Fitzcarraldo

Apocalypse Now in the Amazon headwaters

Called Fitzcarraldo by the Indians, an Irishman (Klaus Kinski) living in Iquitos, Peru, dreams of bringing Grand Opera to the jungle city in the Amazon Basin. Its the early 1900s and theres a rubber boom. To fund his dream he decides to exploit a considerable area of rubber trees growing beyond the impassable Ucayali Falls. To get to this remote area he incredibly has his steamboat lifted over a hill from another branch of the Amazon with the assistance of notorious headhunters. Claudia Cardinale plays his girlfriend, a successful brothel owner.

Werner Herzogs Fitzcarraldo (1982) is superior to his Aguirre, the Wrath of God (1972), which was shot in the same general area, the Amazon basin...

Klaus Kinski is great as the eponymous, slightly maniacal, opera lover who decides that his love of Verdi, Bellini and Puccini needs to be shared with his mid-jungle community. He realises that to do that, he must have cash - and that's only to be found if he can manage to tap into the rubber trees deep into the Amazon. To that end, he and local hostess "Molly" (the sparingly featured Claudia Cardinale) manage to scrape together enough cash to buy a dilapidated old steamer from local grandee "Don Aquilino" (José Lewgoy) and he sets off into uncharted waters with a skeleton collection of untrustworthies into the realm of rapids, insects and hostiles. There's a snag to his cunning plan, though. The area he wishes to exploit is all but inacces...