Tag: period piece

La chanson de Roland (1978)

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Dir: Frank Cassenti
Star: Klaus Kinski, Alain Cuny, Dominique Sanda, Pierre Clémenti
a.k.a. The Song of Roland

Kinski is not exactly the kind of person you would invite on a press tour to promote a movie in which he starred. The pattern appears to be fairly consistent, at least over the time in his career in which he was a “name” actor. Show up, do the bare minimum required by the contract, fight incessantly with the director, sexually harass any woman within reach, and bad-mouth the entire production as soon as his involvement was over. It says a lot about his performances, even in these “pieces of shit”, that Klaus still kept getting work, despite the problematic nature of his personality. Still, there are times where it’s hard to argue with him, and Roland is one such film. In a passage excised from Kinski Uncut, he described it as follows:

A miserable, painful story from the Middle Ages. The pretentious director, Cassenti, has no talent; he can win people over only with money. He is too idiotic to realize that it is they who are giving an asshole like him the chance to make a movie.

Klaus Kinski, All I Need Is Love, p.243

I’m more or less in complete agreement with him. It’s a painfully obvious and extremely preachy effort, from a director, much of whose career seems to have been based on this kind of socially conscious cinema: a French version of Ken Loach, if you will. This also tries to cram two separate stories into a film that’s ill-suited for one. Let’s begin with a quick history lesson though: what is the Song of Roland? Maybe think of it as a French equivalent to Sir Thomas Malory’s Le Morte d’Arthur. A saga, supposedly based on historical reality, but written several centuries after the fact, and intended rather more to entertain than inform. Roland was an 8th-century military leader under Emperor Charlemagne, He fought a brave rearguard defense during the Battle of Roncevaux Pass in 778 AD, dying heroically to protect the rest of the retreating army.

The Song of Roland was an epic poem, of around 4,000 lines, written in the late 11th century, and is one of the earliest surviving works of French literature. It was a popular work for several hundred years, both in written and oral forms. It’s the latter which concerns us here. We’re now in the 13th century, and a group of pilgrims are on the Way of St. James a.k.a. El Camino de Santiago. This is a journey to the shrine of the apostle Saint James the Great, located in the North-west corner of Spain, in the cathedral of Santiago de Compostela. On the way, they perform the Song of Roland for the residents of the territory through which they pass, although in a variant form in which Roland is betrayed by his army allies. The film bounces back and forth between Roland’s story and that of the actors: neither has a happy ending.

More obviously, their performances help inspire a growing realization among the pilgrims about the injustices imposed on them by the strictly hierarchical nature of their society, and which are reinforced by the “official” version of Roland’s story. Many of the pilgrims are outcasts of society themselves, including whores, thieves and lepers, and they gradually become revolutionaries. Though not everyone agrees: “If these peasant revolts on the land on which God put them, then they’re made to do so by a heretical power,” goes one counter-argument. “They’re made to do it because of hunger, misery and brutality, all caused by monastical orders and lords,” is the response. This is the kind of didactic content you can expect in bulk here, right until the final line: “Violence and injustice are the masters’ weapons, but for those who rebel, even failures are victories.”

I’m sure if you were already of a fervent revolutionary Marxist bent, then you would be nodding your head in agreement at such dogmatic assertions, but it’s hard to to imagine this film changing the mind of anyone not already wholly committed to the cause. Even purely from a cinematically critical point of view, the two halves of the story never gel into a cohesive whole. Whenever one threatens to achieve clarity or momentum, bang, you’re catapulted several hundred years across time, to the same actors playing different roles, and everything collapses back to the ground. It would take a skilled director to mesh the two narratives together, and on the evidence of this, Cassenti does not have the necessary film-making chops – as Kinski eloquently put it above. His performance, both as pilgrim Klaus and the heroic Roland (below), is disinterested and forgettable.

There would probably be scope for one version or the other. Either twist the story of a historical (or, at least, semi-historical) hero to put across your intended message, or depict the awakening of a group of people in the downtrodden masses, to the realization that they are the downtrodden masses. Trying to do both seems to be have been a fatal mistake, condemning the film to be a failure as both. It’s clear where this is going to go, long before the knights descend to suppress the threat of this (very minor) rebellion – no longer the heroic figures of legends, but brutal enforcers of the current order. It’s exactly the kind of thing skewered mercilessly by Monty Python three years earlier in Holy Grail, with the scene where the peasant Dennis berates King Arthur: “Strange women lying in ponds distributing swords is no basis for a system of government..”

I had been on a bit of a medieval binge-watch of late, having seen a number of versions of the Joan of Arc story for my GirlsWithGuns.org site. So I was quite looking forward to this, intrigued by the concept of the dual stories, and the setting in an era not too far away from the Maid of Orleans. The results, however, are hugely disappointing. Kinski as Roland could potentially have worked, even in a deconstruction of the hero, in a similar way to Aguirre, the Wrath of God (1972). This lumpy mess can’t even succeed as a spectacle.

Web of the Spider (1971)

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Dir: Antonio Margheriti
Star: Anthony Franciosa, Michèle Mercier, Peter Carsten, Klaus Kinski

For one of Kinski’s cameo roles – his appearances strictly book-end the film, this is actually not bad, an Italian Gothic horror set in the 1830’s. It’s a remake of an earlier film, 1964’s Castle of Blood, also directed by Margheriti (mostly – let’s not get into that here!), but which flopped at the box-office. The director believe this was due to it being in black-and-white, so decided to remake it in color. He appeared to regret this, calling the decision”stupid.” I haven’t seen the original, so can’t comment, but found this to be an effective enough tale, good enough to leave me interested in locating a decent print. For the one I watched was badly washed-out, pan-and-scanned (with a lot of scanning!), edited down by about 20 minutes, and dubbed into English with Greek subtitles. That it still retained my interest, thus says a good deal.

