Roger's
reviews have appeared in McClatchy-Tribune News
Service, Orlando Sentinel, Spin Magazine, The World,
Orlando Magazine Autoweek Magazine among others.
He is the founder and editor of Movie
Nation.
In
Billy Wilder’s “Sunset Boulevard,” the
deluded, forgotten silent film star Norma Desmond lamented
a lost and very different era in cinema — silent
films.
“We
didn’t need dialogue,” she bellows. “We
had FACES!”
It’s
a line that comes to mind when considering the quixotic,
bug-eyed fury that was Klaus Kinski, a German actor with
one of the most expressive faces of the sound film era.
Kinski
appeared in some 130 films, and earned a measure of fame
in just a few of them — a couple of tiny but memorable
parts in the spaghetti Westerns of Sergio Leone, a searing,
stand-out turn in a single scene in David Lean’s
“Doctor Zhivago.”
But Kinski’s best showcase, he was certain, was
as a monologist. Just him, a “role” and a
spotlight — always ready for his close-up.
A
World War II Wehrmacht veteran, his early post-war acting
career established a pattern of firings from theater companies,
but “success” doing one man shows. He toured
as a largely unscripted, ranting Jesus in such shows in
the early ’70s.
His
acting career was well-established, if mostly German,
by the late ’60s.
But
the one filmmaker who truly indulged that need to be seen
in camera-dominating close-ups playing figures larger
than life was the then-young German director Werner Herzog.
They did five films together, with the first — “Aguirre,
the Wrath of God” — making both men world
famous in the mid-70s, formally launching Herzog’s
half century career and re-launching Kinski as a star
level international talent.
Legends
grew up around their hate-love relationship, of violent
tirades and threats with firearms, arranged murder and
the like, with the actor embellishing this professional
feud in his memoirs and Herzog allegedly helping Kinski
come up with more “vile expletives” for Kinski
to use in referring to Herzog in the book.
That’s
helpful to remember in approaching Herzog’s mid-career
summary documentary “My Best Fiend,” ostensibly
about his relationship with his bug-eyed muse. It’s
also an appreciation of Herzog’s epic undertakings
with Kinski — movies shot in impossible locations
with impossible tasks and impossible budgets, dangerous
films where people got hurt and Kinski became one more
obstacle to overcome to get “Aguirre,” “Nosferatu,”
“Fitzcarraldo” and “Cobra Verde”
made.
“Woyzek?”
That Czech-filmed period piece, tucked into the end of
production on “Nosferatu,” was a piece of
cake compared to everything else they achieved together.
Herzog
has long made documentaries, and became an Oscar-nominated/Directors
Guild of America award winning doc maker after Kinski’s
death in 1991. “My Best Fiend” was the world’s
introduction to Werner as a top flight documentarian and
narrator (in German here, with English subtitles) extraordinaire.
In
the years since this film came out in 1999, more has been
made of Kinski’s mental illness, his raging narcissism
and megalomania. He’s been credibly accused of attempted
sexual assault of a leading lady by one director he worked
with and accused of molesting his oldest daughter in her
memoirs, published years after his death.
Herzog
refers to Kinski’s memoirs as “lies”
in “My Best Fiend.” But in watching this film
anew, I found it helpful to think of Herzog himself as
an unreliable narrator. I’ve interviewed him several
times over the years, and found him nothing but credible,
every time out. But he is a “story teller,”
after all. He helped Kinski come up with sorry names to
call him on his book? A little self serving, even if it’s
true.
There’s
lots of on-set footage of Kinski flipping out, and the
film begins with a long snippet of Kinski melting down,
not wholly in character, in his “Jesus” touring
show, before he and Herzog became a team. But Herzog,
everybody’s favorite doom saying German philosopher
on film, comes off as more than a little disingenuous
in this fond remembrance of his most important collaborator.
Herzog
put huge crews and huge populations of Native extras at
risk and under hardship making “Aguirre” and
“Fitzcarraldo.” More than a few people got
badly hurt, something emphasized by using lots of footage
from one of the best “making of” documentaries
ever, Les Blank’s “Burden of Dreams,”
about Herzog filming and endangering himself and everybody
else on “Fitzcarraldo.”
The
shots of that river boat — not a model— careening
down a raging river in Amazonia, with a few camera folks
and Herzog and crazy Kinski on board, are stunning to
this day.
Herzog
gives his version of the “getting my rifle”
story from “Fitzcarraldo,” threatening his
star with “eight bullet holes” before he could
get away if Kinski followed-through on his latest threat
to quit the film shoot. One bullet, Herzog intones, was
saved for himself. Because if this movie — which
had already lost original stars Jason Robards and Mick
Jagger to sickness and the elements — was not finished,
Werner would take his own life, too.
Or
so he says. This Indian chief or that producer who offered
to “kill” Kinski for him adds to the mythic
lore of this relationship. And plans to “firebomb
his house” when they got to Germany seem like a
grand embellishment.
“We
belonged together,” seems more to the point of their
psychic connection. “We were ready to go down together.”
They
were two crazy guys involved in all those high-degree-of-difficulty
projects. And Herzog, the younger man, could call Kinski
a bully and a coward once he was dead and gone. But footage
on set shows him allowing his volatile star to berate
“victims” on the crew without the director
intervening.
You
were going to fire bomb Kinski’s house? Sure you
were, Werner.
Herzog
has lived and worked and achieved enough to become cinematic
royalty, a beloved figure as a character actor —
more sinister than cuddly — lionized “Grizzly
Man” documentarian and Grand Old Man of International
Cinema, someone famous actors flock to the moment he calls.
This documentary reminds us of what he went through to
get there.
“My
Best Fiend” thus builds two co-dependent legends,
with Herzog revisiting their distant past, sharing a boarding
house together (the one Herzog grew up in) and recalling
the first time he was mesmerized by Kinski’s presence
in a movie (sharing scenes with Maximillian Schell in
1955’s “Sons, Mothers and a General”).
And Herzog’s tribute film sort of explains himself
as he accepts his role in Kinski’s “all used
up, spent” demise — at 65 — by refusing
to work with him after their last collaboration, another
agonizing jungle tale, “Cobra Verde” (1987).
The
generous samples of their films together make “My
Best Fiend” the best primer on prime Herzog, even
if he has made Oscar-worthy documentaries and a decent
thriller (“Rescue Dawn”) or two since, with
new films in the works even today, twenty-five years removed
from this revealing and riveting documentary about his
years spent managing a madman on the other side of the
camera.
