Word: kinski
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...characters reveal themselves through theatrical gestures: Bunny, swilling a bottle of Scotch ("horse piss") on her balcony and threatening to jump; Lucille presiding over a spaghetti dinner like Klaus Kinski in Nosferatu, stabbing stray meatballs on others' plates with birdlike speed; Francis excoriating his family and friends and demolishing his birthday cake; his father describing the day his wife left home, whereupon he took a pickaxe, smashed the sidewalk, and planted a fig tree that has grown into a majestic symbol of le Beau Geste...
...nowadays all the old reliable problems - differences of years, background and religion, for example - are carelessly surmounted all the time by lovers. So the search for something to deter, for a few reels, a middleaged, middle-class Marcello Mastroianni from turning his one-night stand with Nastassia Kinski, a spunky student, into a full-scale affair has led the creators of this film to bedrock taboo: the possibility of incest...
Mastroianni is one of the few actors who can play weakness and retain an audience's sympathy, mostly because of his ability to make sweet-tempered comedic comments on male vulnerability. Kinski is simply ravishing, genuinely sexy and high-spirited without being painfully aggressive about it. The result is a surprisingly pleasant diversion...
...which all the actors were dwarfs, and a third in which the leading character, an old woman, was both deaf and blind. His best work, Aguirre, the Wrath of God (1972), might serve as a metaphor for the whole German school. Aguirre, a Spanish conquistador played by Klaus Kinski, revolts against the crown and attempts to build a new empire in the jungles of Peru. The film, a kaleidoscope of the fabulous and the bizarre, would be noteworthy even if it stopped after the first riveting scene: 50 or so Spaniards, in armor and heavy battle gear, slowly descending...
...Aguirre is little more than an extraordinarily beautiful enactment of an historical event. Herzog tells us little that we didn't already know, though he shows in magnificent detail the physical odds against which the conquistadors struggled in their desperate search for gold. If Kinski were a different kind of actor, Aguirre's steadily increasing megalomania might have provided a dynamic for the film, but he fails to project the reasons for his ruthless brutality. (The problem may be that the actors speak in German, and subtitles hardly aid in character development, but is more likely that Kinski...