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The first shots of Cobra Verde are suitably desolate. Scorched ranch land has cracked and shrunk from years of drought into the flaking scales of a great, dead dragon, and an introductory close-up of Klaus Kinski’s sunburnt, thinning hair zooms out to show the man, Francisco Manoel, kneeling before a grave surrounded by the bleached bones of his long-dead cattle. This is classic Herzog, conflating the torrential misery of his volcanic muse with a hard environment that, though shot in documentary-like fashion, feels like an expressionistic rendering of the protagonist’s folly.
And therein lies the problem. After two decades of invigorating, abstruse documentaries and narrative films that explored various contours of human ambition and madness (and the thin line separating the two), Herzog reveals the limits of that theme with the fifth and final of his collaborations with Kinski. The film feels like a pastiche of the pair’s four previous, wildly variant features. Etched in Kinski’s haggard, worn face is the inevitability that this would be the duo’s last work together, not simply for the actor’s failing health but for their inability to match the unpredictability of their previous work.
Prior to this film, the most straightforward of Herzog’s movies had been his Nosferatu remake with Kinski, which went so far as to recycle locations from Murnau’s original. But even that film displayed the director’s knack for upending expectations, producing an Italo disco riff on the material that foregrounded the repressed sensuality but narcotized it into an opium slur. Comparatively, Cobra Verde is an old-school western, albeit one transplanted to Brazil and, later, Africa. Forced to take work as a gold miner then turned into an outlaw when he kills his boss for cheating him out of wages, Francisco becomes “Cobra Verde,” a bandit who raids towns and impregnates a local sugar plantation owner’s daughters. Kinski makes a good Western villain; indeed, he already had, as a star in several Spaghetti Westerns like The Great Silence.
But when Francisco is exiled to Africa to reestablish the Portuguese slave trade, the film takes a political turn that the more metaphysically inclined Herzog is not prepared to handle. Slaves dot several of the director’s other films set in a long-ago time in a span of inhospitable land, but usually as part of a teeming ecosystem of misery, an anthill that Herzog promptly set aflame with a magnifying glass. Here, however, the politics and economy of slavery are foregrounded, at least by the script. Herzog, meanwhile, continues to film in his usual spaced-out way, which now conflicts with the material instead of giving it life. The director regularly shows the bleak amorality of slavery, as in an early scene of Francisco and the sugar don calmly standing over a slave whose arm is being crushed by a cane grinder, the latter reassuring the former that this sort of thing happens all the time as he calls for a machete. But for the most part, Herzog goes off to do his own thing, shooting extended reveries of jungles or unexplained African rituals he observes with total curiosity. This approach ordinarily works for the director, but in such a narrative-driven film, it feels perfunctory and tedious.
Released in 1987, the film shares much in common with two other neo-Westerns released the same year: Alex Cox’s metatextual Walker and Walter Hill’s present-set Extreme Prejudice. All three craft classic Westerns in unorthodox places and time periods, yet the other two face their political implications directly, castigating not only the racist history the genre represents but the manner it reverberated in present reality, especially under the leadership of a president who conflated Hollywood and actual history to suit his own Manifest Destiny excursions in Latin America. Compared to the vituperative, young energy of those films, Herzog’s cannot help but look tired, finding its most honest moments in Francisco’s weariness at the end. “Finally, something happened,” the slave master tells his aide upon hearing that Portugal has outlawed slavery and targeted him for retroactive crimes—and for a movie filled with globetrotting conquest, tribal warfare and Kinski’s fury, it’s hard not to agree with the man.
There are some graceful moments of profundity here and there, such as Francisco’s admiration of the hunchback barkeep who is the only person in a Brazilian village not to flee him on sight (“You stand straighter than the whole town!”). Yet as Kinski collapses into the sea at the end of the film, not from the bloody revenge of the freed Africans under his eradicated control but his simple exhaustion, one can see on screen the ragged ceasefire that ends one of cinema’s most volatile, rewarding teams.