The wraparound story is a good one, and sees writer Edgar Allen Poe (Kinski) visiting England – there’s no indication, incidentally, this trip ever took place [Though Poe did spent several years in London, it was as a young boy]. It starts with Poe, Lord Blackwood and writer Alan Foster (Franciosa) drinking together in a pub, where Poe reveals that his stories aren’t works of fiction, but reports of events that actually happened, and were witnessed by him. The skeptical Foster scoffs at this, but Blackwood agrees with Poe that there are more things in heaven and earth, etc., and wagers ten pounds with Foster that he will be unable to spend an entire night in a haunted, empty castle owned by the nobleman. The writer is dropped off at the (impressively spiky) castle gates by Poe and Blackwood, and goes inside for a lengthy sequence of Foster walking the halls and rooms of the deserted manor.

web2Except, naturally, it turns out to be far from deserted, playing home to a wide spectrum of characters – some of whom happen to bear a strong resemblance to portraits hanging on the walls. The first of these to appear is Elisabeth Blackwood (Mercier), for whom Foster falls, and falls hard; this is used to explain his reluctance to leave, once the escalating weirdness achieves full effect. She’s followed shortly after by another, rather more sullen beauty, Julia (Karin Field), and before you know it, this supposedly vacant home is playing host to an entire ball. Turns out, as you have perhaps guessed already, that these are not living people, but spectral entities left over from previous tragic events.

This is explained to Foster by Dr. Carmus, an occult scholar who went to the castle to carry out some research, only to be trapped there himself. The same fate seems likely to befall Foster – except for the love that he and Elisabeth share, leading to her trying to help him escape the grounds before dawn, when he is doomed to join the other spirits, forever. At least, that appears to be the plot here: I was somewhat surprised to read other synopses saying things like, “Near the end of the film, the ghosts reveal their true nature: they aren’t actually ghosts but vampires with ghostly powers, and they need Foster’s blood in order to maintain their existence,” because that particular angle would appear to be part of the 20 minutes missing from the version I saw. This would at least somewhat explain the German title, Dracula im Schloß des Schreckens (“Dracula in the Castle of Secrets”), even if Dracula is notable by his complete absence.

While enjoyable enough, with no shortage of atmosphere to be found, I suspect Mercier is likely a downgrade from the phenomenal Barbara Steele, who played the same role in Castle: here, she’s pretty, and not much more, hardly coming over as the sort of woman to inspire the level of devotion shown by Foster. Given its era, this also feels tame; things had moved on significantly in the horror world since the original film, and some more sex and violence probably wouldn’t have gone amiss. It is a bit of a shame the early direction isn’t sustained. I love the concept of Poe’s stories actually being journalism, and think it would have been a fantastic idea to have had an entire series of films based on that premise [H.P. Lovecraft immediately comes to mind as another author for whom this would work]. There’s a sequence which plays under the opening credits that shows where this idea could have gone: Poe stalking his way through a graveyard, all disheveled and flailing, looking for a specific grave and digging it up, before it cuts to the pub where he is telling the story to Blackwood and Foster – still, all disheveled and flailing.

Kinski as Poe is an inspired bit of casting; if I can’t say how accurate the portrayal of Poe as a twitchy, sweaty  laudanum addict type might be, I can’t deny how much fun it is to watch. Undeniably, it’s a vast improvement over Klaus’s other cameo as a “great author”, playing the Marquis De Sade in Justine, where he got to do very little except sit in a cell and pretend to scribble furiously. Margheriti had worked with Kinski before to great effect, in And God Said To Cain, and it’s just a shame that his screen time here is limited to a handful of scenes. While the rest is more undeniably more entertaining than some of the Kinski cameos I’ve had to endure in the course of putting this site together, the gap between Klaus and the rest of the cast is rather apparent. I’d have willingly ponied up ten quid, for everyone to just sit in the pub and listen to some more of Poe’s stories, rather than go out on a cold night to a freezing and unwelcoming pile of stones – ectoplasmic babes or no ectoplasmic babes…

Count Dracula (1970)

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Star: Christopher Lee, Herbert Lom, Soledad Miranda, Klaus Kinski
Dir: Jess Franco

While I appreciate the idea of making a more faithful adaptation of Bram Stoker’s novel, going back in many ways to its original roots, I’m not sure getting Jess Franco to direct it was the smartest idea. Whatever his merits, he was hardly known for PG-rated works inspired by Victorian literature, and despite a couple of bits of impressive casting, in Lee and Kinski, this feels about 15 years too late, and a bland supporting cast leave it marooned in, at best, the middle tier of vampire movies.

The main coup is, of course, getting Lee to reprise his most famous role, even if this was the third chance to sink his fangs into Count Dracula that year, its release (at least, in Germany) just managing to pip Taste the Blood of Dracula to cinemas, and with Scars of Dracula following later. [Blood wasn’t even supposed to include the Count at all, but the US distributor balked, and he was talked into playing the role again; Lee later complained Hammer’s president used “emotional blackmail” to convince him to keep playing Dracula, saying the crew would be put out of work otherwise – I wonder if it was for this film?]. He was growing increasingly disenchanted with the direction Hammer were taking: “They gave me nothing to do! I pleaded with Hammer to let me use some of the lines that Bram Stoker had written. Occasionally, I sneaked one in.” Here, no such sneaking was needed, and indeed, the film’s best scene has the Count delivering a sonorous monologue about his ancestors, which is close to Stoker’s text:

“To us was entrusted for centuries the guarding of our lands. The Lombard, the Bulgar, the Turk, poured their thousands against our frontiers – we drove them back! The Draculas have ever been the heart’s blood, the brains, the sword of our people. One of my race crossed the Danube and destroyed the Turkish host. Though sometimes beaten back, he came again and again against the enemy, till at the end, he came alone from the bloody field, for he alone could triumph. THIS was a Dracula indeed!”

countdracula2Another cool aspect is the way this Count starts off as old, and gradually becomes more youthful and active as the film goes on and he quenches his thirst on more victims – something also used in Coppola’s Bram Stoker’s Dracula. But the film still takes liberties with the text, some of which don’t work, such as the way Jonathan Harker escapes Dracula’s castle, and is transported back to Great Britain, to rehab in a facility – here run by Professor Van Helsing (Lom) – which directly overlooks… Dracula’s English mansion. Really, what are the odds? The fiance of Lucy Westenra (Miranda) is now Quincy Morris, with Arthur Holmwood entirely omitted. So, while more faithful than many, it’s clear the makers still felt it necessary to make a number of concessions on the transition from page to screen.

