Werner Herzog and Klaus Kinski made five pictures together, two of which–Aguirre, the Wrath of God and Fitzcarraldo–everybody’s at least heard of, and three–Cobra Verde, Woyzeck, and Nosferatu the Vampire–that don’t get as much attention.
There’s a reason for that.
Aguirre is a transcendent piece of art that cockslaps all the Big Important Questions right in the face.
Fitzcarraldo had a boat getting dragged up a mountain.
The other three are okay.
I’m guessing that Woyzeck is fine; I did not watch it because it’s the only one not on Amazon Prime.
The film does intrigue me, though.
Mostly because Klaus Kinski makes this face.
What caused that face?
Was it a lady?
Was it the crushing nincompoopery surrounding him?
Was his lunch not prepared properly?
I did not see the movie, and so I cannot tell you.
I did see Cobra Verde and Nosferatu the Vampire, so I can tell you about them.
Again: fine.
Aguirre had me on the edge of my couch, barely blinking and thrusting my entire consciousness into the image; when it finished, I almost just restarted the flick.
Got through about an hour of Cobra Verde while fucking with my phone and scratching my nuts, got sleepy, kipped out, woke up, read some of John Farrell’s Richard Nixon: The Life, listened to the new Fiona Apple, scratched my nuts some more, then finished the last hour.
In fairness, part of my wavery interest can be blamed on the atrocious dub: The movie should be in German, but the version I watched was in (shitty) English, and I don’t think Klaus Kinski did his own dubbing.
It might be my fault, though.
Not the dubbing.
I wasn’t the one making the decisions on that.
It might be my fault in that there may have been a German language/English subtitles version available, but I cannot figure out how to access the settings to do things like turning the closed captioning on or off.
But now is not time for the Blame Game.
If the Blame Game were to be played now, then we would have to blame China.
So let’s not play the Blame Game.
Cobra Verde is about a slaver.
He’s the good guy.
Already, I’m not onboard.
I’d enjoy a film in which the slaver suffers for his sins, but that does not happen in Cobra Verde.
Klaus Kinski has a series of sexy adventures on multiple continents, and then dies in the last scene for no reason other than “the lead character dying” is always a boffo way to end a picture.
It’s just sequence after sequence of Klaus Kinski having the time of his life fucking his way through Brazil and Benin.
That’s how he gets to Benin, actually.
He fucks too much in Brazil, so they send him there.
Enthusiasts, I’ll just lay all my cards on the table right now: I may not have 100% followed the plot of Cobra Verde.
First he’s poor, and then he murders someone, and then he’s a bandit, and then he’s leading an all-female army in a coup against an African king.
The flick is downright picaresque.
“Cobra Verde” is his name, or at nickname, or whatever.
It just means “green snake.”
Which is not a very cool bandit name.
If you walk into the saloon and announce yourself as “the Green Snake,” then all the other outlaws are gonna laugh at you.
It’s no “Sundance Kid” is all I’m saying.
Like Charo talking dirty, it sounds better in Spanish.
This is what Klaus Kinski looked like:
Yes, that is Captain Crunch’s outfit.
Klaus Kinski, in the opening scene, beats Captain Crunch to death and steals his clothes.
I have no idea why the lawyers allowed that to happen.
You would think the Quaker Oats corporation would be opposed to that sort of use of their intellectual property.
The 80’s were a different time, I guess.
You probably don’t have to watch Cobra Verde, but check this out:
Aren’t you glad you checked that out?
Pretty song.
You don’t wanna know what they were singing.
You’ll start crying so hard you puke.
The only other necessary scene in Cobra Verde is one that the film shares with Aguirre and Fitzcarraldo, but not Nosferatu: Klaus Kinski physically assaults the extras.
All three of these movies feature a mentally-imbalanced former Nazi going utterly apeshit on a gaggle of locals making a buck a day to wear silly outfits and get ordered around by Werner Herzog’s assistant director.
BEATINGS.
Klaus Kinski hands out ACTUAL BEATINGS to the background players, all of whom are women and/or people of color.
Twitter would lose its shit if this came out today.
On a related note: Would Klaus Kinski love Trump?
This one could go either way.
On one hand, Klaus Kinski despised Americans and nothing is more American than Trump.
On the other, Klaus Kinski was a giant asshole, and giant assholes love Trump.
FUN FACT: As pointed out by Buck Mulligan–not only a Valued Commentator, but a skilled producer of children–Klaus Kinski spent the last few years of his angry life in Lagunitas, just a few miles from where the Dead bivouaced in ’67; this was his Blockhütte, which he named Himmel Auf Erden.
(Blockhütte means “log cabin” and the other thing means “Heaven on Earth.”)
This is a picture of Garcia, Bobby, and the ol’ Pig at Lagunitas:
(FURTHER FUN FACT: This is the only extant photograph of Pigpen’s feet.)
And then there’s Nosferatu the Vampire, which is not about Nosferatu, but Count Dracula.
But apparently they’re the same guy.
And Nosferatu wasn’t named Nosferatu, anyway.
