Cobra Verde (1987)

PLOT:

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The final film in the legendary collaboration between director Werner Herzog and actor Klaus Kinski, COBRA VERDE--based on a novel by Bruce Chatwin--tells the story of Francisco Manoel da Silva, a poor farmer who raises himself to fame and notoriety as the bandit “Cobra Verde.”

The film begins with a blind minstrel beginning to sing the tale of the famed bandit. Da Silva is shown kneeling before a cross; surrounding him is a dead, parched landscape. It’s only because I read a synopsis of the film that I know that this is supposed to be his land, destroyed by draught (the film itself makes no mention of this). And so da Silva is forced into a job as a gold miner, only to disagree with his foreman over his payment. Having exhausted the legitimate means available to him for making a living, da Silva murders the foreman and turns to a life of crime, as the bandit Cobra Verde.

Soon, he finds himself in the employ of a sugar baron named Don Octavio Coutinho. Rather than attending to his duties, da Silva impregnates each of the sugar baron’s three daughters, before revealing himself as the bandit Cobra Verde. As punishment, he is sent to the African kingdom of Dahomey, where he is to reopen the slave trade by negotiating with the mad King Bossa Ahadee. The sugar baron assumes that Cobra Verde will fail, and be murdered in the process. Of course, the bandit succeeds, becoming the Viceroy of Dahomey, and eventually leading an army of amazons in the process.

REVIEW:

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COBRA VERDE is often considered the weakest of the Herzog-Kinski collaborations. I have to disagree with this popular assessment. I find the alienation in WOYZEK is so intense that I, as the viewer, felt it as well, and in doing so was almost completely unable to enjoy the film. And something about NOSFERATU has never sat right with me, as much as I admire it. COBRA VERDE, on the other hand, is as engrossing as the earlier Herzog-Kinski collaborations, AGUIRRE and FITZCARRALDO.

This film is different than those two, though, in very important ways. For one, the focus in both of those films is the obsession (and insanity) of the main character, as played by Kinski. They are character-driven, rather than plot-driven (and indeed almost all of these films suffer from a lack of clear narrative, to my mind). COBRA VERDE, on the other hand, is a plot-driven piece; it has a detailed narrative, with several easily-distinguishable acts, as well as lots of action.

Among the chief pleasures to be derived from any Herzog film is the filmmaker’s eye for composing a breathtaking shot, and his engagement with the world of the film. Look how he uses the colourful costumes of the Dahomey people to serve as a living background for Cobra Verde:


There are almost no sets in Herzog’s films; everything is shot on location, using real buildings, and often real people (as opposed to “fake” actors, I suppose). It adds an element of reality to his films that doesn’t necessarily make a “better” movie, but it has a striking effect that you can’t find elsewhere. For instance, the image that first comes to my mind, when I think of FITZCARRALDO, is scene where the tribesmen begin cutting down an immense and ancient tree. I mean, they’re really cutting down this tree, doing real, irreparable violence to nature. And I think you feel that violence.

Herzog’s fictions, then, are like a weird marriage of documentary and drama, and instead of the two genres clashing, they somehow serve to illuminate each other. And so you get to see the “fake” action of Cobra Verde in the “real” wilderness of Brazil, or in the landscapes of Ghana (serving as Dahomey). He uses a real Ghanaian choir, and lets them have ample time to sing; near the end, he shows the audience a real Ghanaian suffering from polio; the man’s twisted figure serves as a shocking and powerful symbol of the film’s themes. Herzog also uses long takes, with minimal cutting; the effect, I think, is to let the viewer sit back and take in the scene, and to be assured that there are no tricks being played.

So, COBRA VERDE is an immensely beautiful film. Herzog uses the colourful dress of the Ghanaian (Dahomians?) to the fullest, and--as in FITZCARRALDO, AGUIRRE, et. al.--captures the landscape like no other director out there. And Klaus Kinski, of course, is Klaus Kinski; wild, intense, and always unpredictable.