Klaus Kinski plays Renfield, in a casting choice of both staggering obviousness and brilliance, matched only by Kinski’s other collaborations with Franco, where he played Jack the Ripper and the Marquis de Sade. In this case, it’s a virtually non-verbal performance, where his sole line is “Varna…”, uttered just before Renfield shuffles off this mortal coil, to tell the good guys where the Count is heading. But that doesn’t make it any less memorable, since Kinski has always been capable of conveying an entire chapter of emotion with a stare, and is allowed to do so freely in this film. Right from the first time we see him, hurling food about his cell, it’s clear that this Renfield is barking mad – and that’s before he starts chowing down on his favorite snack, dead flies, which he has hidden in a box in his cell. According to Jay Marks and Waylon Wahl, Kinski took Franco to task for not filming Renfield’s scenes in an actual asylum, to which the director responded, “I had planned to shoot it in a real cell but then it occurred to me that they might not let you out!”

Certainly, it’s fair to say that, as well as the canonical Dracula, in Kinski this film also has the canonical Renfield, and I don’t think anyone can match the intense lunacy of his portrayal. Where the film goes off the rails is with the good guys in the cast, starting with Lom as Van Helsing, who is a very pale shadow indeed of, say, Peter Cushing. And that’s before he inexplicably appears to suffer a stroke, which confines him to a wheelchair for the rest of the movie (perhaps inspiring Dr. Everett Scott in The Rocky Horror Picture Show, which hit the stage three years later?). The rest of the cast are equally forgettable, despite the scenic contributions of Miranda, and Maria Rohm as Mina – although the latter remain far more clothed than most Franco ladies! And, indeed, Hammer ones of the time, as they released The Vampire Lovers the same year, the first of their Karnstein trilogy.

That’s perhaps what I mean about it being 15 years too late. In tone and content, this comes across as less daring than even Blood of Dracula, made in 1957 and whose success led directly to the entire “Hammer Horror” filmography which followed. That packed much more of a wallop than this even lower-rent version does, which has all the impact of the giant polystyrene rocks used to disrupt the Count’s escape at the end [you can clearly see one of them glancing off the side of a horse’s head as they are “hurled” down from a nearby cliff. And do not even get me started on the “bat” effects…]. The truth is, for all the influence Dracula had, Stoker isn’t actually all that good a writer – if you can name two of his 11 other novels, it will be one more than I can manage, and my Lair of the White Worm knowledge is entirely through Ken Russell’s adaptation.  So a faithful translation to the screen may seem like a good idea in theory, yet it tends to bring over as many negatives as pluses. This film demonstrates why most movie versions have tended to take only the core, and leave everything else.

 

Paganini (1989)

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Dir: Klaus Kinski
Star: Klaus Kinski, Debora Kinski, Nicolai Kinski, Dalila Di Lazzaro

“Everyone knows what a pig he is. The whole world knows what a dissipated life he leads. It’s disgusting. His only interests in life are… money and, of course, women. The younger, the better, and if possible, underage. He’s obsessed with sex.”

The above lines are spoken at the beginning of the movie, by two priests on their way to Paganini’s house where the musician is dying, in an effort to administer last rights and save his immortal soul. But, obviously – and in the light of subsequent allegations, unfortunately – they are intended to be applied as much to Kinski himself. Klaus clearly sees himself as a spiritual descendant of Paganini, and even referred to himself as Paganini reincarnated: a great artist, whose genius is misunderstood and derided by his critics, but who is capable of touching the hearts of his audience directly. Quite how accurate he is there, could politely be called a topic for debate, but let’s face it: he had a one-man show in which he played Jesus Christ. No-one had a higher opinion of Klaus Kinski’s talents than Klaus Kinski.

However, it’s clear that whatever skills he had on the stage and in front of the camera, did not translate in any way to writing and directing. For the result is a complete mess, and an utter failure in terms of providing any significant insight into the life of Paganini. As an insight into Kinski’s self-image and psychological identity, on the other hand, there’s enough material here to keep an entire Las Vegas convention of psychiatrists happy. As disasters go, it’s a glorious, fascinating one, a misconceived project from beginning to end.

Werner Herzog says Kinski repeatedly asked him to direct the film, but Werner turned it down. When a man who dragged a full-scale boat over a mountain for his movie, calls your script “unfilmable,” it’s probably best to rethink it a bit. Klaus, naturally, had no such second thoughts, instead opting to direct it himself, and the result is the most batshit-crazy biography ever of a classical musician. And considering this field includes the likes of Ken Russell’s Lisztomania, that’s some gold standard for insanity.

It’s the kind of film which breeds urban legends, of varying credibility. There’s rumors of a 12-hour version. Or that the film contains so many long shots, because this allowed the crew to stay out of range of Kinski’s wrath. Before going on, I should mention the review is based on the director’s cut version, which runs 94 minutes. The producers, when they saw what he had delivered, were apparently appalled, calling it “pornographic”- not without reason – and suing Kinski. Their version, which received a minimal release, runs 80 minutes, although one presumes, is no more coherent. 

