A Most Wanted Man director Anton Corbijn told me this morning during a phone interview that he recently spent time in Berlin with Wim Wenders during a “regrading” (i.e., color readjustment) of The American Friend (’77). That told me Wenders is probably preparing his classic noir for Bluray release. I fell deeply in love with The American Friend when I first saw it at the 1977 New York Film Festival. Seriously — I was doing cartwheels in the lobby of Alice Tully Hall. It’s one of those films that I wanted to literally move into. The gloomy Hamburg realm of The American Friend was, at the time, a reflection of my own personal weltschmerz and vice versa. It inspired me to pitch a column to a couple of publications called “Hollywood Weltschmerz.” I was (and perhaps on level I still am) Dennis Hopper taking polaroid photos of himself while lying on a pool table. In late ’77 or early ’78 I tried to figure a way to paste my face onto Bruno Ganz‘s in that famous poster, but I couldn’t get it right.