Word: klause
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...problems plagued Herzog's efforts. Once he and his crew were forced to flee camp for their lives; later original actors Jason Robards and Mick Jagger pulled out, the former because of ill health, the latter for other commitments. Herzog had to start from scratch with a new lead, Klaus Kinski, while writing out Jagger's obviously irreplaceable part...
Where does that leave Cannes the movie festival? Still exciting after all these years. Fitzcarraldo, which stars Klaus Kinski as an Irish rubber baron who leaves his mistress, played by Claudia Cardinale, is a mystical trek through the Peruvian jungle that took four calamitous years out of Director Herzog's life and won him the best director prize. The official competition also boasted new films from Michelangelo Antonioni, Jerzy Sko-limowski and Jean-Luc Godard. Antonioni's Identification of a Woman is hypnotic and erotic, and it earned him the festival's special 35th-anniversary citation...
Hendrik is not inherently evil. Indeed, in Klaus Maria Brandauer's person, he presents a rather open and innocent face to the world, and one comes to see that he is the victim not so much of calculation as of a failure to calculate. He appeals before he appalls. He really cannot see, until the end of the story, the difference between the Nazis and everyone else with whom he has leagued himself to get ahead, cannot imagine the dire consequences of ambition unmediated by, among other factors, simple common sense...
...under the delusion that he is a man of ideas, a Conrad or Dostoyevsky of the silver screen, and will go to any convoluted lengths to get a strained or totally phony argument going. In this case, the great mogul (played with a flashy show of menacing teeth by Klaus Kinski) wishes to bump off the revolutionary (Armand Assante) and hires the rebel leader's old Harvard roommate to do the job. This character (Ray Sharkey) pretends to go along with the scheme because he is a victim both of existential ennui and of a sudden obsessional letch...
...after a punch line for laughs that may never come. The pirouetting narrative (from Francis Veber's script for the French film A Pain in the A-) is occasionally incredible. Wasted in flaccid supporting roles are the comic gifts of Paula Prentiss and the decadent-skeleton face of Klaus Kinski. Some of the jokes and targets have lost their currency ("Prema ture ejaculation means always having to say you're sorry"? Hippies? Slow-witted chicanos?). But if Wilder's antique vehicle is no more than serviceable, it is ever at the service of two meticulous farceurs...