For there is little or no effort at any kind of narrative structure here: what you get is a series of montages, approximately 50% of which involve sex (or perhaps it just seems that way), and most of those involve Kinski. But not all. In one of the film more notorious sequences, Di Lazzaro, playing noblewoman Helene von Feuerbacha, is overcome in her carriage with lust at seeing a stallion servicing a mare, and begins masturbating furious while thinking of Paganini.

paganiiniThis is, it appears, perfectly normal. For another early montage shows Paganini on stage, while the (young, attractive) women in the audience are virtually orgasming in their seats, and generally reacting in a way that recalls Beatlemania at its height. There’s a lot of this kind of thing, unsubtly suggesting he is entirely irresistible to women: later on, one of his conquests goes on a self-abasing demand that he make love to her again, mere seconds after he has dismounted. “He is an animal!” it is bemoaned. “Given the chance, he would rape every girl he meets. Especially the ones underage!” Again with the benefit of hindsight and future events, an unfortunate choice of sexual predilection, not apparently rooted in biographical accuracy. Though one of the film’s themes appears to be how the legend of Paganini was exaggerated to malign him by his enemies, which could conceivably apply equally as much to Kinski and his legacy. Here, Paganini certainly doesn’t need to rape anyone, his partners are all entirely and enthusiastically willing.

In between the sex, you get footage of Paganini stalking the streets of Venice in slow-motion, violence to both a chicken and a goat, and scenes of family life, with his wife Antonia Bianchi, played by Debora Caprioglio. The two were having a relationship, even though Caprioglio was one-third Kinski’s age, and credited as Debora Kinski even though she was never actually married to Klaus [curiously, she also played the wife of his character in their other film together, Grandi cacciatori] Extending the familial feel, Nastassja was supposed to have been involved, but it’s reported, “after three days she fled from the set in tears, never to return”.

Instead, we do have Klaus’s son Nikolai, by his third wife, Minhoi. It’s actually kinda touching, because the affection between father and son appears entirely genuine on both sides. This also leads into the film’s best sequence, with Paganini playing the violin with increasingly berserk passion, as his son watches, entranced and holding a kitten. Which is a good place to laud Salvatore Accardo, whose performances provide the music for the film, and is awesome. If nothing else, he was apparently satisfied with Kinski in the role, saying, “Paganini has finally come back to us through you, Klaus.”

Mind you, that comes from the film’s website which says, almost proudly, “Just as Paganini didn’t need to tune his violin because he could play his unique music anyway, so Kinski doesn’t need to prepare, repeat or rehearse the scenes – he just does it. Also as the director, he doesn’t rehearse or repeat – he just shoots.” If having the ring of plausibility, this is probably the movie’s biggest problem: it’s no coincidence that the quality of Kinski’s performances appear almost directly related to the degree any given director was prepared to butt heads with him, e.g. Herzog. Here, there wasn’t apparently anyone with the courage to stand up to Kinski and rein in more self-indulgent ideas, such as apparently insisting on everything being shot with natural light [though this may partly be an issue with the transfer of the director’s cut].

This was described by one viewer as “very possibly the worst film I’ve ever seen in my entire life,” and while I don’t agree, that isn’t an assessment with which I can find enormous fault. The review did continue, “on that score alone it’s clearly a must-buy,” and that does illustrate the conflicting emotions the film generates, much like the man himself. Yes, it’s a complete mess and abject failure, on just about every level. But as complete messes and abject failures go, it exerts an almost-hypnotic fascination, and I’d far rather have something like this, which takes the art of cinema and twists it into something bizarre, than another bland biopic. Klaus’s sole directorial credit is absolutely everything you would want or could expect from that, illustrating once more how thin the line is, between genius and insanity.

kinski-paganini

Deadly Sanctuary (1969)

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Dir: Jess Franco
Star: Romina Power, Maria Rohm, Mercedes McCambridge, Klaus Kinski
a.k.a. Marquis de Sade: Justine

“Contrary to his reputation, [Klaus] was not difficult to direct. We made seven films together, without any hassle and he was wonderful: friendly, gentle as a child, except, of course, when he got pissed off. This great master didn’t have problems, except with idiots. When a small-time filmmaker told him nothing at all except, “Sit there and smile”, he got angry.”
— Jess Franco

justineKinski is certainly a good choice to play the Marquis de Sade, between those full lips and a sense of overwhelming cruelty lurking not far behind his eyes. So, I was surprised to learn he was actually not the first pick for the role: it was originally supposed to be Orson Welles, who apparently backed out after reading the script. I’m not certain quite what Franco’s thought process was here: I’m hard pushed to think of any character where you’d think, “Well, if we can’t get Orson Welles, what about Klaus Kinski?” Though perhaps surprisingly, this film is only one of a number of connections between Welles and Franco. Back in 1965, Franco was the second-unit director on Welles’s Chimes at Midnight, though they reportedly parted on bad terms, and there are at least two other Franco productions in which Welles was linked to roles, including 1975’s The Man From Guyane, which also had Kinski attached to it. And after Welles’s death, Franco took the footage from his unfinished Don Quixote production and turned it into 1992’s Don Quixote de Orson Welles.

That’s surprising, because – and let me speak frankly here – Franco is one of the most godawful directors in the history of cinema. I know there are those of a cult persuasion who love his work, but the description of him as a European version of Ed Wood is perhaps closer to the mark, albeit an incredibly prolific Ed Wood with a fondness for sleaze, with Franco not infrequently working in hardcore porn. However, given that, this adaptation of the Marquis de Sade’s Justine: The Misfortunes of Virtue, is actually relatively tame, with only one (admittedly, fairly extended) sequence exhibiting the sadomasochistic bent which was one of the characteristics in much of Franco’s work. It feels more like a historical romp, though does retain some of the cynicism present in the original, which suggests that the wicked are rewarded, and that a life of virtue is simply a meaningless exercise in self-restraint. It is also true that, the novel itself was relatively restrained by de Sade’s standards of depravity. However, the film does present a softer ending than de Sade’s novel, in which the heroine is struck by lightning and killed.

Truth be told, Klaus doesn’t have much to do – not even a single line of dialogue – since the film is not “about” him, except in the sense that the story occasionally flicks back from the main plot, to the Marquis de Sade (Kinski), scribbling feverishly away in his cell at (supposedly) the Bastille. There, he’s tormented by visions of women, inspiring him to inflict further torments of his heroine as she progresses on her journey through life. She is Justine (Power), who along with her sister, Juliette (Rohm), are being brought up in a convent, though Justine is far closer in temperament and outlook to the nuns than Juliette. Their tranquil to the point of boring life is shattered by the news that their father is bankrupt and their mother dead, a double whammy which leads to both sisters being turfed out on the streets of Paris [albeit a Paris oddly equipped with palm trees] with 100 crowns to their name. Juliette says she knows where they can stay: when this turns out to be a notorious brothel, Justine bails.

