Fitzcarraldo

After original star Jason Robards contracted dysentery, Klaus Kinski was drafted in to play Irishman Brian Sweeney Fitzgerald, or ‘Fitzcarraldo’, a rubber merchant living in the Amazon Basin in the early part of the twentieth century. A cultured man, Fitzcarraldo dreams of constructing an opera house and so devises a plan to raise capital by leasing a seemingly inaccessible parcel of land and selling the rubber found there. To bring this plan to fruition, his intention is to sail to a nearby point and then physically move the massive boat required to the river that flows by his land.

While notable occurrences during production included moving the boat for real, and the local tribe’s apparently genuine offer to kill Kinski as a favour to Herzog (see the astonishing making-of documentary Burden Of Dreams), the resulting film is a towering achievement.