Time 100 Greatest Movies

8/4/2019 Time 100 Greatest Movies

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Saturday, Feb. 12, 2005

Aguirre: The Wrath of God (1972)

By Richard Corliss

Directed By: Werner Herzog

Screenplay: Werner Herzog

Cast: Klaus Kinski, Helena Rojo

The 70s established Herzog as the most defiantly

visionary of directors. In Every Man for Himself (And

God Against All), Heart of Glass, Nosferatu the

Vampire and his amazing documentary about the

Guadeloupean volcano La Soufriere, he created

worlds beyond civilization, whose ravishing beauty

could drive intruders mad. Who better to play the

overweening man, intoxicated to the point of

insanity, than Klaus Kinski, Herzog's house demon?

(Herzog made a fascinating documentary, the 1998

My Best Fiend, about his hectic relationship with the

actor.) Aguirre is the prototype Herzog-Kinski collaboration, about a Spanish explorer who loses his

mission, men and mind on an Amazon adventure. Answering only to the logic of Peru's natural beauty,

the film seems an examination of madness from the inside. Sumptuous, spellbinding and immediately,

eternally scary.

Monday, May. 16, 1977

Cinema: Meditation on MadnessRICHARD SCHICKEL

In 1560 a party of Spanish explorers, pursuing their curious national dream of El Dorado, are stopped by

the fierce mountains and jungles of Peru. The commander detaches a smaller group to proceed down a

rather forbidding river to see if they can discover some easy way out of this bad country.

The leader of this party is a gentle spirit, dignified and impractical. To him there is nothing ridiculous in

the sight of his men toiling along treacherous trails, weighted down by armor, struggling to transport an

entirely useless cannon. He has brought his wife with him and his second in command's daughter. What

begins as an obviously dangerous journey soon turns into a manifestly self-destructive one. The rafts

built to navigate the river are inadequate to its currents. And then, of course, there are the Indians,

always in the shadows, picking off stragglers. But the worst danger derives from the Spaniards'
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delusions, and the most deluded of all is that second in command, the Aguirre of the title. He foments a

mutiny, places the one nobleman present in nominal charge of the expedition and, acting in that pliable

gentleman's name, proceeds to tyrannize his ever dwindling band.

Before long, he creates a government, complete with constitution and courts. He declares

independence from Spain and claim to the vast land he and his group are dreamily yet viciously floatingthrough, starving as the Indians grow bolder. In the end, no one is left but Aguirre, who is last seen

shouting his plan for the conquest of the entire continent to the indifferent jungle, as hundreds of

marmosets swarm over his waterlogged raft.

It is a magnificent image of the will to power running mad. But it is only one of a hundred such images

distinguishing this singular and haunting film. Director Werner Herzog, 35, is German. and it is clear that

he was drawn to this story, which derives from a historical incident, because he sees in it a parable

applicable to his country's recent past.

That, however, is not something he insists on, any more than he insists on the absurdity of the activities

he patiently, unemphatically records in a movie that unfolds slowly but never slackly. The most

admirable thing about Aguirre may be the discipline with which Herzog tells his tale. He does not indulge

himself in any comments on the action or insist, as most historical dramatists do, on the obvious

parallels between his material and modern issues. He does the audience the honor of allowing it to

discover the blindnesses and obsessions, the sober lunacies he quietly lays out on the screen. Well

acted, most notably by Klaus Kinski in the title role, gloriously photographed by Thomas Mauch, Aguirre

is, not to put too fine a point on it, a movie that makes a convincing claim to greatness.


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The Apu Trilogy (1955, 1956, 1959)By Richard Schickel Saturday, Feb. 12, 2005

Directed By: Satyajit Ray

Screenplay: Bibhutibhushan Bandyopadhyay (novel); Satyajit Ray

The story of a child growing to manhood in modern India. His

triumphs are small, his tragedies large, but Ray's filmmaking is direct

in manner, simple in its means and profound in its impact. It is, as

another great master, Akira Kurosawa, said, "the kind of cinema that

flows with the serenity and nobility of a big river"the river of life

as it is ordinarily lived.

Cinema: The New Pictures, Sep. 26, 1960The World of Apu (Edward Harrison) completes, in alternations of suffering and joy, one of the most

vital and abundant movies ever made. Based on a bestselling Bengali novel by Bibhuti Bannerji, the

picture was written, produced and directed as three separate pictures by a 39-year-old Calcutta film buff

named Satyajit Ray (pronounced Sawt-yaw-jit Rye). Each of the three lasts about an hour and 45

minutes and stands as a separate and complete cinema experience in its own right. But the moviemaker

intended his trilogy ultimately to be seen and judged as a single immense discursive epic in the Indian

traditionas a modern Mahabharata.

Part 1, called Father Panchali (The Lament of the Path), describes the hero's childhood in the innocence

and violence of a village in Bengal. Part 2, Aparajito (The Unvanquished), tells how he lost his father and

left his mother in order to make himself a modern man. Part 3, called Apur Sansar (The World of Apu),

begins with a slyly humorous description of how the young man (Soumitra Chatterjee) spends his can't-

afford-salad days of bohemian genius in Calcutta's slums. Suddenly one day a college friend carts him off

to a country wedding that has an unexpected and fateful conclusion. The bridegroom proves to be

insane, and in order to save the bride (Sarmila Tagore*) from the curse that will fall upon her if she is

not married at the appointed hour, Apu makes the noble gesture and marries her himself. To his

amazement he falls in love with the girl, and for a year they live a garret idyl in Calcutta. Then she dies in

childbirth. Almost insane with grief, Apu throws his novel, his career and almost his life away, but he

finds himself again in his relation to his son, in his duty to the future, in his love of life.

