Review: For a Few Dollars More (dir. by Sergio Leone)

Posted on August 18, 2026 by Arleigh

“When two hunters go after the same prey, they usually end up shooting each other in the back. And we don’t want to shoot each other in the back.” — Col. Douglas Mortimer

For a Few Dollars More is the moment Sergio Leone’s western style starts to feel fully formed: larger, stranger, more emotionally bruised, and far more confident in its ability to turn silence into suspense. Released in 1965, it serves as the second leg of Leone’s “Dollar’s Trilogy,” following A Fistful of Dollars and preceding The Good, the Bad and the Ugly. It shares the earlier film’s basic ingredients—dusty towns, morally compromised gunmen, crooked institutions, and Ennio Morricone’s unforgettable music—but it is not simply a bigger repeat. Leone takes the stripped-down revenge-and-gold framework of the first movie and gives it a darker emotional center. This is a western about obsession, damaged masculinity, and a world in which violence does not restore order so much as expose how little order existed in the first place.

Clint Eastwood returns as the Man with No Name, although he is called Manco here, and he is still the same lean, poncho-wearing opportunist viewers met in A Fistful of Dollars. He moves through the film with that familiar mixture of cocky calm and barely concealed menace. Manco is a bounty hunter, collecting rewards for dead criminals with an efficiency that makes his work feel almost casual. There is comedy in his early scenes, especially in the way he manages an absurdly large number of wanted men, but the humor has a sharp edge. Manco is not a conventional hero. He is charming because he is capable, because he has style, and because Eastwood knows exactly how little effort the role needs. A squint, a pause, or a hand resting near a gun does more than most full pages of dialogue.

The major difference is that this time Eastwood is not alone at the center of the story. Lee Van Cleef enters as Colonel Douglas Mortimer, another bounty hunter, and his presence gives the film its real dramatic charge. Mortimer is older, more formal, and more openly haunted than Manco. Where Manco seems motivated largely by money and survival, Mortimer carries himself like a man pursuing something much more personal. Their relationship begins as a rivalry, with both men circling the same targets and testing one another’s abilities. Leone gets a lot of mileage out of the contrast: Eastwood is loose and youthful, Van Cleef is rigid and calculating; one looks like he has wandered in from the wilderness, while the other has the manner of a retired officer who never truly left the battlefield.

Their eventual partnership is what makes For a Few Dollars More so satisfying. It is a buddy movie in the least sentimental sense possible. Neither man becomes especially warm or expressive, and their bond is built less on trust than on mutual respect for professional competence. They know the other is dangerous. They also know that the other may be necessary. Leone stages their alliance with a kind of deadpan amusement, particularly when Manco and Mortimer try to outdo each other with increasingly elaborate shooting demonstrations. Those sequences are entertaining because they are absurdly masculine, but the film never lets the spectacle become completely weightless. In this world, skill with a gun is not a sport; it is a qualification for survival.

The villain, Gian Maria Volonté’s El Indio, pushes the film decisively into darker territory than A Fistful of Dollars. Volonté had already played a memorable antagonist in Leone’s previous film, but El Indio is far more unsettling than Ramón Rojo. He is not merely greedy or power-hungry. He is psychologically ruined, driven by trauma and by a sadistic need to revisit it. His recurring pocket-watch motif, paired with Morricone’s chiming melody, becomes one of the film’s great inventions. The tune begins almost innocently, but Leone gradually turns it into a signal of dread. Every time El Indio opens the watch, it feels as though time itself has stopped and everyone nearby has been sentenced to wait for death.

