Dennis Hopper [2], who died yesterday at the age of 74, figured prominently in David Flusfeder's recent piece [3] for the NS on the "outlaw cinema" of 1970s Hollywood. Flusfeder's article was organised around a photograph of Hopper at the 1971 Cannes Film Festival in the company of the directors Donald Cammell, Alejandro Jodorowsky and Kenneth Anger.

Hopper is described, memorably, as "a C-list Method actor of the Fifties with anger-management issues who is still cruising after his directorial debut, Easy Rider". Flusfeder identifies that film, which has loomed large in the media reaction to Hopper's death, as

the beginning of the second golden age of American cinema, "outlaw Hollywood". The astonishing success of Easy Rider had taught the studios that music and drugs and radicalism made for good box office. There was an audience appetite for a cinema of anxiety and meaning -- or, if not actual meaning, then at least a search for it, with a rock'n'roll soundtrack.

But Hopper's finest hour, as an actor at least, wasn't Easy Rider, nor Rebel Without a Cause nor Apocalypse Now; it was his performance as Tom Ripley in Wim Wenders's 1977 film The American Friend [4], an adaptation of Patricia Highsmith's novel Ripley's Game. In this scene, Ripley visits Derwatt, a painter-turned-forger played by the director Nicholas Ray (who had directed Hopper in Rebel more than 20 years earlier):