Nosferatu the Vampyre (Werner Herzog, 1979)

Isabelle Adjani and Klaus Kinski in Nosferatu the Vampyre

Cast: Klaus Kinski, Isabelle Adjani, Bruno Ganz, Roland Topor, Walter Ladengast, Dan van Husen, Jan Groth, Carsten Bodinus, Martje Grohmann. Screenplay: Werner Herzog, based on a novel by Bram Stoker and a film by F.W. Murnau. Cinematography: Jörg Schmidt-Reitwein. Production design: Henning von Gierke. Film editing: Beate Mainka-Jellinghaus. Music: Florian Fricke, Popol Vuh. 

Werner Herzog's Nosferatu gets a little choppy in its efforts to blend both Bram Stoker's novel Dracula and F.W. Murnau's 1922 film Nosferatu. The latter was an "unofficial" version of the novel, which the producers neglected to obtain the rights to film, and it was almost suppressed. But the potency of Max Schreck's embodiment of Dracula (called "Count Orlok" in the Murnau film) remained, and it informs Klaus Kinski's makeup and manner in Herzog's version. Herzog did a lot of tinkering with the Stoker version -- Jonathan Harker's wife is Lucy, not Mina as in the novel, and Dr. Von Helsing is not the vampirologist of the book but rather an elderly scientific skeptic -- but he stayed generally faithful to it almost to the end, when he switched to the denouement of the Murnau film and then added his own shocker twist. The homage to Murnau is apparent not only in Kinski's imitation of Schreck, but also in Isabelle Adjani's performance as Lucy, which is built on silent-movie mannerisms, including effective use of her great haunted eyes. Even though it's full of images designed to shock and disgust, including a plethora of rats, Herzog's film is often quite beautiful, especially in the scenes set in the Carpathian Mountains (actually filmed in Slovakia and the Bavarian Alps) and the views of the quaint town called Wismar in the film, but actually shot in the town of Delft and several other villages in the Netherlands. The performances are all that they should be, including Bruno Ganz's determined Harker, whose character twist at the film's end seems organic to the performance, and Roland Topor's giggly Renfield, which often seems to parody Peter Lorre. Dracula is so familiar and fertile a source for movies that it probably will never receive a definitive version, but Herzog's makes a good bid for it.  

Cobra Verde (Werner Herzog, 1987)

Klaus Kinski in Cobra Verde

Francisco Manoel da Silva: Klaus Kinski
Taparica: King Ampaw
Don Octavio Coutinho: José Lewgoy
Captain Fraternidade: Salvatore Basile
Bernabé: Peter Berling
Euclides: Guillermo Coronel
Bossa Ahadee: Nana Agyefi Kwame II

Director: Werner Herzog
Screenplay: Werner Herzog
Based on a novel by Bruce Chatwin
Cinematography: Viktor Ruzicka
Music: Popol Vuh

With Aguirre, the Wrath of God (1972) and Fitzcarraldo (1982), Cobra Verde constitutes the third element in a trilogy about the insanity of colonialism written and directed by Werner Herzog and starring Klaus Kinski. It's the weakest of the three films, though it's the only one based on a previously published work, Bruce Chatwin's 1980 novel The Viceroy of Ouidah. Its weakness may even stem from having a source: With an existing narrative to work from, Herzog may have been constrained to follow its outline, instead of giving free rein to his usual improvisatory imagination. The film really begins about a third of the way in, after Herzog has loosely established his protagonist's background as a failed rancher, Francisco Manoel da Silva, who has turned outlaw, the "Cobra Verde" of the title. Eventually his charismatic lawlessness leads him to a job as overseer on a Brazilian plantation where, after having impregnated the owner's three daughters, he gets sent on an errand to buy slaves in West Africa -- a task that his employers figure is a win-win situation: either they get rid of a troublesome person or they profit from his success as a slaver. The problem with the first third of the film is that it is told in rather enigmatic sequences, one including a conversation with a philosophical dwarf who owns a bar -- a scene long on talk and short on significance. But the African scenes are often powerful and colorful; Herzog doesn't yield to the impulse to preach about the slave trade, but we see its evil infect everyone, not only da Silva but also the Africans who have been corrupted by participating in it. Some of the big scenes don't quite fit: da Silva spends a long time training an army of women to depose the local chieftain, but his efforts end anticlimactically when the ruler, seated in a courtyard decorated with the skulls of his enemies, folds without a fight. In the end, da Silva is defeated by the decision of the Portuguese to end the slave trade, leaving him penniless and without purpose in a hostile land. In the powerful last scene, da Silva desperately tries to haul a boat, single-handedly, into the crashing surf, only to wind up rolling in the waves. The only witness to his futile efforts is a cruelly deformed man, whose lower body has been so weakened by what we can assume must have been polio, that he walks on all fours, mostly using his hands. It's a horrifying image that tacitly makes its thematic point about the consequences of imperialism.

