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What I would like is to make Hollywood movies, that is, movies as wonderful and universal, but at the same time not as hypocritical, as Hollywood. – Fassbinder

The final instalment of Fassbinder's loose gangster trilogy, The American Soldier finds the titular character returning to Munich after serving in Vietnam. Back in the city's dark underbelly, Ricky (Karl Scheydt) is hired as a contract killer by a trio of corrupt cops. Unable to legally apprehend a number of undesirables responsible for a crime wave, the police officers opt to clean up the streets by having them rubbed out. Ricky coldly alternates between murder and revisiting his old haunts. The film is a bleak, self-reflexive pastiche of film noir, with Fassbinder going so far as to name characters after Samuel Fuller, Raoul Walsh, and Fritz Lang. The Hollywood melodrama clichés and tropes soon bloom into fully-fledged absurdity, culminating in a gorgeously surreal slow-motion shoot-out.

R18+