Which isn’t to say that COBRA VERDE isn’t without its faults. The first fifteen minutes or so are incredibly hard to follow, with no exposition to help the viewer along the way. There’s a shot of Cobra Verde surrounded by desolation; you have to infer that this is his land. There’s a run in, near the start of the film, between the bandit and a cripple; the crippled man tells some fantastic tales to Cobra Verde, but it’s unclear what the connection is to the rest of the film. As well, there’s almost no sense of time passing. From the first scene of da Silva as a poor rancher, to the first scene where he is identified as Cobra Verde, one must infer that time has past, but there’s no telling how much. How long does it take the bandit to impregnate Don Coutinho’s daughters: months, or days? You can’t tell, from watching the film. And it’s unclear how long Cobra Verde is in Dahomey before things go screwy. However, if you can struggle through the first few scenes, and simply accept that you’re going to be shown quite a show, even if it’s somewhat disjointed, then you’re in for a treat. COBRA VERDE is one of Herzog’s most under-appreciated films.

A Bullet for the General (1966)

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Set during the Mexican Revolution, Damiano Damiani’s A Bullet for the General follows the bandit leader El Chucho (Gian Maria Volonte, best known as the bad guy from a couple of Leone Westerns) and his gang of thieves, as they raid trains and government facilities for guns and ammunition to sell to General Elias, who is either a Zapatista rebel or a stand-in for Zapata himself (I’m not sure which). Chucho allows a gringo named Bill Tate (whom Chucho dubs “Niño”) to join the gang, unaware that Tate is actually an assassin hired by the Mexican government to take out General Elias with a golden bullet.

REVIEW:

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Without meaning to be reductive, the most important parts of a film are probably the beginning and the end. If you can catch people’s attention at the start, and wow them at the finish, you’ve probably got a good movie on your hands, unless you really duff it in the middle. Damiani’s political Western A Bullet for the General has one of the best first 20 minutes in film history.

It begins with four men, in close up, walking along a plain white wall. They are outside, and seem to be in a bit of a hurry. They stop, and two of them hug. And then the camera cuts away, revealing that these four are bracketed by soldiers, and that a row of men are aiming their rifles. It’s an execution by firing squad, and as Tate (Lou Castel) looks on, the four are gunned down. Tate is obviously out of place--he is pale and fair-haired, clean and well-dressed. He doesn’t belong.

Unfazed by the execution, Tate walks over to the train station to buy a ticket. A small Mexican boy asks him if he’s an American, and then asks him if he likes Mexico.

“Not very much,” Tate responds.


The film jumps straight into the action when the train is attacked by Chucho’s gang. The setup is clever: they’ve basically crucified a captain of the army, placing him on the tracks. When the train stops, unwilling to crush the still-living officer, the bandits attack. A lieutenant on the train shouts at the captain, asking for orders. The captain lets it be known that the train should just move forward. The lieutenant, unwilling to let the captain die by his command, instead drops down between the tracks and tries to crawl up to the officer, hoping to free him without bloodshed. Chucho shoots the lieutenant in the guts. Then the train rolls forward, crushing the captain.

Tate, seeing his opportunity, kills the engineer, stopping the train for the bandits. He tells Chucho that he’s an outlaw, and that he was being extradited to the US to face trial. He asks if he can join Chucho’s band. Chucho agrees, giving Tate a new name, Niño (“boy”).

The opening scenes, then, go a long way to set up the movie in a concise and powerful manner. Chucho and Niño are obviously both ruthless individuals; they share a love of money and of violence that unites them, even though they are completely dissimilar in every other way. It’s clearly not going to be a story about heroes.


Now a part of the gang--including Chucho’s obsessively religious brother, El Santo (Klaus Kinski) and the charming bandita Adelita (Martine Beswick)--Niño aids the bandits as they raid government buildings in search of guns. Niño is willing to help, but he’s impatient, always pestering Chucho about meeting the General. Chucho, not the brightest bandito around, seems to take it in stride, and is only angered when Niño convinces the other men to abandon Chucho and his brother when the two of them are more interested in helping poor villagers than making money. Still, Chucho’s noble streak doesn’t last long--he, too, is in it for the pesos--and soon the gang is back together again, in time for the film’s climax.

