Editing Rainer Werner Fassbinder (section)

====''The American Soldier'' (1970)====
The main theme of the gangster film ''[[The American Soldier]]'' ''(Der Amerikanische Soldat)'' is that violence is an expression of frustrated love. A sudden frenzied outburst of repressed passion, the revelation of desire and a need for love that has been thwarted and comes too late is central here.<ref>{{harv|Thomsen|2004|p=71}}</ref> The eponymous hit man of the title (actually a German, played by Karl Scheydt) is a cold-blooded contract killer, who returns from [[Vietnam]] to his native Munich, where he is hired by three renegade policemen to do away with a number of undesirables. Eventually he ends up killing the girlfriend of one of the policemen with his friend Franz Walsh (Fassbinder). The film closes with the music of the song "So much tenderness", written by Fassbinder and sung by Gunther Kaufmann. ''The American Soldier'' is the third and final installment of Fassbinder's loose trilogy of gangster pictures formed by ''Love Is Colder Than Death'' and ''Gods of the Plague''. It pays homage to the Hollywood gangster genre, and also alludes to [[Southern Gothic]] race narratives.