"Fitzcarraldo" (1982) has many similarities to "Aguirre"; once again, the Herzog crew is floating along the river in the Amazon jungle. Once again, Kinski is the wildly ambitious, unrealistic visionary who takes advantage of the fact that the "bare-assed" natives have a myth involving a white God arriving on a boat. Again, Kinski plays a man driven by weird personal passions -- this time, it's Italian opera. Kinski is almost playing against type: He's softer than we've ever seen him before. Affectionate, charming, civilized -- driven, but reasonable.

"That slope may look insignificant, but it's gonna be our destiny," says Fitzcarraldo, his eyes like spinning globes. It was a prophetic line -- the difficulties encountered by Herzog Filmproduktion on this film are legendary, and pulling a steamboat over the mountain was no less an ordeal for the film crew than it was for the characters. There were casualties. Animals. Indians. Numerous prehistoric trees with roots 15 feet across; trees that it should be punishable by maiming to cut down.

Knowing how hazardous and impossibly awful the whole project was, the film, despite its brilliance, is almost unwatchable. One gets the overwhelming, creepy sensation that Herzog thought these people and their lands were expendable, because of his flaming Will to Power.

But it's so undeniably, mind-blowingly awesome to see a steamboat creaking up a mountainside; such a soul-grabbing visual metaphor, that ultimately the hardships and perils of the shoot really only make the whole film more powerful. Disgusting, because it was all for the vanity of one German dirtbag of a filmmaker, but powerful.

Herzog claims that the Machiguengas and Campas Indians offered to kill Kinski for him; he thanked them but politely declined. The Indians, claims Herzog, weren't afraid of Kinski -- they were afraid of him, because he was so quiet. It is impossible not to hear the pride in Herzog's voice, telling this.

In "Fitzcarraldo," Kinski's instincts to be the Greatest Actor in the World are unimpeded, but his personal dysfunctions are beginning to show through the weave of his unassailable craft.

There is a ridiculous shot wherein Kinski, wearing a thin pair of linen pants pulled up nearly to his nipples, stretches in such a way that his entire johnson is fully visible in outline, hanging outrageously to one side of his crotch. This could not have been unintentional ---- this was Hello, ladies. Note the helmet of my manhood and fulsome testes and rejoice. This is the first hint of Kinski's weirdness leaking out into his roles -- it was to come out more and more.

Kinski's reputation for being impossible preceded him, at this point, and he didn't get many job offers, so had to act in abject crap like David Schmoeller's 1986 film "Crawlspace." This movie is so bad it is actually marketed as a horror double-feature alongside Schmoeller's other plodding shitsucker, "The Attic," starring the late Carrie Snodgress.

In "Crawlspace," Kinski, who plays a deranged Nazi landlord named Dr. Karl Gunther, coats a bullet with blood, loads it into a .44 Magnum and holds it to his head. Even in a half-assed movie, Kinski doesn't do anything halfway. "Now I kill because I'm addicted to killing. It's the only way I can feel alive."

Kinski said this, like his lines in "Nosferatu," with a tired whine: It is an admittance that he identifies with these characters. You hear, in his voice, that Kinski is infinitely sick of himself. This was his burden: He had to live with Klaus Kinski every day, a person that he and virtually everyone else in his life found intolerable.

"I am my own judge, jury, and executioner," Dr. Gunther shrieks, walking around in his basement in an SS uniform. "Heil Gunther!"

Kinski puts on a crazy smile and wobbling eyes when he says this line. It's a fuck you to the idiocy of the script, and it's so funny, it's actually scary. Back in Europe, Kinski reports walking by a store window and being stopped in his tracks by an old photograph of a wild-looking man playing the violin. Kinski ran into the store to ask about the photo and learned that it was a picture of Paganini. This was a great shock to Kinski's soul. "I know that I was Paganini," he wrote.

Kinski became obsessed by Paganini. He wrote a script, for himself to star in, and asked Herzog to direct it -- Herzog refused, saying the script was unusable. Kinski ended up directing the film, "Paganini," himself.

Since Kinski thought he was the reincarnation of Paganini, ostensibly, the film is a paean to himself.

Clearly, Kinski had no prevailing architectural vision for the piece -- it's mainly sections of Paganini's life that he relates to: standing in the footlights, sawing away at his violin with his teeth clenched in fury like he just bit the head off a chipmunk.

Paganini, another insatiable sex fiend, ruts horribly with "13-year-old" girls who let out blood-curdling screams like they're being impaled up to the neck: "AAAAhhhhh!!! Aauughh!! Fuck me again! Please! I'm begging you!You must! Aaaaauugh!!" The screaming sounds like rape or murder until you realize, from the subtitles, that they're supposed to be experiencing an uncontainable delirium of pleasure. It is positively brutal.

Young Nicholai Kinski, aka Nanhoï, also stars in the film, as the composer's beloved son. Paganini kisses, slobbers, clutches and moons over his son. Kinski seems to be barely controlling himself from eating Nikolai's head when they are embracing; as a director, he makes his son gaze at him wistfully and throw intense tantrums to demonstrate his excruciating love for his father -- the love that Kinski would have demanded in order to feel loved at all, since his emotional volume-knob was broken.

The female love interest was a beautiful 20-year-old named Deborah Kinski, who I read later was not Klaus' grandchild (thank God), but a new young lady who looked alarmingly like a younger version of Nastassja. This young woman, the extremely large-breasted Deborah Caprioglio, was 62-year-old Klaus' new wife. The marriage lasted two years.

Recent Stories