Volonte’s Chucho is fascinating to watch; he’s wild and charismatic, and defies easy explanation, probably because Chucho himself is quite a conflicted character. There’s something inside of him--probably his background as a poor peasant--that connects him with the people, but any sort of kindness or generosity of his character is often obfuscated by his greed and rude manners. He distrusts wealth and learning and yet clearly envies it. He has to tell his brother Santo that they are giving the guns to General Elias, too embarrassed to admit that he’s selling them. That Niño is an assassin should be obvious to Chucho, and so it’s easy not to feel sorry for him, but his genuine humanity, no matter how disfigured, makes you side with the bandit against the cold, professional gringo.

Against the expectations of the genre, A Bullet for the General features a couple of strong female characters. Little is made of the fact that the first of these, Adelita, fights side-by-side with the rest of the bandits, just as though she were a man. She is clearly attracted to Niño, but her relationship with one of the other bandits keeps them apart, for a time. Adelita makes it known that she has suffered at the hands of the government and the wealthy landowners; she, more than any of the other bandits, is motivated by hatred.


The role of Rosario is much smaller, but is a vital part of the story. When the bandits and a handful of poor, angry townsfolk come to the home of the wealthy landowner Don Feliciano, it is his wife, Rosario (Carla Gravina) who tries to deal with the situation. We watch, uncomfortably, as she tries to reason with bandits, and then moves on to threats, before breaking down completely when it’s clear that her husband will be killed. While Chucho and his men have hardly been forgiving of their military targets, this is the first time that they victimize the unarmed and the helpless. Our sympathy for Chucho is tested when he even agrees to let his men rape Rosario--an action which Niño puts a stop to.

The man who adapted the screenplay for A Bullet for the General, Franco Solinas, was a politically-interested writer with leftist sympathies. This is obviously most evident in his interest in the Mexican Revolution, which is not a neutral setting for the story, but an integral one. Clearly this is a man who sides with the Revolution. Though quick to show the ugliness of the bandits and revolutionaries, he and the director are at their most heavy-handed with the repeated use of gold as a symbol for capital and wealth. It is not a simple affectation, that Niño must shoot the General with a golden bullet--but at least that bit of imagery is acceptable. Harder to swallow is the existence, and importance, of a golden machine gun, a mechanized weapon capable of unlimited slaughter and linked to wealth and privilege by its ostentatious decoration. Even if there were some historic truth to it--even if there is documentation proving the existence of a golden machine gun during the Revolution--it’s simply too hard to swallow as a practical or realistic detail. It takes you out of the film, smacking you in the face with its inauthenticity.

That said, A Bullet for the General is one of the best Westerns I’ve ever seen, a real gem, and I’d encourage anyone to track it down and give it a try. While I’m not familiar with Damiani’s other films, this one certainly gives Leone a run for his money.

The Great Silence (1968)

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A young boy watches, powerless, as his parents are murdered by bounty hunters. The leader of the killers, Pollicutt--perhaps unable to kill a child--slits the boy’s throat, severing his vocal chords, so he’ll never tell the tale. That boy grows up to become a bounty hunter himself. Known only as “Silence” (guess why), he specializes in tracking down those bounty hunters who subvert the law and kill innocents in the name of justice, cashing in on their illicit and immoral behaviour. Silence’s main trick is to lure his opponents into drawing first, so he can gun them down with his Mauser in “self defence,” (ironically) subverting the law in the process.