This kicks off a series of misadventures which see her arrested as a thief; broken out of jail by notorious murderess Madame Dusbois (McCambridge); forced to become part of a gang; turned into a servant to the wife of a gay aristocrat; forced into becoming the sex slave for an order of depraved monks under Brother Antonin (Jack Palance, apparently drunk throughout filming); re-encounters Madame Dusbois and is turned into an 18th-century stripper; is accused of murder; and, finally, encounters her sister again, who has turned her life of depravity into a position as the mistress to a member of the upper classes. Juliette rescues her sister from a likely trip to the guillotine, thanks to her powerful connections. Justine realizes that all her efforts to be good and do the right thing, have not helped her in the slightest, so she might as well have given into her baser tendencies, and used them to her advantage and pleasure, as Juliette did.

klausmarquisIt certainly looks better than the typical Franco low-budgeter – the price-tag on this one was a million bucks, which is close to $7m in today’s money. However, that appears not to have come without its problems. He had originally cast Rosemary Dexter as Justine, but Hollywood’s Golden Rule – he who has the gold, makes the rules – kicked in, one of the producers insisting on Power (daughter of Tyrone Power) for the leading role. The director reluctantly agreed, with Dexter reduced to a small role, but it’s a choice Franco has repeatedly regretted, comparing Power’s performance unfavorably to that of a window dummy. Personally, I didn’t find her particularly grating: she’s playing a wide-eyed innocent, so her lack of acting experience perhaps works for her in the role. However, in her scenes with McCambridge, it’s definitely clear who is the seasoned actress, and you are left to wonder what might have happened, had Franco been given the same budget without any external interference in casting or production.

But much more irritating for me, is Klaus Kinski being entirely wasted. While, as mentioned above, it’s a great choice, I’d have far preferred to see him play de Sade in something like Quills, peeling away the psyche of one of history’s most notorious figures. Here, his presence is entirely pointless, and you’re left wondering why they bothered to get him at all, for what can only have been a couple of days’ work. It’s certainly not Franco’s worst – I’ve sat through Virgin Among the Living Dead, so can say this with absolute certainty. But there’s not a great deal to commend this to anyone, unless you’re specifically looking for a lukewarm adaptation of de Sade, lightly garnished with Kinski face-pulling.

Vampire in Venice (1988)

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Dir: Augusto Caminito
Star: Christopher Plummer, Klaus Kinski, Barbara De Rossi, Donald Pleasence
a.k.a. Nosferatu in Venice

vampireinvenice2 An unofficial sequel to Herzog’s Nosferatu… Well, that was the plan, anyway. The intent was rapidly derailed when Kinski showed up and proclaimed that he wouldn’t cut his hair, so the vampire here is not the bald creature from the original (and Murnau’s original), but sports a typically Kinskiesque main of shaggy, blond hair. [He does, however, have the same fangs as in Herzog’s film] That was only the start of a nightmare production, which chewed up and spat out any number of directors, while the money ran out when they had only filmed half the story. We’ll talk about that in a bit. Get some popcorn.

Vampire hunter Professor Paris Catalano (Plummer) is called to Venice at the behest of Helietta Canins (De Rossi), who wants his opinion on a tomb, tightly secured with iron bands, she has found in the family crypt. Could this be the actual resting place of the infamous Nosferatu (Kinski), who supposedly left Venice two centuries earlier? Turns out he did have a connection to the household, vampirising a distant ancestor of Helietta, whose portrait bears a spooky resemblance to her descendant. [Anyone who has seen more than two vampire movies will know immediately where this is going] Helietta organizes a seance, to try and contact Nosferatu’s spirit, but it acts more as a wake-up call, and he rises from his rural grave, though what he really wants is the black veil of death. Fortunately, the only thing that can kill him is the love, freely given, of a beautiful virgin. Any of those around? Hello, Helietta’s little sister, Maria…

Though set in the modern day, the film rarely feels like it, with a stiff, mannered approach to the characters which appears rooted more in the Hammer tradition of middle Europe in Victorian times. Venice provides a highly evocative backdrop and, overall, it looks very, very nice: credit to Tonino Nardi for the cinematography. Many scenes have a dreamlike – more accurately, nightmarish – quality that is not dissimilar to Herzog’s version, with people moving in what often seems like slow-motion. Nosferatu is particularly good at that, capturing perfectly the world-weary air of the undead: when you’ve lived for hundreds of years, you aren’t going to be in a rush to get anywhere. However, even its most ardent fans would have to admit that the story leaves a lot to be desired, and some scenes, such as Nosferatu flying, in very badly-done green screen, with his lady, may have strayed in from entirely different films [Superman would be a good guess for the one mentioned]. These do a good job of destroying the atmosphere, and the end result is a patchwork of the creepily effective and the cringe-worthy.

vampireinvenice1There’s good reason for this, because the film had as many as six different directors at various stages of proceedings. According to Luigi Cozzi, who was originally the special effects supervisor, the first was Maurizio Lucidi, who shot some scenes without Klaus, such as the Venice Carnival. Then Squittieri Pasquale wrote a new script, but didn’t actually direct anything. Third was Mario Caiano: he lasted two days, mostly spent arguing with Kinski. When Caiano left, producer Augusto Caminito took over, but was so slow he asked Cozzi to help out, doing second-unit work. Klaus also had “some creative ideas,” which Cozzi helped commit to celluloid. Kinski’s ideas made no sense, even with input from an experienced film-maker – but it kept the star happy, and willing to work with Caminito. This was likely in the best interests of both men, as part of the lure for Kinski to reprise his role, was that Caminito was willing to fund Klaus’s pet project, Paganini.

