Cobra Verde
Werner Herzog, Germany, 1988 (7.8*)
Another of director Herzog's adventure films in South America with madman actor Klaus Kinski. Kinski here plays a local Spanish bandit, named Francisco Manoel da Silva, but called Cobra Verde by the locale natives, a man avoided by all when he wanders into town.
A local plantation owner decides he is just the sort of man to oversee his slave operation for his massive sugar cane farms. He soon impregnates all his daughters, and as punishment, is sent to Africa to manage slave procurement there, work not completed in a decade due to local uprisings. The authorities are certain they are sending Cobra Verde off to his death.
However, like Herzog's other films with Kinski, this is about a white man surviving and interacting with local indigenous populations. Though not as fully satisfying as Fitzcarraldo and Aguirre, The Wrath of God, this is the last of their five films together as Kinski died soon after this release, and is still a worthy entry into what could be called the "South American Trilogy" of the Herzog-Kinski collaborations.
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