Fitzcarraldo (1982)

Best known as the movie where they drag a boat over a South American hill, Fitzcarraldo is another of obsessive director Warner Herzog's films about obsession. Klaus Kinski plays "Fitzcarraldo" Brian Sweeney Fitzgerald, loosely based on real Peruvian rubber baron Carlos Fitzcarrald. The Fitzcarraldo of the movie is a man obsessed with opera, and who has the very impractical dream of building an opera house in the Peruvian jungle and bringing world renown tenor Enrico Caruso there to play at its opening. A business man who has already had more then his fare share of failures, Fitzcarldo leverages money from his wife's (Claudia Cardinale) business, which seems to be a bordello operating under the guise of a school for domestic staff, to purchase a used boat and stake a claim to some remote land covered in rubber trees. With a misfit crew he heads off up the river, however its the wrong branch of the river, but this dose not concern Fitzcarlado, who seems pretty confident they should be able to drag the boat over a hill when they get to the proper isthmus. Needless to say, this proves a pretty complicated challenge.

This was surprisingly a much lighter film then I had expected it to be. Kinski's character is manic, but ingratiatingly sow, a charming, slightly unhinged dreamer, I particularly liked how oddly strong his and Cardinale's marriage is portrayed to be. This film appropriately conveys the outsized dreams of the Peruvian rubber boom of the late 19th and early 20th century, and the kinds of eccentricity sudden immense wealth can engender. This film was actually shot in English but I didn't know that when I started the film so I watched it with the German audio track and English subtitles on, no need for you to make the same mistake. This is pretty great, pretty odd movie. ****