The New Biographical Dictionary of Film: Completely Updated and Expanded (190 page)

You may notice, on reflection, that music was written for
Camelot
by Alan Jay Lerner and Frederick Loewe. Equally,
The King and I
occupied Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein for many moons.
Call Me Madam
was from a show by Irving Berlin, who had much to do with
Alexander’s Ragtime Band
, too. You go back to Mr. Newman’s list and you recollect, gratefully, that lovely, soupy song, “Love Is a Many Splendored Thing”—written by Sammy Fain and Paul Francis Webster (they got an Oscar for the song).

So music is a funny business. The great and indispensable Bernard Herrmann won just once—for
All That Money Can Buy
(41, William Dieterle). That was the beginning of Herrmann’s movie career (the Dieterle film beat out
Citizen Kane
). At its close, Herrmann’s score for
Taxi Driver
(76, Martin Scorsese) lost out to Jerry Goldsmith’s for
The Omen
.

Why choose Herrmann above all others? I believe he was the best. He had an overall theatrical sense: he had worked with Orson Welles in radio, and he supplied the lazy, “live” and louche sounds of Ramón Raquello from the Meridian Room in the Park Plaza in
The War of the Worlds
. But, more than that, Herrmann gave himself to the art of Welles, Hitchcock, Truffaut, and Scorsese. He knew how to make music that came not just from the action we are seeing or the characters, not just from the heart of a film or the incoherent dream of its director, but from the unique marriage of a particular film and the large medium. Herrmann knew how lovely the dark should be, and he was at his best in rites of dismay, dark dreams, introspection, and the gloomy romance of loneliness. No one else would have dared or known to make the score for
Taxi Driver
such a lament for impossible love. Try that film without the music and the violence is nearly unbearable. Yet the score for
Taxi Driver
is universally cinematic: it speaks to sitting in the dark, full of dread and desire, watching.

The list:
Citizen Kane
(41, Orson Welles), including the “opera”;
The Magnificent Ambersons
(42, Welles);
Jane Eyre
(44, Robert Stevenson); the lurid, hammering piano for
Hangover Square
(45, John Brahm);
Anna and the King of Siam
(46, John Cromwell);
The Ghost and Mrs. Muir
(47, Joseph L. Mankiewicz);
The Day the Earth Stood Still
(51, Robert Wise); brilliant alarums and brooding excursions for
On Dangerous Ground
(51, Nicholas Ray);
Five Fingers
(52, Mankiewicz);
The Snows of Kilimanjaro
(52, Henry King); rich underwater effects in
Beneath the Twelve Mile Reef
(53, Robert Webb);
The Wages of Fear
(53, Henri-Georges Clouzot);
White Witch Doctor
(53, Henry Hathaway);
The Egyptian
(54, Michael Curtiz); a resonant stereo score for
Garden of Evil
(54, Hathaway);
King of the Khyber Rifles
(54, King);
The Kentuckian
(55, Burt Lancaster);
The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit
(56, Nunnally Johnson); and
Prince of Players
(55, Philip Dunne).

Herrmann worked with Hitchcock for the first time on
The Trouble with Harry
(56), and he actually played the Albert Hall conductor in
The Man Who Knew Too Much
(56). He also did the bass-broody score for the story of a wronged bassist,
The Wrong Man
(57, Hitchcock);
A Hatful of Rain
(57, Fred Zinnemann);
The 7th Voyage of Sinbad
(58, Nathan Juran);
The Fiend Who Walked the West
(58, Gordon Douglas); and
The Naked and the Dead
(58, Raoul Walsh).

Then came
Vertigo
(58, Hitchcock), music that pioneered a blending of fatal romance, mystery, and horror—it was a uniquely psychological score;
Blue Denim
(59, Dunne);
Journey to the Center of the Earth
(59, Henry Levin);
North by Northwest
(59, Hitchcock);
Psycho
(60, Hitchcock), with sly borrowings from Beethoven’s
Eroica
—Norman’s favorite music;
The Three Worlds of Gulliver
(60, Jack Sher);
Mysterious Island
(61, Cy Endfield);
Cape Fear
(62, J. Lee Thompson);
Tender Is the Night
(62, King);
The Birds
(63, Hitchcock), where the music is indistinguishable from the overall sound design;
Jason and the Argonauts
(63, Don Chaffey);
Marnie
(64, Hitchcock);
Joy in the Morning
(65, Alex Segal);
Fahrenheit 451
(66, François Truffaut);
The Bride Wore Black
(68, Truffaut);
The Night Digger
(71, Alastair Reid);
Endless Night
(71, Sidney Gilliat);
Sisters
(73, Brian De Palma);
It’s Alive!
(74, Larry Cohen);
Obsession
(76, De Palma); and
Taxi Driver
(76, Scorsese).