But eventually, the money for this one ran out, with only half the story filmed – in part, I suspect because Caminito had to pay all three directors who left the project their full fees. But he eventually cobbled together something that was semi-coherent, and it was premiered at the Venice Film Festival, mostly due to the producer’s clout. It certainly wasn’t as well-received as Herzog’s, and that’s fair enough, since Nosferatu had a far stronger consistency of tone, even if it was less imaginative and inventive. This throws some curves into the standard vampire mythology, such as the suggestion that they can be killed with mercury, while daylight and crosses are ineffective. However, these ideas are never developed, although who knows what might have happened, had the film been able to be made as originally intended.

The audio side is kinda weird too. It’s mostly a synthesizer-based soundtrack by Luigi Ceccarelli – but it also throws in chunks from the Vangelis album, Mask, as if Ceccarelli also had a fight with Kinski and left the production, leaving Caminito to fill in the gaps from his CD collection. Watching this with the English-language dialogue is equally odd, because Plummer and Pleasence are clearly recognizable as themselves, while Kinski is just as obviously dubbed by someone else. It doesn’t really impact his performance very much, because he hardly has many more lines than he did in the original – it’s all about the presence. And the staring. There’s lots of staring. Plummer provides good support in a role I can easily imagine Peter Cushing having played, but Pleasence is never given too much to do. He plays the family priest, Don Alvise, and one wonders, again, if perhaps his role would have been more pivotal had the film been completed.

In some ways, this is a Rorschach Blot film, where what you get out, is based on what you put in. Knowing about its troubled production, you’re left having to fill in the blanks yourself, and how much you enjoy this, may well depend on how good a job you do. Here’s the Japanese trailer.


Vampire in Venice aka Nosferatu a Venezia (1988… by Z-cinema

Death Smiles on a Murderer (1973)

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Dir: Aristide Massaccesi
Star: Ewa Aulin, Sergio Doria, Angela Bo, Klaus Kinski
a.k.a. Death Smiled at Murder

Director Massaccesi is better known under one of the forty-plus pseudonyms he used, Joe D’Amato, being one of the most infamous grindhouse directors of the seventies and eighties. He was a pioneer of the “mockbuster,” a similarly-titled movie with the same themes as a successful mainstream film, e.g the 11 Days, 11 Nights series inspired by 9 1/2 Weeks, or Ator the Invincible, which came out soon after Conan the Barbarian. But he’s probably best know for such titles such as Erotic Nights of the Living Dead and Porno Holocaust. Those are more or less exactly as they sound: a mix of sex and violence which could be both soft- and hard-core. Having seen some of these, his reputation as the “evil Ed Wood” seemed largely justified.

This, however, dates from early in his career – so early, in fact, he directed it under his own name! – and is largely competent, made with more care than later examples of his work which I’ve seen. Perhaps it was from before he adopted a more jaded and cynical approach, as voiced by a character in Emanuelle’s Revenge [note the mis-spelling of the first word!], who appears to echo D’Amato’s own frequently-expressed thoughts, “We’re not making artsy-farty crap for intellectual faggots. We’re out to make money!” Instead, there are certainly no shortage of “artsy-fartsy” elements, even if it also contains its fair share of nudity and sex. In terms of style, it’s somewhere between the giallo and Gothic genres, combining the more in-your-face and whodunnit aesthetics of the former, with the dreamlike mysteries of the latter.

It’s a period piece, set around 1909, and begins with Franz (Luciano Rossi) bemoaning the death of his sister, Greta (Aulin). The next thing we see is a coach accident outside the house of Walter and Eva von Ravensbrück (Doria + Bo); the driver is killed, but the passenger is Greta, and is knocked unconscious. She recuperates in their house, under the eye of the local physician, Dr.  Sturgess (Kinski). but a couple of problems soon arise. The maid, apparently knowing something, hands in her notice and leaves, but  on the way out takes both barrels of a shotgun to the face. Then, both Walter and Eva fall in love with the new house-guest. When Eva realizes her husband is winning the battle, she takes drastic action, luring Greta to the basement and walling her up there. Problem solved, right? Nope – as anyone familiar with classic horror will know, it’s never a sound solution. Eva soon starts seeing both the hale and hearty Greta, alternating with a decayed version, and when she tears the bricks down to make sure she is seeing things, discovers the body is no longer there.

deathsmiles3You’ll notice that Klaus’s character only receives a passing mention. That’s because, despite his co-star billing with Aulin, his role is largely incidental. He has a sideline, working to discover the secret of life in a basement laboratory with his mute assistant, and a medallion worn by Greta appears to have provided a breakthrough. One imagines he sensed something was up when he was able to stab her in the eyeball with a pin, and not even receive a blink; that, along with the odd scar on the side of her neck where the IV tube of elixir went in. Anyway, he successfully revives his own test subject, only to be offed, along with his assistant, by (presumably) the same person who killed the maid. Exit Mr. Kinski, before the half-way point has been reached, though he’d return for another Massaccesi movie later in the year, Heroes in Hell.

To this point, the film hasn’t so much been playing the cards close to its chest, as leaving the table entirely, and looking at them from a locked room in the next building. Even by the end, it’s far from certain that all the questions raised have even potentially been answered, and indeed, it seems more are raised. Walter’s father shows up, and appears to have had quite the relationship with Greta himself: yet he didn’t make any connection between her disappearance and the sudden arrival of a beautiful blonde at his son’s house? The film also treats us to an entirely incomprehensible moment, where a bunch of flowers thrown by Greta turn into a cat, which then scratches someone’s face off, over a period of what seems like several minutes. [Look, it’s a freakin’ cat: you outweigh it by a factor of about twenty, and gravity is on your side] “None of this makes any sense,” says an investigating policeman at one point, and by the time the final credit roll, you’ll almost certainly be agreeing wholeheartedly.

