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Werner Herzog takes another river trip (after Aguirre, the Wrath of God), this time with the impossibly scary-looking Klaus Kinski as an only semi-insane man who wants to bring together Enrico Caruso and Sarah Bernhardt for an opera. (And you only thought it was about an Italian dance.) In so doing, he navigates a Peruvian river in order to harvest its rubber trees, goading a group of Indians into lifting his steamboat over the mountains. If there's a point to this, it's what Herzog's point always is: That obsession can drive you nuts. I'm not sure I needed a freaky German traipsing through the jungle for 2 1/2 hours to drive that point home, but there you have it. The contraption built to hault the boat over the mountains, however, is quite an astonishing thing to behold.
