much Tenderness” by: Rainer Werner Fassbinder
Song “So Much Tenderness” by: Peer Raben

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Eclipse Series 39: Early Fassbinder

From the beginning, it was clear that Rainer Werner Fassbinder was destined to shake up German cinema.

By Michael Koresky

Essays — Aug 26, 2013

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Rainer Werner Fassbinder

Writer, Actor, Director

Rainer Werner Fassbinder made an astonishing forty-four movies—theatrical features, television movies and miniseries, and shorts among them—in a career that spanned a mere sixteen years, ending with his death at thirty-seven in 1982. He is perhaps remembered best for his intense and exquisitely shabby social melodramas (Ali: Fear Eats the Soul)—heavily influenced by Hollywood films, especially the female-driven tearjerkers of Douglas Sirk, and featuring misfit characters that often reflected his own fluid sexuality and self-destructive tendencies. But his body of work runs the gamut from epic period pieces (Berlin Alexanderplatz, the BRD Trilogy) to dystopic science fiction (World on a Wire) as well. One particular fascination of Fassbinder’s was the way the ghosts of the past, specifically those of World War II, haunted contemporary German life—an interest that wedded him to many of the other artists of the New German Cinema movement, which began in the late 1960s.