However, for all the questionable plot elements, I can’t deny that Massaccesi does a good job of generating a dreamlike atmosphere, where even the more dubious moments have a certain plausibility. The first return of Greta from the tomb is particularly well-done, and delivers a fine wallop [I didn’t see it coming, that’s for sure], while there are also a couple of other sequences that are well-put together and directed with finesse. Aulin is undeniably lovely to look at, and it’s entirely credible why both husband and wife would fall for her. This isn’t one to watch if you’re in a demanding mood; I’d probably recommend laying off the caffeine instead, and watching it just before bedtime, when your critical faculties are dulled toward sleep. Seen through that prism, it’s a lusciously-shot exercise with the air of a lesser story from Edgar Allen Poe, and provides a more than pleasant way to pass 90 minutes.

Cobra Verde (1987)

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Dir: Werner Herzog
Star: Klaus Kinski, Jose Lewgoy, King Ampaw, Salvatore Basile

In most of the other films, the character Kinski plays is out there: clearly orbiting a different star in terms of sanity. That’s perhaps less the case here, once the film hits its stride, at least. He plays the titular bandit, real name Francisco Manoel da Silva. He’s hired as a slave overseer on a Brazillian sugar-cane plantation, but incurs the wrath of the owner after impregnating three (!) of his daughters. To get rid of the outlaw, the owner ships Mr. Verde off to Dahomey to acquire more slaves, in the belief that it’s a suicide mission. Certainly, the ruined fort which he takes over on arrival does not bode well, or the story told by the sole survivor of the previous garrison.

However, once Francisco settles in there, it turns out he’s far from the most differently-sane person – not least the king, who is definitely a couple of sandwiches short of a picnic, taking advice from his invisible friend. da Silva finds success there, delivering the slaves, but after discovering the king’s insanity first-hand, teams up with the son who wants to take over from his father, even though he has not exactly fallen far from the tree. The Cobra recruits an army of women warriors and helps with the coup, only to find his new life shattered when Brazil abolishes slavery. Proceedings end, in typical Herzog/Kinski fashion, with a broken hero trying to drag a boat back into the water, and rolling around in the surf, howling hysterically.

To misquote a proverb, in the land of the bat-shit crazy, Klaus Kinski is king, and that’s the case here. His character fits the Dahomey society like a glove, whether it’s helping his slaves in their work – they adopt a remarkably casual approach to the shrieking madman in their midst – or training a battalion of topless female soldiers in the finer points of spear-chucking. It has to be said, there are probably more bouncing breasts in this than the entire cinematic output of Fred Olen Ray – or, more appropriately, of National Geographic news-reels.

But, in terms of performances, I liked this one better than some of his more renowned work: I’d probably put it above Nosferatu, for instance (which, as noted above, is an undeniable chore), almost entirely on the strength of Kinski’s facial expressions. These communicate as much in a single look, as many less talented actors struggle to put over with an entire Tarantino of verbiage, and it’s just captivating: there have been occasional “looks” in the preceding films, but here, they’re in full effect. and you could probably put together a great montage of clips from this alone, of Kinski staring at the insanity unfolding around him.

In wonderfully Herzog-esque style, the mad King Bossa Ahadee of Dahomey, is played by a real African monarch, the wonderfully-named His Honor the Omanhene Nana Agyefi Kwame II of Nsein – it’s a village in Ghana, and based on the performance here, is entirely aptly named. He’s so convincingly out of his gourd, that it’s a shame it appears to have been his only screen credit, though I suppose the market for lunatic monarchs of colour is probably a somewhat limited one. Still, if you manage to make Klaus Kinski look sane and normal with your acting debut, you’re clearly doing something right in terms of your performance.

This would be Kinski’s last collaboration with Herzog – he’d die four years after its release, having made only two films, both nearly unwatchable (Nosferatu in Venice and Paganini). It seems to have gone about as well as the preceding four, going by Klaus’s comments.

I wish Herzog would catch the plague, more than ever. He was even more helpless, more stupid and at the same time more persistent against me, than he was in the last four films, I shot with him. Although he urgently needed my help, and pretended, he would kiss my ass for that, he did the opposite behind my back. The people from Ghana are friendly and peaceful. Herzog knew, how to use them for his purpose. I knew his criminal and enslaving methods since Peru, where he always went for the most helpless and where I eventually called him Adolf Hitler. In Ghana he excelled himself.

Yep, Kinski just Godwin’s Law’d himself.

Fitzcarraldo (1982)

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Dir: Werner Herzog
Star: Klaus Kinski, Paul Hittscher, Huerequeque Enrique Bohórquez, Claudia Cardinale

As an appetizer, we watched Les Blank’s documentary, Burden of Dreams, which chronicles the early stages of filming, from the initial attempts with Jason Robards as Fitzcarraldo and Mick Jagger (!) as his sidekick, through the initial camp, burned to the ground by disgruntled locals, and on through the reshoot after Robards came down with amoebic dysentery and Jagger went off to tour. Not that this exactly went swimmingly, as the shoot continued to present problems: the bulldozer used to clear the way needed parts flown in from Miami, there were delays due to attacks from another tribe up-river, and this is probably one of the few films with whores officially on the payroll [Charlie Sheen movies don’t count].

What that film brings out are perhaps the similarities between Herzog the director and Fitzcarraldo the subject, both consumed with an idea that many would conceive as ludicrous, and determined to plough on with it, whatever the cost. You can visibly see Herzog disintegrate over the course of filming, though it’s disappointing that the documentary stops before the director succeeds in pulling off the ‘money shot’ of seeing a 300-ton boat pulled up a forty-degree hill. It’s almost as if Blank is more interested in failure than success, though it’s still worth seeing, purely for Herzog going off on a rant about the jungle:

Kinski always says it’s full of erotic elements. I don’t see it so much erotic. I see it more full of obscenity. Nature here is vile and base. I wouldn’t see anything erotical here. I would see fornication and asphyxiation and choking and fighting for survival and growing and just rotting away… The trees here are in misery, and the birds are in misery. I don’t think they – they sing. They just screech in pain… It’s like a curse weighing on an entire landscape. And whoever… goes too deep into this has his share of this curse. So we are cursed with what we are doing here… We have to become humble in front of this overwhelming misery.