The backstory tied to El Indio is where the movie reveals just how much more disturbing its narrative ambitions are. Leone and his screenwriters introduce subjects that are much uglier than the genre’s usual tales of outlaws and frontier justice: rape, suicide, and the lingering horror of sexual violence. The film does not handle these ideas with contemporary sensitivity, and it is not interested in exploring their victims with the depth they deserve. Still, their presence changes the atmosphere. El Indio’s trauma is not abstract; it is tied to a violent violation and the suicide that follows it. That history does not humanize him in any easy way, nor does it excuse him. Instead, it explains the repetitive, self-destructive pattern of his cruelty. He is obsessed with an event he cannot undo, and he converts that obsession into violence against everyone around him.

That theme of obsession runs through nearly every important character. Mortimer’s pursuit of El Indio turns out to be rooted in a personal wound that has shaped his entire life. His bounty-hunting career, disciplined exterior, and almost mechanical precision are revealed as part of a long-delayed act of vengeance. Manco, meanwhile, is obsessed in a different and less tragic way: with winning, with money, and with proving that he cannot be manipulated. Even the gang’s massive bank robbery has an obsessive quality. It is overcomplicated, theatrical, and clearly more about El Indio demonstrating power over his men than about securing wealth. Leone’s characters do not simply want things. They become imprisoned by them.

The plot itself is fairly direct, though Leone fills it with enough betrayal and shifting alliances to keep it lively. El Indio and his gang target the bank in El Paso, using a jailbreak as part of a larger scheme. Manco and Mortimer separately infiltrate the group, both pursuing the reward on El Indio’s head while working toward their own goals. From there, the film becomes a tense contest of patience. Leone is never in a rush to deliver a payoff. He lets scenes breathe, often lingering on faces, boots, hands, doorways, and empty spaces. In another director’s hands, this could feel slow. Here, it feels like the movie is daring the audience to notice every tiny movement before the gunfire begins.

That visual patience is one of Leone’s greatest strengths. For a Few Dollars More is full of faces that feel weathered by the landscape around them. The film’s close-ups are almost confrontational, catching sweat, stubble, suspicious glances, and flashes of fear. Leone makes the human face as important as the wide-open Spanish locations standing in for the American West. He also understands that scale works best through contrast. A showdown can begin with an extreme close-up of a man’s eyes, then pull back to reveal two tiny figures facing each other in a vast, empty space. The result is both operatic and intimate.

Morricone’s score deserves equal credit for making the movie feel larger than life. The music is less a background element than another character in the story. Whistles, bells, guitar, percussion, and that eerie watch melody give the film a sound unlike the traditional Hollywood western. It is playful in some moments and nightmarish in others. Most importantly, it makes the climactic duel feel like the culmination of everything the film has been building toward. The final confrontation is not just about who draws first. It is about memory, guilt, revenge, and whether a person can ever truly escape the worst moment of their life.

If A Fistful of Dollars was Leone proving that he could reinvent the western with attitude, For a Few Dollars More is him demonstrating that the formula could carry genuine darkness. It is still stylish, funny, and gleefully exaggerated. It still has impossible gunplay, swaggering antiheroes, and scenes designed purely to make the audience grin. But beneath all that is a colder film. Its violence is tied to trauma. Its men are defined by grudges they cannot release. Its most memorable villain is terrifying not because he is invincible, but because he is already spiritually broken.

Eastwood remains iconic, but Van Cleef is arguably the film’s emotional anchor. His performance gives the story weight without ever becoming melodramatic. Volonté, meanwhile, creates one of the great spaghetti-western villains: volatile, wounded, cruel, and unforgettable whenever that pocket watch begins to play. Leone would go even bigger and more ambitious with The Good, the Bad and the Ugly, but For a Few Dollars More may be the trilogy’s most focused character piece. It takes the sparse coolness of its predecessor and adds scars, grief, and a genuinely haunted sense of purpose.