Aguirre, the Wrath of God (Werner Herzog, 1972)

Don Lope de Aguirre: Klaus Kinski
Inez: Helena Rojo
Brother Gaspar de Carvajal: Del Negro
Don Pedro de Ursua: Ruy Guerra
Don Fernando de Guzman: Peter Berling
Flores: Cecilia Rivera
Perucho: Daniel Ades
Okello: Edward Roland

Director: Werner Herzog
Screenplay: Werner Herzog
Cinematography: Thomas Mauch
Film editing: Beate Mainka-Jellinghaus
Music: Popol Vuh

In the breathtaking opening scene of Aguirre, the Wrath of God, a long line of conquistadors and their Indian slaves descend the trail carved into the almost vertical face of a mountain. It's a scene that we'll never see the likes of again because no one today would have the audacity to film it the way Werner Herzog did: with real people really descending a real trail down a real mountain. It would be done today with computers supplying either the mountainside or the people or both, and something would be lost in the process. Which is not to say that I think that Herzog's defiant insistence on working his cast and crew to the point of exhaustion and madness is a virtue. We can watch a film filled with similar perils, such as Henri-Georges Clouzot's The Wages of Fear (1953), and know that the dangers are artfully simulated and that cast and crew are not in real danger, but still be thrilled by the simulation. But there is something about the raw, passionate obsessiveness of Herzog's work that remains essential. A film like Clouzot's, for example, is tightly scripted with well-drawn characters. Herzog's feels improvised, and the characters are simply figures in a hostile landscape. The central figure, Aguirre, is played by an actor who was, by all accounts, only a bit this side of the kind of madness that infects the character. Aguirre, the Wrath of God almost feels like a documentary, a genre in which Herzog was a master. That it's also a historical fable about colonialism, about the thinness of civilization's veneer, about the horrors wrought by religious fanaticism, and perhaps an allegory of recent German history only adds to one's uneasy sense that art sometimes emerges from cruelty and obsession.

Fitzcarraldo (Werner Herzog, 1982)

Klaus Kinski in Fitzcarraldo

Brian Sweeney Fitzgerald: Klaus Kinski
Molly: Claudia Cardinale
Don Aqulino: José Lewgoy
Cholo: Miguel Ángel Fuentes
Captain: Paul Hittscher
Huerequeque: Huerequeque Enrique Bohorquez
Station Master: Grande Otelo
Opera Manager: Peter Berling
Chief of Campa Indians: David Pérez Espinosa
Man at Opera House: Milton Nascimento
Enrico Caruso: Costante Moret
Sarah Bernhardt: Jean-Claude Dreyfus

Director: Werner Herzog
Screenplay: Werner Herzog
Cinematography: Thomas Mauch
Production design: Ulrich Bergfelder, Henning von Gierke
Film editing: Beate Mainka-Jellinghaus