His name was Count Orlok.
“Nosferatu” means “vampire.”
The movie should’ve been called Orlok the Nosferatu.
But then people would have thought they were buying tickets for a terrible scientifictional picture.
See if you can keep this straight, bozo: Nosferatu the Vampire is a remake of Nosferatu: A Symphony of Horror, which was a straight-up theft of Dracula (the book)
That actually wasn’t that complicated.
Dunno why I felt the need to challenge you like that.
The “bozo” was completely unnecessary.
I’m not gonna apologize, but I do acknowledge that I should.
Anyway, this is Klaus Kinski as a dracula:
Herzog, we have a problem.
Y’can’t put the fangs there, man.
That’s some Bucky Beaver shit, man.
C’mon, man.
It’s supposed to look like this:
That’s scary!
Stay away from me, Mr. Dracula!
Don’t you bite on my neck!
Ooh, I’m tingling and my bumps are becoming goosed.
And then there’s this:
I do not feel fear.
I just feel bad that his parents couldn’t afford to send him to the orthodontist.
MOVIE PITCH: Dracula gets drafted.
I call it Sergeant Dracula.
At this point, all I have is the title, but you have to admit it’s a hell of a title.
It begs questions.
“Dracula’s in the army now?”
“How does a nocturnal creature of sin get by in an overwhelmingly day-based organization?”
“Does he wear his normal clothes, or the regulation uniform with, like, a cape and his medal?
I always wondered about Dracula’s medal.
This one:
Where does Dracula even get a medal?
And for what?
Did Dracula blow up the Death Star?
Anyway: Sergeant Dracula.
We get the script together this week, put together the funding over the summer, and start shooting the instant that the insurance companies say we can.
Who’s with me?
Why must you drift down these tributaries of triviality?
I am rudderless, and at nature’s whim.
You’re just a shithead.
Also that.
Nosferatu, of the four Herzog films I watched, least tickled my pickle.
Holy GOD was that a terrible sentence.
Are you still here?
I was leaving, but then I heard that abomination; you should have the alphabet confiscated from you.
Oh, hush.
Mopey Klaus Kinski in dreary European castles doesn’t make it for me; gimme crazed Klaus in a jungle.
And, as I mentioned, he does not assault a crowd of extras.
Which is not just boring, but a breach of Chekhov’s Rule.
Chekhov wrote that if a gun is introduced in Act One, then it must go off in Act Three.
Klaus Kinski is the gun in this scenario, and beating extras is the going off.
The beating necessarily follows his presence.
This is Drama 101 stuff, folks.
I couldn’t help comparing Nosferatu to Francis Ford Coppola’s Bram Stoker’s Dracula, as they’re both based on the original novel and so have mostly identical plots, characters, and even dialogue.
(ARGUMENT: Francis Ford Coppola is the American Werner Herzog, or vice versa. Both went insane making river-based movies, and also made a dracula picture. I am now realizing there is not much to my argument. Also, Herzog is insanely prolific while Coppola took ten years to make each movie because he was such a pain in the ass. Yeah, this is a shitty argument. This entire parenthetical was a mistake. I regret coming in here.)
One metric in which Nosferatu beats Bum Stroker’s Dracula is in the casting and performance of the actor who plays the doomed Jonathan Harker.
Coppola cast Keanu Reeves, and I respect everyone involved for the decision.
Keanu was trying to expand his range.
Coppola took a chance on a young artist.
I respect that.
Didn’t work out.
Keanu was so bad I’m surprised his performance stuck to the celluloid.
You can almost hear him reminding himself “Talk fancy, Keanu!” as he airily overarticulates every line.
But in Nosferatu, the Harker character is played by veteran Swiss actor Bruno Ganz, who you may remember from such hits as a shitload of European movies you’ve never seen, and this classic meme:
If the film “Woyzeck” is the same story as Alban Berg’s opera “Wozzeck,” then there’s LOTS of stuff in there that could make Kinski make that face, and maybe worse . . .
We saw “Wozzeck” at Lyric Opera in Chicago and it was one of the most amazing things I have ever seen on a stage. I had no idea it was also in the Kinski Canon. Mighy need to hunt that down . . .
Kinda looks like Kinski
https://images.app.goo.gl/EcX7f5XLCi47rhqB8
https://images.app.goo.gl/Ln5nfZwa1f5s742D9
If the film “Woyzeck” is the same story as Alban Berg’s opera “Wozzeck,” then there’s LOTS of stuff in there that could make Kinski make that face, and maybe worse . . .
They’re both based on the same (unfinished) play.
We saw “Wozzeck” at Lyric Opera in Chicago and it was one of the most amazing things I have ever seen on a stage. I had no idea it was also in the Kinski Canon. Mighy need to hunt that down . . .
Are we going to talk about the bird at the bare feet of the dead (batbfotd)?
Is it stuffed and dusty? If so that is a strange pose.
Is it dead and just tossed there to be stood around, like Mickey brought home a road killed hawk to freak out the high people?
Is it alive and just hanging out?
Does it have a name, batdbfotd?