Review: Aguirre, The Wrath of God (dir. by Werner Herzog)

Posted on May 17, 2026 by Arleigh

“For here on this river, God never finished his creation.” — Balthasar

Werner Herzog’s Aguirre, the Wrath of God opens with one of the most hypnotic sequences in cinema: a column of Spanish conquistadors and indigenous slaves snaking down a fog-shrouded Andean pass, cannon winched separately. From that first frame, you sense you’re watching not a historical adventure but a fever dream. The film is loosely based on the real-life Lope de Aguirre, a Basque mutineer who searched for El Dorado in the 1560s. But as Herzog later confirmed, historical accuracy was never the point. Aguirre is fiction—a myth sculpted from jungle heat, river currents, and one actor’s maniacal commitment. Remarkably, the production itself became a hellish mirror of the narrative: shot deep in the Peruvian rainforest under conditions so brutal that the line between making a movie and surviving an ordeal vanished.

The plot is simple. In 1560, a Spanish expedition descends into the Amazon basin, searching for the golden city of Manoa. When rapids prove too treacherous, a smaller party is sent ahead under the noble but hapless Don Pedro de Ursúa (Ruy Guerra). Among them is Aguirre (Klaus Kinski), a wiry, half-mad soldier who immediately undermines authority. After Ursúa is murdered, Aguirre seizes control, declaring himself “the Wrath of God” and proclaiming a new monarchy. What follows is not a rousing conquest but a slow hallucinatory unraveling: rafts stuck on looping rivers, starvation, arrows from invisible natives, and the collapse of every civilizing impulse. This is one man’s battle against nature and his personal crisis of faith—a crisis the production team would come to know intimately.

Herzog’s storytelling prioritizes mood over plot. The narrative drifts through long takes of jungle canopy, close-ups of Kinski’s hollow eyes, and Popol Vuh’s otherworldly score. But the film’s raw authenticity comes from its production: a near-literal trek through jungle hell. Herzog took a small cast and crew into the Peruvian rainforest with no insurance, no backup equipment, and no evacuation strategy. The Urubamba River was unpredictable, with hidden rocks and stretches local guides refused to navigate. Rafts capsized. Food spoiled. Actors began unraveling for real. When a soldier in the film announces, “We are walking in circles,” it is both scripted and a genuine observation from an extra who’d passed the same fallen tree three days running. Herzog left that take in. The boundary between fictional madness and documentary collapse dissolved completely.

And then there was Klaus Kinski. If the jungle was one monster, Kinski was another. The conflict between Herzog and his star is the stuff of legend. Kinski arrived volatile, prone to screaming fits, threatening to abandon the production. At one point, a native chief offered to kill Kinski for free. Herzog declined—he still needed the actor alive. On another occasion, Herzog reportedly held Kinski at gunpoint during an attempted walkout. Kinski stayed. That friction bleeds into every frame. Kinski’s rage and paranoid stillness aren’t simulated; they’re the genuine product of a man frayed by heat, isolation, and his own demons. That is not method acting in a safe studio. It’s a man on the edge, pointed at a director who refused to flinch.

What lifts Aguirre into high art is its philosophical dread, earned through real suffering. And at its heart is Aguirre himself, a character who feels less like a historical figure and more like a literary archetype. As played by the manic Kinski, Aguirre is a remarkable fusion: the tragic Miltonian rebel and the obsessive Melvillean monomaniac. Like Satan in Paradise Lost, Aguirre defies divine and imperial order, preferring to reign in hell than serve in heaven. His self-coronation and final soliloquy echo Milton’s antihero—magnificent in defiance, hollowed by pride. But Herzog drains the grandeur, leaving only the fall without the poetry. Simultaneously, Aguirre is pure Ahab from Moby-Dick: another obsessive dragging a reluctant crew into the void on a suicidal quest. El Dorado is his white whale, an obsession that obliterates loyalty, love, and sanity. Both are swallowed by their obsession—Ahab by the sea, Aguirre by the jungle. But where Melville gives Ahab a thunderous final confrontation, Herzog gives Aguirre a whimper: a circle of monkeys, a drifting raft, and a whispered promise of a dynasty that will never come. Kinski holds both archetypes in suspension—Satan’s pride and Ahab’s fixation—and grinds them into something unrecognizable, belonging only to Herzog’s fever dream.

