Stop the Week 27

‘This movie makes as much sense as a rat fucking a grapefruit…’

Also spracht Marlon Brando, one of two troubled geniuses wandering across my cultural radar screen this week. I thought that Patricia Bosworth’s biography of Montgomery Clift was one of the most enthralling Hollywood tales that I’ve ever read. The portrait of Brando seems a bit quick-and-easy in comparison, seemingly borrowing a lot from Brando’s own autobiography and other, fuller biographies on the market. But it’s entertaining enough to induce me to leave my bike in the cellar, propped up against a stack of boxes, and take once more to my walking boots. By chance the 2^nd hand copy I brought is a large-print version from Hammersmith & Fulham public libraries (Serving our community, the memorable strap-line that no doubt cost them a pretty packet), so it has done wonders for my walk-and-read technique. So much so that I’m now sketching some Heath Robinson contraption for the bike that will allow me to ride-and-read (possibly not serving our rural community too well in the process).

I have always had very ambivalent feelings about our Marlon. I remember as a kid seeing him as Terry Malloy in On The Waterfront, and it was – and still is – one of the most powerful cinematic experiences of my life. It was a staggering performance and the back-of-the-car scene with brother ‘Chollie’ must be one of the most quoted scenes in movie history. But while I loved him in Waterfront, A Streetcar Named Desire, The Missouri Breaks and The Godfather, to name but a few, equally I hated him in Mutiny on the Bounty, Last Tango in Paris and Apocalypse Now, to name but a few.

He was a mass of contradictions: gentle, generous, sensitive, kind to animals, loyal to friends on one hand; crass, boorish, conceited and a royal pain-in-the-ass on the other. Unlike someone, say, of Tom Cruise’s ilk, who seems to have worked so hard at being a star throughout his career, Brando was a star almost in spite of himself. ‘Acting is a bum’s life,’ he said. ‘It leads to perfect self-indulgence. You get paid for doing nothing and it adds up to nothing’. Which is maybe why he ended up squandering his massive talent and describing himself, even in the early ‘60s, as a ‘balding, middle-aged failure’.

Trevor Howard said of his co-star in the ill-fated Monty on the Bonty, as my siblings and I used to call it, that ‘he could drive a saint to hell in a dogsled’. If this was so, then Klaus Kinski could have done it simply by glaring at the unfortunate saint.

Just fiends, Mr. H. and Mr. K.

I bought a boxed set of Werner Herzog’s films with the demented actor about five years ago as an investment in my child’s future. I have been training her to watch Aguirre, Wrath of God ever since, but she tells me that she still doesn’t feel ready for it (if you ask me, she doesn’t like reading sub-titles: the curse of the micro-attention-span generation). So last night, Debs and I decided to watch the slightly barking director’s documentary film about his completely barking star, My Best Fiend.

We’re about half way through it and it makes for riveting viewing, what with Herzog’s hypnotic Teutonic delivery and clips of Kinski raving at Gas Mark 10. His co-star in Woyzeck, Eva Mattes, actually talked of a sensitive, caring side to the man. It’s an extraordinary notion. At one point Herzog’s camera captured Kinski in Aguirre costume and character set about some of the extras with a broad sword, I think because they were picking at some of the food to be used as props. One of them showed Herzog the traces of a large scar on his skull, some 30 years or so after the event. If he hadn’t have been wearing his helmet, he would have been a dead man.

But if it’s true that there was a gentler, human side to the raving madman, I guess it goes part of the way to explaining how such a monster managed to sire such a soft, feminine creature as Natasja. My God, though, assuming that her father played any significant role in her childhood, she must surely be a very troubled soul.

It all does make you wonder why Herzog was prepared to put himself through the torment he, cast and crew all suffered from K.K. not once but five times. When you think about the premise of Fitzcarraldo – pulling a boat across a hill in the middle of the jungle to transport it from one river to another – there must be a strong element of the masochist in Herzog’s make-up. Maybe you need an element of insanity in order to make great art. Countless biographies seem to reinforce this idea. So maybe Herzog recognised that, if he could survive the trauma and shockwaves of working with such a human maelstrom, then he would get the kind of charismatic performance that his films needed.

Well, the proof of the pudding is there in the eating. From the staggering opening shots of the group of conquistadors snaking their way down the mountainside to the final restless circling of the camera as Aguirre and a raft-load of monkeys drift downriver, Aguirre for one must be one of the most riveting collaborations between director and star ever committed to celluloid.