(3 of 3)
Fitzcarraldo is unusual for a Herzog film in providing a gallery of delightful supporting performances. Claudia Cardinale, as Fitz's mistress Molly, radiates sensuality like a healthy year-round suntan. Jose Lewgoy, who plays an unscrupulous rubber baron, takes immense and innocent pleasure in his character's venality. Miguel Angel Fuentes, the boat's mechanic, is a huge ivory totem, twice as large as Arnold Schwarzenegger and with three times the dark charm. Grande Othelo, who starred 40 years ago in Orson Welles' unfinished film It's All True, is the wrinkled old retainer of one of Fitz's broken dreams. And steering the vessel through precarious waters is Klaus Kinski, once the psychotic stalker of Herzog's Aguirre, Woyzeck and Nosferatu, now a Kodachrome picture of the imperialist as jolly fantast. It is one of the many odd pleasures of Fitzcarraldo to watch Kinski's 80 or so teeth, which are usually forged into a vampire's carnivorous sneer, here forged into the semblance of a Teddy Roosevelt grin.
"Conquistador of the useless," a rival calls Fitzcarraldo. Fitz says: "I am the spectacle in the forest." This is Herzog talking, of course, not Kinski or Fitzcarraldo. Or rather, Herzog is all his characters, all his actors. He is the dreamer, the savage, the engulfing river. This time, Herzog steered his craft through rapids and longueurs, outside dangers and his own follies. A madman and a survivor: a moviemaking Ahab who lived to tell his fabulous tale. —By Richard Corliss