In the film’s most famous scene, Aguirre stands alone on a raft littered with corpses, small monkeys crawling over his armor, and whispers, “I will be the Wrath of God. Who else is with me?” No one. The jungle has swallowed everyone. Herzog frames this as the logical end of both the Miltonian and Melvillean arcs: absolute power in absolute isolation. The scene was shot in one take—not for artistry but because the raft was about to be swept away. The monkeys were real, biting the crew and defecating on Kinski’s armor. He didn’t break character. He couldn’t afford to. That’s the difference between a film that describes madness and one that embodies it.

Visually, Aguirre is a masterclass in low-budget grandeur. Cinematographer Thomas Mauch’s handheld camera glides through the jungle like a ghost. The opening descent feels supernatural. Rivers fill the frame until you lose direction. A galleon stuck in high branches—a leftover from a previous flood—becomes the film’s central metaphor: even empire is helpless against nature’s chaos. That chaos was logistical as well as thematic.

If there’s a weakness, it’s that the pacing can feel punishing. This film doesn’t build to a climax; it decays. Characters die offscreen or vanish. There is no redemption, no final battle. Some viewers may find this anticlimactic, but that’s the point. Herzog isn’t telling a story about winning or losing. He’s documenting a psychic meltdown from the inside, and meltdowns don’t follow three-act structure. The production’s own meltdown—hunger, disease, screaming matches on muddy riverbanks—only reinforces that vision. Aguirre is not a film about a man battling nature and losing his faith. It’s a film that became that battle, in real time, with real stakes, and somehow survived.

Years after release, Herzog clarified that Aguirre bears only the loosest resemblance to the historical Lope de Aguirre. He claimed he dreamed the film during a hike in the Alps. That dream-logic explains why Aguirre feels less like a period piece than a prehistoric vision. History is just a costume; the real subject is the human capacity to mistake madness for destiny. And that destiny, filtered through Kinski, is neither strictly Miltonian nor Melvillean but a nightmare hybrid: a fallen angel who keeps hunting the whale long after the ship has sunk.

In the end, Aguirre, the Wrath of God remains a towering, unsettling achievement. It influenced everything from Apocalypse Now to Resident Evil 4, but no imitation has matched its specific, waterlogged power. Despite the leeches, dysentery, gun threats, and screaming, the film that emerged is haunting, mesmerizing—a surreal trip into one man’s battle against nature and his crisis of faith. Herzog wanted “ecstatic truth” rather than mere fact. Aguirre is ecstatic truth: a fiction that feels more real than reality, a portrait of a madman that makes you understand why sanity is fragile, and a warning about conquest that remains urgent half a century later. Watch it on the biggest screen you can find, late at night, alone. The monkeys will be waiting. And somewhere in the jungle, Herzog and Kinski are still arguing.

13 for 13: Creature (dir by William Malone)

Posted on March 13, 2026 by Lisa Marie Bowman

1985’s Creature takes place in the future!

A spaceship that has just recently visited one of Saturn’s moons has crashed into a space station that is orbiting Earth’s moon. An American corporation sends another crew up to investigate the wreck but, when they arrive, they discover that a German corporation has beat them to it. They also discover that all of the Germans are dead, with the exception of Hans Hofner (Klaus Kinski). Hofner claims that an alien creature killed all of the other Germans and now, the creature will be coming after the Americans as well.