Sergio Corbucci’s The Great Silence takes place in the fictional town of Snow Hill, Utah, during the great blizzard of 1899. There, due to the unseasonable weather, the starving townsfolk have had to fall into banditry to survive (though this isn’t very well explained). A general amnesty is expected from the governor, but until then Pollicutt, Snow Hill’s Justice of the Peace, is paying $1000 a head for these outlaws. This offer attracts to Snow Hill large groups of bounty hunters (called “bounty killers” in the film); chief among them is Loco (Klaus Kinski), a dangerous and sadistic man looking to cash in on the townsfolk’s desperate situation. Only Silence, famed for his antagonism towards bounty hunters, can possibly save the town.

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There’s a lot you have to accept if you want to get into a Spaghetti Western, especially a Spaghetti Western that isn’t helmed by Sergio Leone. Like most of its kind, The Great Silence is badly dubbed, so that the words you hear never match the movement of the actors’ lips; furthermore, the words you hear are badly mixed in, so that they always come out as an audio close-up. All of the costumes look newly made, no matter how worn they should be, and most of the extras can only be counted on to ham it up in the worst fashion imaginable. But if you go into the film knowing this, you can soon accept it, and you should, since The Great Silence is one of the most original and rewarding Westerns out there.

The film stands out for various reasons. First is its setting; most of us are used to seeing cowboys in dusty Frontier or mining towns, or perhaps in lush green fields in places like Montana. The Great Silence takes place in snow-covered Utah; everyone is bundled up, everything is frozen (not unlike McCabe & Mrs. Miller, Robert Altman’s 1972 Western film that seems to be the spiritual partner of Corbucci’s film). Then there’s Loco, played by the infamous Klaus Kinski. It’s hard to put your finger on exactly what makes Loco so much different from so many other villains. He seems practical (he asks for help hoisting frozen corpses onto a carriage, so he can collect the bounty), and almost polite. He also looks fucking insane. Then there’s the overall mood of the film, which is gloomier even than Clint Eastwood’s Unforgiven.


There isn’t much to say about Silence, played by French actor Jean-Louis Trintignant. There are different theories, or rumours, surrounding the reasoning behind the protagonist's muteness. Some say that this is Corbucci playing with the trope of the laconic cowboy; if Eastwood or John Wayne, for instance, are curt, than Corbucci’s hero is going to be downright dumb. The other popular belief is that Trintignant only accepted the role on the grounds that he didn’t have to learn any lines. Either way, Silence is pretty uninteresting; not only does he not talk, he has seemingly no facial expressions whatsoever. All of his character seems to be expressed in his unique choice of gun. Unlike most cowboys, who carry some sort of six-shooter, Silence carries an automatic handgun, an 1896 7.63 mm Mauser Broomhandle. It’s his gun, rather than his silence, which sets him apart.

The last character worth mentioning is the Sheriff, played by Frank Wolff. (The love interest, played by Vonetta McGee, doesn’t do much but bring Silence to Snow Hill, before quickly falling love with him.) While the Sheriff is clearly meant to be comic relief, he’s rarely as buffoonish or clownish as some of his comedic counterparts. On the whole, he is well-meaning, but ignorant of his own situation and naïve in believing that he can make a difference. He is, on the whole, fairly noble, and one can’t help but feel that he’s the most sympathetic character in the whole film.


As unique as The Great Silence is, it’s not without its faults. Little explanation is offered for what’s happening--the reason that so many people are outlawed, and exactly how Pollicutt is supposedly profiting, is hard to grasp. In one instance, Loco digs a gun out of the snow and uses it to great effect; though we’ve seen him hide weapons in the snow before, it’s incredibly convenient (and incredibly hard to believe) that he had one in exactly that spot, and knew exactly where to look, exactly when he needed to. Some extra bounty hunters show up at near the end, and while their presence is mentioned it isn’t really explained. If you’re a stickler for a tight script, parts of the film can be irritating.

That said, anyone who’s a fan of the genre should check out the movie. It features a great villain, and while I’m not sold that Corbucci is the peer of that other, more famous Sergio (I found Django, for instance, pretty bad), he is a stylish director with a flair for filming violence. The Great Silence is a dour, nihilistic Western that is well worth tracking down.