Werner Herzog
(Werner Stipetic), b. Sachrang, Germany, 1942
1962:
Herakles
(s). 1964:
Spiel im Sand
(s). 1966:
Die Beispiellose Verteidigung der Festung Deutschkreutz/The Unprecedented Defense of the Fortress “Deutschkreutz”
(s). 1967:
Letzte Worte/Last Words
(s);
Lebenszeichen/Signs of Life
. 1968:
Massnahmen Gegen Fanatiker/Measures Against Fanatics
(s). 1969:
Die Fliegenden Arzte von Ostafrika/The Flying Doctors of East Africa
(d). 1970:
Auch Zwerge Haben Klein Angefangen/Even Dwarfs Started Small; Fata Morgana
. 1971:
Land des Schweigens und der Dunkelheit/Land of Silence and Darkness
(d). 1972:
Aguirre, der Zorn Gottes/Aguirre, the Wrath of God
. 1974:
Jeder Für Sich und Gott Gegen Alle/Each Man for Himself and God Against All/The Enigma of Kaspar Hauser
. 1975:
Die Grosse Ekstase des Bildschnitzers Steiner/The Great Ecstasy of Woodcarver Steiner
(s). 1976:
Herz aus Glas/Heart of Glass
. 1977:
La Soufrière
(d);
How Much Wood Would a Woodchuck Chuck
(d);
Stroszek
. 1979:
Nosferatu: Phantom der Nacht; Woyzeck
. 1980:
Huie’s Sermon
(d);
Glaube und Wahrung/Faith and Fortitude
(d). 1982:
Fitzcarraldo
. 1983:
Wo die Grünen Ameisen Traumen/Where the Green Ants Dream
. 1984:
Ballade von Kleinen Soldaten/Ballad of the Little Soldier
(d). 1985:
Gasherbrum, Der Leuchtende Berg/Gasherbrum, The Little White Peak
(d). 1988:
Cobra Verde; Herdsmen of the Sun
(d). 1990:
Echos aus Einem Düsteren Reich
(d). 1991:
Schrei aus Stein/Scream of Stone
. 1992:
Lessons of Darkness
(d);
La Donna del Lago
. 1993:
Glocken aus der Tiefe
(d). 1994:
Die Verwandlung der Welt in Musik
(d). 1995:
Tod für Fünf Stimmen
(d). 1997:
Little Dieter Needs to Fly
(d). 1998:
Julianes Sturz in den Dschungel/Wings of Hope
(d). 1999:
Mein Liebster Feind—Klaus Kinski
. 2001:
Invincible; Pilgrimage
(d). 2002: “Ten Thousand Years Older,” episode from
Ten Minutes Older: The Trumpet
. 2003:
Wheel of Time
(d). 2004:
The White Diamond
(d). 2005:
The Wild Blue Yonder; Grizzly Man
(d). 2007:
Rescue Dawn; Encounters at the End of the World
(d). 2009:
Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call—New Orleans
. 2010:
My Son, My Son, What Have Ye Done?

In 1965, it would not have been credited that West Germany might hold a leading place in radical filmmaking. Perhaps it was the specially clotted character of German movies, and the rigid industrial setup, that provoked the German outburst that followed. With Alexander Kluge and Volker Schlondorff as harbingers and very valuable support, West Germany became the base for exceptional directors: Rainer Werner Fassbinder, Jean-Marie Straub, Wim Wenders, and Werner Herzog.

A student of literature and theatre, Herzog was at the University of Pittsburgh and worked briefly in American TV. An enthusiastic traveler, he began with several shorts and documentaries before making his first feature in 1967.
Signs of Life
is a title and film that predicts Herzog’s work. Ostensibly a Second World War picture, it is far more an allegory that deals with the hopeless and tragic struggle between social forms and the rebellious individual’s self-assertion, between order and life. Its situation is that of a young German soldier on a Greek island whose self-destructive standing out against the army is less local than mythological.