Would you allow Klaus Kinski on your spaceship? That was one of the main things that I found myself wondering as I watched Creature. Kinski was a German actor who was widely acknowledged as being one of the best actors in the world. For instance, Doctor Zhivago is a beautiful but very slow film that suddenly comes to life during Klaus Kinski’s fifteen minutes of screentime. He was also widely acknowledged as being incredibly difficult to work with, prone to paranoia and wild rages. His frequent collaborator, director Werner Herzog, has frequently talked about being tempted to kill Kinski while working with him and Kinski reportedly threatened to kill Herzog as well but the two of them still worked together because Kinski’s talent made the pain worth it. (At least, for a while….) It’s probably open to debate just how much of Kinski’s bad behavior was performative and how much of it was actually due to Kinski being mentally unstable but it’s also true that any experienced filmgoer knows better than to trust any character played by Klaus Kinski.

Now, it should be noted that, while Kinski was a great actor, that doesn’t always mean that he gave performances that were appropriate for the film in which he was appearing. If Kinski got bored during shooting, he would pretty much just do whatever he wanted. That’s the feeling that one gets while watching him in Creature. Kinski alternates between being overly twitchy and being obviously disinterested. When he makes his first appearance, he randomly gropes an actress, a move that was apparently not scripted. Later, Kinski eats a sandwich and talks with his mouth full. From the disgusted looks of the other cast members, it’s hard not to suspect that this was another improvisation on Kinski’s part. Kinski is always watchable but his performance is still one of the weaker elements of Creature.

That’s a shame because the rest of the cast — Lyman Ward, Stan Ivar, Wendy Schaal, Robert Jaffe, Diane Salinger — all do a pretty good job of bringing their characters to life. That Creature is essentially a rip-off of Alien is no great secret. But the film itself still works, due to some memorably grotesque effects work, William Malone’s quickly paced direction, and the performances of the majority of the cast. It’s an enjoyable B-movie, obviously made by people with a deep appreciation for the science fiction genre. Usually, Kinski is the element the redeems a B-movie. In this case, he’s almost superfluous. The film would have worked just as well — perhaps even better — if he hadn’t shown up.

Would I let Klaus Kinski on my spaceship?

In this case, I’d tell him to wait for the next shuttle. He’s not needed.

Scenes That I Love: Aguirre Declares Himself To Be The Wrath of God

Posted on September 5, 2025 by Lisa Marie Bowman

In honor of Werner Herzog’s birthday, today’s scene that I love comes from one of his best films. 1972’s Aguirre, The Wrath of God not only established Herzog as a major filmmaker but it also showed that he was the director who could get the best out of the notoriously difficult Klaus Kinski.

In this scene, Kinski plays the mad conquistador, Aguirre. Lost with his men in the Amazon, Aguirre establishes control over the dwindling expedition.

Scene That I Love: Lee Van Cleef, Clint Eastwood, and Klaus Kinski in For A Few Dollars More

Posted on January 9, 2025 by Lisa Marie Bowman

In 1925, on this very date, Lee Van Cleef was born in Somervillve, New Jersey. In honor of what would have been Lee Van Cleef’s 100th birthday, here he is with Klaus Kinski and Clint Eastwood in For A Few Dollars More.

There’s not a lot of dialogue in this scene but when you had actors like Eastwood, Kinski, and Lee Van Cleef, you didn’t need a lot of dialogue to make an impression.

Film Review: Woyzeck (dir by Werner Herzog)

Posted on January 1, 2025 by Lisa Marie Bowman

First released in 1979 and directed by the great Werner Herzog, Woyzeck takes place in a small German town in the 19th century. It’s the type of town where everyone knows everyone else and not much happens. As is mentioned towards the end of the film, it’s been a while since the town has seen a “real murder.”

Franz Woyzeck (Klaus Kinski) is a soldier who lives in the town. He’s had a son with Marie (Eva Mattes), despite not being married to her. For that, Woyzeck’s Captain (Wolfgang Reichmann) continually tells him that he is immoral. Woyzeck replies that the poor cannot afford morals. To make extra money, Woyzeck does odd jobs for the Captain and he’s agreed to serve as an experimental test subject for the Doctor (Willy Semmelrogge). The Doctor, who looks down on Woyzeck, has put Woyzeck on a diet of only peas. He’s curious to see what this does to Woyzeck’s physical well-being but he has no interest in the fact that Woyzeck is obviously going mad.

