The München police cannot cope anymore with some of their underworld elements, so they hire Ricky Murphy alias Richard von Rezzori, a German who served for the US in Vietnam, to kill first a gypsy, then a porno-merchant (and by the way also her lover), and last the girlfriend of one of the police detectives. It happens to be exactly this girl who is sent to Ricky when he stays in a hotel and orders a girl. In the scene in the hotel we hear also the story of the house-keeper Emmy who married a much younger man from Northern Africa who killed her. This story has been filmed by Fassbinder with a different end a few years later under the title "Ali: Fear eats the soul". Just at the time of his arrival, Ricky meets his old buddy Franz, and they visit places where they had been together. Ricky also meets his mother and brother, and in this scene we have on the one side a coldness between Ricky and his mother that cannot be increased and a latent homosexual love between Ricky a his slightly retarded brother on the other side.
However, after Ricky has done his duty for the detectives that engaged him, they must get rid of him because otherwise they would have to admit their incapability to solve their problems on their own in front of their boss, an ancient police-chief who seems to be in the hand of his officers. The end scene, in which Ricky and his buddy Franz lose their lives because of a simple "accident", I do not want to spoil here, because the end of "The American Soldier" is an end of such a magnitude of splendor that you will hardly find in any other movie. However, what I want to add is that the message of this movie goes way beyond that of Fassbinder's inclination towards American gangster movies from the 40ies: People who know Fassbinder's work also know that he gave his movies strong political and sociological messages on their ways. "I want my movies to go on in the heads of the audience after they have left the cinema", Fassbinder once said. In this movie, Germans engage an American-German with Vietnam-experience to do the dirty work in Europe, and after he succeeds, instead of paying him the promised sum, they kill him. It seems that Fassbinder just used the decor of Film noir to characterize the years after World II in Germany, since, for a man like Fassbinder, the liberation of Germany by the Allies was not an act of terrorism against the Nazi regime, but a deed for which the American soldiers who cleaned the mess up in Germany have never been adequately rewarded.
However, after Ricky has done his duty for the detectives that engaged him, they must get rid of him because otherwise they would have to admit their incapability to solve their problems on their own in front of their boss, an ancient police-chief who seems to be in the hand of his officers. The end scene, in which Ricky and his buddy Franz lose their lives because of a simple "accident", I do not want to spoil here, because the end of "The American Soldier" is an end of such a magnitude of splendor that you will hardly find in any other movie. However, what I want to add is that the message of this movie goes way beyond that of Fassbinder's inclination towards American gangster movies from the 40ies: People who know Fassbinder's work also know that he gave his movies strong political and sociological messages on their ways. "I want my movies to go on in the heads of the audience after they have left the cinema", Fassbinder once said. In this movie, Germans engage an American-German with Vietnam-experience to do the dirty work in Europe, and after he succeeds, instead of paying him the promised sum, they kill him. It seems that Fassbinder just used the decor of Film noir to characterize the years after World II in Germany, since, for a man like Fassbinder, the liberation of Germany by the Allies was not an act of terrorism against the Nazi regime, but a deed for which the American soldiers who cleaned the mess up in Germany have never been adequately rewarded.