As a piece of craftsmanship, The World of Apu is the finest film of the three. Director Ray, who had

never turned a camera before he started shooting Father Panchali, began his trilogy with incredible

strokes of beginner's luck, but he ends it with deliberate mastery of the medium. He has superb control

of his camera. His images are continuously beautiful but never obtrusive; they rise out of the story as

naturally as thoughts rise out of the pool of Vishnuthere is nothing arty in Ray's art. By the same token

his actors act, not with the usual bombinations of Oriental drama, but as though the camera had found


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them alone and simply living; and they live, as few characters in pictures do, real lives that swell to the

skin with pain and poetry and sudden mother wit. Actor Chatterjee, as a young man too gifted to be

strong, provides an unforgettable object of the Biblical lesson (Luke 16:8): ". . . the children of this world

are wiser in their generation than the children of light." And Actress Tagore, though she looks as

mysterious and lovely as an Apsaras, nevertheless comes off the screen as a lustily healthy young

woman, essentially down to earth and up to tricks.

Director Ray reveals moreover an order of poetic insight and a gift of visual anecdote that combine to

produce some astonishing effects. In one scene the tenderness and bliss of a whole honeymoon are

pressed into a moment when the young husband wakes in the same bed he had used as a bachelor and,

listening to his bride as she cheerfully makes breakfast, lifts in silent wonder from beside his pillow one

of her fallen hairpins.

Taken as a whole, Ray's film has the generosity and the prodigal variety of genius. Nevertheless, to

moviegoers accustomed to the visual shorthand of Hollywood's clichs, it will probably seem sometimes

to maunder in Oriental obscurities, to go the long way round to nowhere. Ray might well reply that life

itself usually takes the same route and reaches the same destination, and this movie is obviously

intended to be like lifenot like other movies.

High Time (20th Century-Fox) is a fast flashy funny 103-minute $3,000,000 CinemaScope De Luxe Color

parody of an old-fashioned college musical, released just in time to catch the back-to-school business. It

stars Bing Crosbyback on campus as a 51-year-old freshman. He is the owner of a chain of 1,433

restaurants who decides to let somebody else mind the store while he gets the education he could not

afford as a boy.

Bing's undergraduate experience is presented in four acts, each describing one of the four years of

college. The first three years rush along, like a well-executed locomotive yell, at a relentlesslyaccelerating rate of rah-rah and haha, and if the last year somehow loses momentum, it does not much

matterthe audience needs a rest by that time anyway. Bing gives it the old college try, and if he

cannot sing so well as he used to or act any better than he ever did, that does not much matter either. A

younger generationrepresented mainly by France's Nicole Maurey, by a sort of Elvis Presley with

muscles called Fabian, and by a starlet known as Tuesday Weld, who displays at least as much acting

ability as Monday Washtakes over with plenty of energy, if not much style. And Director Blake

Edwards runs the show with all sorts of technical razzle-dazzle: the wide-screen wipes are a clever

touch, the hurry-ups are corny but funny, and some of the blackouts are just great.

Carry On, Nurse (Anglo-Amalgamated; Governor Films). "Good heavens, no!" the male patient sputtersshyly to the two young nurses who propose to remove his drawers. "I'll do it myself if you don't mind.''

They do mind, and with Amazonian zest they pants the poor chap and dump him in the sack. "There

now," one of them remarks, "what a fussabout such a little thing!"

The incident sets a standard that the rest of this bedpan farce from Britain rarely tries to rise above. The

picture begins with a pubic shave, continues with a ceremony involving a suppository, settles down to

some steady vomiting, wakes up with a scene full of toilet-paper streamers.


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The humor of these situations may largely be lost on people who have successfully completed their

toilet training, but the phenomenal popularity of Carry On, Nurse would suggest that they are not in the

majority. Produced for less than $250,000, the film last year made more money ($1,400,000) than any

other picture exhibited in England, and in international distribution it smashed house records from

Stockholm to Singapore. Offered to Manhattan's pickity midtown exhibitors, Carry On, Nurse was

thumbsed down as "one of those British jokes that nobody here will get." So it opened in Los Angeles

without benefit of New York reviews, and there, after 27 weeks in the same theater, it is still going

strong. It is still going strong in Denver and St. Louis (17 weeks), in Boston (16 weeks), in Chicago (16

weeks), in Dallas (15 weeks), in Milwaukee (12 weeks). Across the U.S., in fact, it has already netted its

distributors more than $1,000,000 in film rentals alone, and will probably triple that total. Gross

earnings, cash across the counter, are expected to approach $10 million.

The end, moreover, is not yet. Carry On, Nurse is just one of a series of sillies (Carry On, Sergeant; Carry

On, Teacher; Carry On, Constable) that Anglo-Amalgamated plans to release in the U.S. and seems

prepared to carry on indefinitely.

* A distant relation of Sir Rabindranath Tagore, the Bengalese poet who died in 1941.

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