Woyzeck, who, at the start of the film, is already hearing voices and talking about his apocalyptic visions, comes to suspect that Marie is cheating on him with a handsome Drum Major (Josef Bierbichler). While the film does make it clear that the Drum Major is interested in Marie, whether or not she’s actually cheating is left ambiguous. Woyzeck may believe that she is but Woyzeck also believes that he’s having visions of the end of the world so who knows whether one should trust his opinion. Eventually, Woyzeck’s madness leads to tragedy and another ambiguous ending. (The ambiguity reflects not only Werner Herzog’s customary aesthetic but also the fact that the film is based on a fragment of an unfinished play.)

What drives Woyzeck mad? Was he born mad or was he driven mad by his jealousy over the Drum Major? Does he truly love Marie or, as someone who has very little to his name, does he just want to possess her? Is he driven crazy by the inequality all around him or is he just looking for an excuse to justify his own disturbed thoughts? Herzog does not provide a definitive answer. Why Woyzeck goes mad is less important than the fact that the community around him is thoroughly and totally indifferent to the fact that he’s obviously losing his mind. The Captain lectures him as him as if he’s merely a teenager who needs to grow up. The Doctor only cares about Woyzeck as a test subject. Even Marie seems to be indifferent to his instability.

With each scene shot in one take and featuring a largely stationary camera, Woyzeck captures the claustrophobic feeling of being trapped in one’s circumstances. Woyzeck is desperate to escape both his circumstances and his madness but Herzog makes it clear that Woyzeck has nowhere to go. He’s trapped in his life and his fate feels almost pre-ordained. This film is dark, even by the standards of Werner Herzog, However, it also features one of Klaus Kinski’s rare sympathetic roles. It’s not surprising that Kinski is convincing as a madman as Kinski is often said to have been a bit mad in real life as well. What stands out is just how good a job Kinski does at playing the rather meek and subservient side of Woyzeck. Woyzeck features one of Klaus Kinski’s best performances.

In My Best Fiend, Herzog said (one hopes jokingly) that he was often tempted to have Kinski killed. Woyzeck shows us why we should be happy that he didn’t.

Horror Scenes That I Love: Klaus Kinski in Nosferatu

Posted on October 17, 2023 by Lisa Marie Bowman

From the 1960s until his death in the early 90s, German actor Klaus Kinski was known for being the enfant terrible of world cinema. Kinski was a volatile talent, an often angry and occasionally violent performer who specialized in playing extreme characters and who reportedly took pride in his ability to drive directors crazy. Kinski appeared in good films and bad films and, in every one of them, he gave the type of unique performance that only he was cable of giving.

Kinski is best-remembered for his work with his frenemy, Werner Herzog. When Herzog and Kinski weren’t making films together, they were often criticizing each other in the press and sending one another death threats. In the documentary My Best Fiend, Herzog documented his partnership with Kinski. Even while Herzog talked about the time that he went to Kinski’s home with the intent of killing him, Herzog’s affection for his frequent star was obvious. Klaus Kinski was one of a kind.

In Werner Herzog’s 1980 film, Nosferatu, Kinski played the role of Dracula. In this scene, she comes to visit Isabelle Adjani’s Lucy.

Scenes That I Love: Aguirre Declares Himself To Be The Wrath of God

Posted on September 5, 2023 by Lisa Marie Bowman

In this scene, Kinski plays the mad conquistador, Aguirre. Lost with his men in the Amazon, Aguirre establishes control over the dwindling expedition.

International Horror Review: Jack The Ripper (dir by Jess Franco)

Posted on October 28, 2022 by Lisa Marie Bowman

In this 1976 German film, Klaus Kinski plays Dr. Dennis Orlof.