Crack open those Joy Division LPs, folks. What the documentary does soft-pedal, is the stormy relationship between Kinski and Herzog. While perhaps not as bad as during Aguirre, Herzog subsequently said that the natives who were part of the cast, offered at one point to kill Kinski, so disturbed were they by his anger. Werner, however, had learned that letting Klaus’s fury burn itself out was more productive than trying to engage his star. Some of this tactic can been in the footage below, from My Best Fiend, which shows what happens when Kinski goes off. All Blank shows, is Kinski growling about the ‘fucking stinking’ camp, so one wonders why Blank chose to relegate to an out-take, this outburst…

That said, Kinski probably smiles more here than he did in almost any other of the 200+ movies in which he appeared, which is an unnerving sight. He plays opera lover and former railway engineer Brian Sweeney Fitzgerald, known locally as Fitzcarraldo, who wants to bring Enrico Caruso to the jungle. To raise money, he spots an opening in the rubber business: a tract of land left unexploited because of the rapids which prevent a boat from going upstream far enough to reachi it. Fitzcarraldo sees that it might be possible to take a nearby river to a point where only a relatively short stretch of hilly country separates it from the river he wants to reach. Haul your boat over that hill, and you can then use it to harvest its rubber.

As noted, it hard to say what’s madder: Fitzcarraldo’s plan, or Herzog’s plan to re-enact it without miniatures, CGI or blue-screen, instead opting to drag a full-scale boat over a 100% actual hill [while inspired by a true story, the real boat was both one-tenth the size, and dismantled into pieces]. On the way, he loses most of his crew, who are unnerved by the local tribesmen, but gets another crew in the shape of said tribesmen, after countering the tribal drumming with his gramophone and opera records. [The resulting audio mash-up is like Caruso jamming with Adan & the Ants.] Fortunately, they have a myth about a white god and his ship, and Fitzcarraldo convinces them that dragging his boat over the hill is part of that. Unfortunately, it’s only part of that…

You often hear of life imitating art, but it’s these parallels between the movie and the making of the movie that give this such resonance: rarely have the two been so close. Both Fitzcarraldo (as played by Kinski) and Herzog (as portrayed by Herzog) are dreamers, obsessed with the grandest of meaningless gestures. They are both prepared to go to any lengths, and make any sacrifice, to achieve their goal, even when simpler means of achieving the same ends would suffice. You can only admire the tenacity, at the same time as you shake your head at the folly – then there’s a scene, where Fitzcarraldo and crew are up a tree, looking at the scope of what they have to do, and you appreciate exactly why Herzog went the extra 1,500 miles or so.

Outside of Kinski, there aren’t much in the way of performances – nobody is given much to do, except trail around the jungle in Fitzcarraldo’s wake. These aren’t so much supporting characters as superfluous ones, but it doesn’t matter much. This is the kind of film that should be in the dictionary beside the word “auteur,” because it’s clear that this was made by a man driven by a vision, rather than, as we so often see these days, the lure of a paycheck.

Woyzeck (1979)

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Dir: Werner Herzog
Star: Klaus Kinski, Eva Mattes, Wolfgang Reichmann, Willy Semmelrogge

Filming on this started a mere five days after the completion of principal photography on Nosferatu, with most of the same crew, but the stylistic approach – there are a lot of long scenes, shot in a single take – allowed it to be finished in 18 days. Herzog had originally planned to use Bruno S, the star of Herzog’s earlier The Enigma of Kaspar Hauser, in the title role, but changed his mind and switched to Kinski. It’s based on a stage play by Georg Buchner, who left the work incomplete at his death – its resulting open-ended state has led to a number of playwrights and film-makers taking it on.

The central character is a soldier, who is already skating on mentally thin ice as we first see him, shaving his superior officer (Reichmann) with a cut-throat razor, and musing on the nature of life – not unlike Alfred Doolittle in My Fair Lady, Woyzeck claims morality is a luxury, not available to the poor like him. To make ends meet, so he can live with his common-law wife, Marie, (Mattes) and their young child, he also volunteers as human guinea-pig in the dubious experiments of a local doctor (Semmelrogge). These include living on nothing but peas for months at an end, a diet which isn’t exactly helping Woyzeck’s stability, who is hearing voices from the ground. Never a good sign…

The tipping-point, however, is the realization that Marie may be having an affair with another soldier, higher in rank and – let’s be honest – physical appeal, charm and sanity, while he’s at it. This sends Woyzeck right over the edge, and he stabs her to death while they’re out on a walk. He takes refuge in a local inn, though his blood-stained appearance gives him away. The film ends with the discovery of Marie’s body, and a final caption, stating that it’s been some time since they’ve had such a good murder. I suppose this is some kind of spoiler, but it’s in such little doubt that this is where the movie is heading, that it barely counts.

There are some things that are more fun to experience directly, than watch someone else do. Play video games is one; take drugs another (as The Trip shows – one of only a few movies I’ve ever walked out on). Go insane is probably in the same category, going by this, which consists of not much more than 80 minutes of Kinski pulling faces and burbling absurdist nonsense – the rest of the cast shares more in the latter than the former – witness the story Marie tells to the local children, for example. But how much of this is Herzog, and how much Buchner, remains uncertain. The origins on the stage are certainly extremely obvious, with Herzog apparently yelling “Action!”, then wandering off for a coffee – or, indeed, going by the length of some takes, dinner and a show.

Occasionally, this does work magnificently: the final killing is up there with Psycho, in terms of being horrific without showing anything to speak of. Its impact is mostly due to the single shot, languidly approaching three minutes, of Woyzeck’s face as this tortured soul realizes that he has just killed the only person apparently capable of loving him to any degree. But the overall results are well on the mediocre side: it’s never made clear what exactly Herzog is trying to say. Is Woyzeck the helpless victim of a callous and class-ridden society? [The play generally appears to lend itself to a fairly Marxist reading] Or is this simply a glimpse into the tormented mind of someone who is only marginally functioning, in a 19th-century version of ‘care in the community’? There’s just not enough of a compelling narrative to make this more than occasionally interesting.

woyzeck