Fitzcarraldo
Some Irishman called Fitzgerald, a failed businessman, goes big or goes home. The crazy part is that it works, he goes big.
After failing to get his trans-Andine railway off the river, and being a destitute aristocrat, he gets a crazier idea to develop a remote Amazon area, without river access. The money comes from his madame fuckbuddy, pooled into one final try to make it big.
The rubber area he bought is upstream from some rapids, so he just goes from another adjacent river, picks up the rails from the failed railway project and just pulls the riverboat up a hill, to get back to the correct location. Easy on paper…
When the rubber meets the road, so to speak, Murphy’s Law strikes. His crew desert just before the uplift location, but a local tribe, famed for its shrunken heads, helps him due to some local myth about a Mighty Whitey. Of course, the legend mentions the mythical boat must be sacrificed to appease the rapids god.
It’s incredible, the boat does get to the top of the hill and back again. And it still floats afterwards! He gets to the objective, but the natives get everyone drunk and let the boat bump around the rapids, making them the first people to cross them in a riverboat.
From what I can tell, this was not the intended outcome, but he still crossed a rapids, so he just sells the boat back to the rival and splurges on the opera he wanted, about the very same boat. The End.
The pacing is kinda crazy on this, the important part is dragging a freaking riverboat up and down a hill. No freaking CGI either, I only saw some miniature on the rapids scene. Werner Herzog is just insanity, but still less that getting shot while giving an interview and shrugging it off like it’s nothing.
In terms of casting, Claudia Cardinali is a great fit, but having Mick Jagger cannot be surpassed. He dropped out (when Mick Jagger thinks your idea is too crazy, it’s time to evaluate your choices), so he was removed from the script, instead of replacing him with someone less incredible. Klaus Kinski chews the scenery HARD, and the rest of his pals are dubbed by Germans doing accents, so that’s a write off. Claudia freaking Cardinali is also dubbed, what a crock of shit. The dubbing prevents this from being watchable by modern audiences. Something like A Fistful of Dollars is also bad, but passable. This is just crap.
This is my place for ramblings about sequences of images that exploit the human visual limitation know as persistence of vision.