He’s a doctor in what is supposed to be Victorian-era London. (Some of the characters where Victorian-style clothes. Some of them definitely do not.) Dr. Orlof is known for being a kind and compassionate man. He has dedicated his life to taking care of the poor and the sick. He is one of the few doctors willing to take care of the men who fish on the Thames and the women who walk the foggy streets of Whitechapel. Because his patients are not rich, Dr. Orlof makes very little money. He is usually behind on paying the rent for his office but his lady doesn’t care. Dr. Orlof is such a kind man. Who could possibly even think of evicting a living saint?

Of course, what only he and his wife know is that Dr. Orlof is also a deviant who is haunted by hallucinations of a nearly naked woman taunting him and daring him to “come and get me.” Dr. Orlof haunts the sleazy dance halls of London and he often offers to give the dancers a ride in his carriage. Dr. Orlof is also the murderer who the press refers to as being Jack the Ripper.

Klaus Kinski as Jack the Ripper? That sounds like perfect casting, right? Actually, it’s too perfect. Klaus Kinski is so obviously unhinged from the first minute that he appears onscreen that it’s impossible to believe that he wouldn’t automatically be everyone’s number one suspect. Kinski plays Orlof as being someone who is in a permanently bad mood. Even when Orlof is doing his “good deeds,” he comes across as being so annoyed with the world that the viewer is left to wonder how anyone could have fallen for his act. Kinski himself seems a bit bored with the role. When Kinski was invested in a character (as he often was when he appeared in the films of Werner Herzog), he was a dangerously charismatic force of nature. When he was bored, though, Kinski made little effort to keep anyone else from noticing. Kinski moves lethargically through Jack the Ripper.

Trying to solve the Ripper case is Inspector Selby (Andreas Mannkopf). The film spends a lot of time on Selby’s investigation but it’s never as interesting as one might hope. Selby spends a lot of time in his office, looking concerned. When he actually talks to the witnesses to the Ripper’s murders, the scene seem to drag out forever. In one unfortunate scene, he gathers all the witnesses in one room and asks each one to describe what the Ripper looked like so a sketch can be made of him. Again, what should have been a minute or two-minute scene is dragged out to an unbearable seven minutes. Seven minutes is a lot of time when you’re bored.

Jack the Ripper was directed by Jess Franco. On this site, I’ve defended some of Franco’s other films. Franco was an idiosyncratic filmmaker whose films often felt rushed but who was also capable of creating a dream-like atmosphere and occasionally coming up with an insanely bizarre plot twist. Jack the Ripper, with its tormented title character and its dance hall scenes, in unmistakably a Jess Franco film. Unfortunately, it’s also often excruciatingly dull. Kinski was obviously a big name in Europe in the 70s but I kind of wish that Franco had cast his frequent star, Howard Vernon, as Jack the Ripper. Not only was Vernon the start of the original Awful Dr. Orlof but Vernon also specialized in playing self-loathing aristocrats. If nothing else, Vernon would have been a bit less oblivious in his madness than Kinski.

Jack the Ripper is definitely a lesser Franco film. It’s also a lesser Kinski film and a lesser Jack the Ripper film. There is one good sequence in which Orlof and a victim ride through the London fog in a carriage. Otherwise, this is a Franco film that you can get away with skipping.

Scene I Love: Klaus Kinski in David Lean’s Doctor Zhivago

Posted on March 25, 2022 by Lisa Marie Bowman

The 1965 film, Doctor Zhivago, is not only notable as one of the many David Lean-directed films to be nominated for Best Picture. It’s also remembered as being one of two Best Picture nominees to feature, albeit in a small role, the madman of European cinema, Klaus Kinski.

In this scene, set in the aftermath of Russia’s communist revolution, Kinski explains why he, despite being a prisoner, is the only free man on the train. Due to his German accent, Kinski was dubbed by actor Robert Rietty and he doesn’t have much screen time but he still manages to steal the movie.