Undescribable Perfection

Great movie! If you want to be entertained and have a few good laughs, see this movie. The music is also very good,

This is a gorgeous movie made by a gorgeous spirit.

This movie tries so hard to be funny, yet it falls flat every time. Just another example of recycled ideas repackaged with women in an attempt to appeal to a certain audience.

Francisco da Silva (Klaus Kinski), known as the bandit Cobra Verde, muses wistfully: "I long to go forth from here to another world." Barefoot and penniless, he resorts to robbery whenever the opportunity presents itself and villagers flee at the sight of him. At a slave auction, he intercepts a young slave trying to flee. "Don't run away," he tells the man: "It'll only be worse for you." HOW it could be worse is never really explained, but da Silva's handling of the situation so impresses a sugar plantation owner that he hires da Silva to be his overseer on the spot. Da Silva promptly knocks up the man's three young mulatto daughters. This leads to his "assignment" to an abandoned Brazilian fortress on the West coast of Africa. It's reckoned that he won't survive there because the slave trade is being interrupted on the high seas by British ships and because the Africans themselves have tired of doing (dirty) business with White Men. He begins to amass slaves for shipment, only to find that his shipments are being hijacked by the very men who sent him to the island. He is captured by a tribe of Africans and prepared for execution: his face is painted black (because the Africans "can't kill a White Man") and he's trussed up and delivered to the local King for Final Judgement. He's (obviously) upset: "In this place, the dead are more alive than the living." The night before his execution, he's rescued by rebels led by the "insane" Prince of the same tribe that wants to kill him and is put in charge of training a (topless) female army of "Amazons" to overpower the feckless male tribesmen. (NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC was never THIS graphic...) COBRA VERDE is an outstanding piece of filmmaking (par for the course for Herzog) and manages to deal with a touchy subject far more effectively than any other movie I've seen about same (slavery). While it's uncomfortable, indeed, to see Kinski leering at some of the (topless) young girls who come out to sing for him, it's well within the bounds of believability. It's one of the Truest moments in the movie, an unabashed look into the Dark Heart of us all. "Slavery is an element of the human heart," Kinski observes: "To our ruin!" The ending, in which a young man horribly disfigured by polio dogs Kinski's heels as he seeks to leave the island, is the perfect denouement.

In the Nineteenth Century, in Bahia, the bandit Francisco Manoel da Silva aka Cobra Verde (Klaus Kinski) is feared and respected by the locals. He is hired by the lord Octavio Coutinho (José Lewgoy) to work as henchman in one of his plantations of sugar cane, supervising the slaves and the production of sugar. When the three daughters of Octavio are pregnant of Cobra Verde, he is sent to Almeria, in the West of Africa, to negotiate slaves with the crazy African King Abomey, in times when this trade was prohibited by Great Britain. The loneliness associated to the fact of being the only white man in Almeria drives Cobra Verde to insanity."Cobra Verde" is boring and non-sense, and certainly the worst movie of Werner Herzog that I have seen so far. Watching this movie actually gives the sensation of seeing a samba-school in the carnival of Rio de Janeiro, with absurd inconsistencies like, for example, the blonde Klaus Kinski performing a Brazilian; the Brazilian and African characters speak German, but the natives sing in their dialect; the title "Don" is not used in Brazil. Last but not the least, Klaus Kinski insane character seems to be a déjà vu of Don Lope de Aguirre. My vote is five.Title (Brazil): "Cobra Verde" ("Green Snake")

This review is for Kinski fans only.I don't think this should even be classed as a Herzog/Kinski film. Kinski is barely in it. Count his lines and you'll see that there are only about 20. The camera rarely shows his face (most shots are from behind or far away), and in most of his scenes, he's just one figure amidst a chaotic jumble of extras--thousands of extras (I'm not exaggerating). If I were to clock Kinski's screen time in this 2hr movie, it would probably come out to ~25 mins.OK, the lack of Kinski doesn't necessarily make it a bad movie. But in the case of Herzog, I believe his art suffers tremendously. Herzog/Kinski is one of those great partnerships that comes along once in a blue moon. Think Audrey Hepburn/Billy Wilder. Or Gene Wilder/Mel Brooks. Break up the team and you break up the magic. In COBRA VERDE, I think we start to see Herzog's departure from Kinski's powerful drama, and instead Herzog chooses to let the African culture and the landscape tell the tale. In contrast to Kinski's 25 mins on screen, we get at least an hour of African tribal rituals, songs, and general mayhem. I'm sure it required a great effort to coordinate/choreograph thousands of extras, but that wasn't what I was looking for (nor do I expect that's what most Kinski fans are looking for). I wanted to see some powerful, passionate acting elicited from Kinski as only Herzog could do, as he did in WOYZECK and AGUIRRE.Sure, Kinski does a great job, but there's only so much that an actor can convey when the camera is following hundreds of half-naked Amazon women across the beach. His character required--DEMANDED--the camera's attention, but instead he only got the lower left corner.My ratings for the Herzog Kinski films:AGUIRRE: 9/10FITZCARRALDO: 9/10WOYZECK: 10/10NOSFERATU: 8/10COBRA VERDE: 4/10

"Cobra Verde" is probably the less brilliant movie that Werner Herzog and Klaus Kinski made together. It's the story of a Portuguese bandit that eventually becomes the Viceroy of some African region (when Portugal had some colonies over there).This time the making of the film wasn't as chaotic as it was in "Aguirre" or "Fitzcarraldo", what let Herzog recreate himself filming the deserted landscapes and the native women, and that's precisely what spoils the movie's rhythm. It looks like Herzog fell in love so much with those African natives that he couldn't help to fill dozens of sequences with their rites and their dance (and that stuff does not contribute in anything to the story).Anyway, "Cobra Verde" is just a MUST SEE for those who really like the madman Kinski (just like I do) , because he released his temper and his anger one more time in this performing. You can never know when Kinski is gonna explode.*My rate: 6/10