The Great Movies III

Mephisto offers him the beautiful Duchess of Parma; he prefers the sweet and innocent Gretchen, and demands the gift of youth so that he can woo her. That way tragedy lies. Mephisto is crafty in his techniques; at first he offers Faust a twenty-four-hour trial of satanic powers, no strings attached, but soon Faust is ready to sign anything to win poor Gretchen. So much for the plague victims.

Silent films like this deal more in broad concepts than in the subtleties of personality. Like Greek myth and comic books, they present characters clearly defined by their strengths and weaknesses. There's no small talk. Ekman creates an elderly Faust in anguish over his inability to cure plague victims and too proud to admit defeat. The young Faust is led astray by the stirrings in his loins, and the function of Gretchen, I am afraid, is to be the innocent victim of his lust; she wanders through a blizzard with her innocent infant and burns at the stake, all because of her love for the unworthy Faust.

It's worth mentioning that William Dieterle, who plays Gretchen's brother, Valentin, fled Hitler, came to Hollywood, and had a long career as a director, distinguished by 7be Devil and Daniel Webster (194i), itself a version of the Faust legend.

Murnau died before he was able to express himself fully in the sound era, where there is no telling what he might have accomplished; soon after he moved to America, his Sunrise (1927) shared the first Academy Award for best picture. In death, he is surrounded by legend, not least in E. Elias Merhige's strange film Shadow of the Vampire (zooo), where John Malkovich plays the director as a man whose star, Max Schreck (Willem Dafoe), is in fact a vampire. Murnau promises Schreck that he can eat the leading lady as his payment, but the vampire grows hungry and devours the cinematographer, and in desperation, Murnau muses, "I do not think we need the writer." The movie is not, by the way, a comedy, but feeds on the real horror that Murnau created. He was an original, and no one else ever made films that looked like his. They are strange and haunted; you reflect that if such satanic dealings were possible, they would probably look very much like this.

V' erner Herzog's Fitzcarraldo is one of the great visions of the cinema, and one of the great follies. One would not have been possible without the other. This is a movie about an opera-loving madman who is determined to drag a boat overland from one river system to another. In making the film, Herzog was determined to actually do that, which is more than can be said for Brian Sweeney Fitzgerald, the Irishman whose story inspired him.

Fitzcarraldo (1982) is one of those brave and epic films, like Apocalypse Now or 2001, where we are always aware both of the film, and of the making of the film. Herzog could have used special effects for his scenes of the 360-ton boat being hauled up a muddy forty-degree slope in the jungle, but he believed we could tell the difference: "This is not a plastic boat." Watching the film, watching Fitzcarraldo (Klaus Kinski) raving in the jungle in his white suit and floppy panama hat, watching Indians operating a block-and-tackle system to drag the boat out of the muck, we're struck by the fact that this is actually happening, that this huge boat is inching its way onto land-as Fitzcarraldo (who got his name because the locals could not pronounce "Fitzgerald") serenades the jungle with his scratchy old Caruso recordings.

The story of the making of Fitzcarraldo is told in Burden of Dreams (1982), a documentary by Les Blank and Maureen Gosling, who spent time in the jungle with Herzog, his mutinous crew, and his eccentric star. After you see the Herzog film and Burden, it's clear that everyone associated with the film was marked, or scarred, by the experience; there is an impassioned speech in Burden where Herzog denounces the jungle as "vile and base," and says, "It's a land which God, if he exists, has created in anger."

Fitzcarraldo opens on the note of madness, which it will sustain. Out of the dark void of the Amazon comes a boat, its motor dead, the shockhaired Kinski furiously rowing at the prow, while his mistress (Claudia Cardinale) watches anxiously behind him. They are late for the opera. He has made some money with an ice-making machine, she is a madam whose bordello services wealthy rubber traders, and as they talk their way into an opera house, Fitzcarraldo knows his mission in life: he will become rich, build an opera house in the jungle, and hire Caruso to sing in it.