It was immediately clear that Herzog possessed a quick sense of narrative; a withdrawn, mobile camera; and a dark, inquisitive humor. All these characteristics were concentrated in the apocalypse of
Even Dwarfs Started Small
, a pungent and brutal parable about an institution of dwarfs that turns against its governor. The grotesqueness of the dwarfs becomes as apt a comment on the warped nature of mankind as, say, the school authorities in
Zéro de Conduite
or the pillars of society in
L’Age d’Or
.

This was followed by the extraordinary
Fata Morgana
, filmed entirely in the Sahara and based on an Indian creation legend. Once again, desert is a model for mankind. The film is in three sections: the first showing an unpeopled, beautiful wasteland; the second introducing signs of human wreckage; and the third showing wretched vestiges of life. Totally imaginative, it is a legend of life at extremes that exposes the fatuity of
2001
. Whereas Kubrick glibly assumes some all-powerful, riddle-making consciousness behind the universe, Herzog’s creator is as fallible, quirky, and uncertain as man himself. The camera style for Herzog is the steady source of reason, simultaneously describing the beauty and the madness of the desert.

Land of Silence and Darkness
is a feature-length documentary about a middle-aged German woman, deaf and blind, who tries to help fellow-sufferers. Herzog avoids sentimentality and uses the handicapped people—as he does dwarfs and the desert—to bring out the primitive, incommunicable nature of people. The film catches that sense of dangerous, private freedom alluded to by Arthur Penn in
The Miracle Worker
. Most strikingly, the elements of documentary—the real German, actual sufferers—are subsumed by the larger idea of man’s being his own handicap. In this film, Herzog established how far he stood apart from socialist cinema in Germany; he stressed the innately damaged quality of man as being natural, essential, and insuperable. That said, the liberated experience of the band of handicapped people is often very touching and exciting, but in the way that the dwarf community bristled with its own flawed nature.

Not to settle or become labeled, Herzog went to Peru to make
Aguirre
, about a band of conquistadors in search of El Dorado. Herzog’s reserved, observant style easily adapts to adventure and epic locales, and the film is paced with exciting action sequences. But its subject is turned to a Herzog extreme: Aguirre’s band becomes increasingly wild, destructive, and pathological, as if the South American setting were reverting to desert and the animal humans destroying themselves. Again one recollects the Buñuel of
L’Age d’Or
, but Herzog has made a vivid identification with Aguirre, a psychotic optimist who ends cast adrift on a raft with dead men and living apes. The film was all the more powerful (and conventional) because of Herzog’s first real identification with an actor—the willful, manic Klaus Kinski.

As attention fell on Herzog, so his pursuit of extremism became a little more studied; it began to seem more zealous than natural. But
Kaspar Hauser
was one of his best works;
La Soufrière
was a magnificent deadpan (or deadcone) joke; and
Stroszek
, for all its failure, sees America as part of the kingdom of silence and darkness.

Herzog pictures were events in the seventies, but they have become very hard to see.
Fitzcarraldo
was the last film to get wide screenings. Its story of opera in the jungle and a boat being carried over a mountain was effective, but it came close to being a parody of Herzog. And that was the close of the partnership Herzog had had with Klaus Kinski. So he lost the actor, yet he has never run out of mountains, remote locations, and epic trials of will. Perhaps the sameness has affected Herzog. Going too often to extremes can turn the remoteness into a habit. Herzog lives in California now, and he has great dreams—of a big feature film about Cortés and Montezuma. But he has to follow stricter economies, and a lot of his recent films have been personal documentaries. Several are haunted by music—bells in religion; opera—but always the subject of ecstatic/perilous experience pulls at Herzog. He is not the ideal documentarian. You feel he has his mind made up about so many things—and so you do not always want to trust what you are seeing. Grant, too, that one of these documentaries concerns Klaus Kinski—who would, certainly, have had things (and curses) to add. The saddest thing of all was
Invincible
, a fable about magic under the Nazis, that falls like lead on the screen.

In his sixties, and based in Los Angeles (surely the least likely abode for so wild a creature), Herzog is profuse, undisciplined, and unpredictable. It is still very hard to see his documentaries as factual
—Grizzly Man
, for instance, is far more relevant as a sequel to
Aguirre
than as a study in bear behavior. And all the time Herzog’s trancelike, self-hypnotizing voice turns all kinds of narrative or commentary into mythmaking. Sometimes he seems content with amazed picture-making (the scenes from South Pole life, for instance). Sometimes—as in
Bad Lieutenant
, he seems incapable of abandoning or redeeming a terrible idea. But
Grizzly Man
is unforgettable—no matter how hard you try.