Why does Werner Herzog's infamously extravagant Fitzcarraldo begin with Fitzgerald/Fitzcarraldo and his brothel-owner mistress Molly attending a performance of Verdi's Ernani that stars not only Enrico Caruso but also, in the role of Elvira, Sarah Bernhardt (played by a man in drag), who mimes while a soprano sings from the pit? Probably to add several more layers of myth to the story, since there is some doubt that Caruso ever sang at the Teatro Amazonas in Manaus and he almost certainly never appeared in a production of Ernani with a lip-synching Bernhardt. If Fitzcarraldo is about anything, it's about obsessions, the more extravagant and, yes, operatic the better. Which is why Herzog's own obsession with actually hauling a steamship over a hill through the jungle, instead of using special effects, models, and montage, is so ironic. If we can believe that Klaus Kinski is an Irishman, we can believe almost anything. Why resort to reality?  Fitzcarraldo is also about the power of illusions, of misguided and conflicting belief systems. Fitzgerald believes, against all evidence to the contrary, in himself. The Indians who labor for him do so because they believe he is some kind of god. So it's entirely appropriate that the central metaphor for a film about extravagantly obsessive belief in illusions should be opera, that most extravagant and illusion-filled of artistic media. (If, that is, you exclude movies.) Is Fitzcarraldo a great film? As fascinating as Kinski's eye-popping is to watch, he never transcends his persona as an actor to create a credible character. And I don't understand what Fitzgerald hopes to achieve by hauling the ship across the isthmus to the rubber plantation. Wouldn't he have to haul it back over again, this time with cargo, to benefit? But such considerations tend to fall by the wayside when viewers encounter the audacity of what's on the screen, and even more so when they learn the behind-the-scenes story of the making of the film. Fitzcarraldo falls into that category of cinematic overreaching occupied by movies like Apocalypse Now (Francis Ford Coppola, 1979) and Heaven's Gate (Michael Cimino, 1980). If it isn't a great movie, it's certainly a unique one. And maybe we should be thankful for that.

For a Few Dollars More (Sergio Leone, 1965)

Most of us didn't realize it until much later when he was an Oscar-winning director, but Clint Eastwood was a very smart man. When Sergio Leone's A Fistful of Dollars became a hit in Italy in 1964, he asked Eastwood if he would make a sequel. Eastwood hadn't seen the movie, which hadn't yet been dubbed in English and released in the States, so Leone sent him a print of the Italian version. Even though he didn't speak Italian, Eastwood immediately recognized Leone's skill, and signed up to do the sequel. It was a gutsy move: At the time, making genre films like Westerns and sword-and-sandal epics in Italy and Spain was a job for has-beens and never-weres. Eastwood was on the brink of becoming one of the latter: His career to that point had been mostly in TV, on the long-running series Rawhide, with a few unmemorable movies. But cultivating a persona distinct from that of Rawhide's callow Rowdy Yates, that of the taciturn Man With No Name* of the Leone films, proved to be precisely the right thing to do. By the end of the 1960s, he had become a major star. Narratively, For a Few Dollars More is not quite so tight as the first film -- for one reason because it lacks the well-tested framework of Akira Kurosawa's Yojimbo (1961) that was the underpinning of Fistful. Also, setting up a rivalry between Eastwood's character and that of Lee Van Cleef's Col. Douglas Mortimer tends to diffuse the story a bit: As in Fistful, Eastwood's character is beaten to a pulp by the bad guys, but so is Mortimer, and the double mauling feels gratuitous, especially since there's no particular reason why the bad guys shouldn't just kill them. But the sequel shows Leone growing in style and technique, with a fine use of widescreen in establishing shots and a deft use of closeups in establishing the characters, especially the bad guys in the mob headed by El Indio (Gian Maria Volontè, who had also been the chief villain, Ramón Roja, in Fistful). Am I the only one who suspects, from Leone's closeups of the mob's faces, that Leone had been influenced by Carl Theodor Dreyer's The Passion of Joan of Arc (1929)? One standout in the mob is a superbly twitchy Klaus Kinski as a hunchback named Juan. The cinematography is by Massimo Dallamano. And once again, Ennio Morricone's score is integral to the film's success. The spareness of the music, scored only for a few instruments, serves as a contrast to the sweeping orchestral scores for Hollywood Westerns by composers like Dimitri Tiomkin and Max Steiner. Morricone and Leone recognized the need for silence, punctuated only occasionally by a penny-whistle tweedle or a guitar riff, to maintain the film's texture.

*Actually, he has a name in both films: In Fistful he is called "Joe," which is obviously just a generic name for an americano, while in the sequel he is known as Monco, the Italian word for "one-armed," in reference to his tendency to use his left hand while keeping his gun hand under his poncho.