Devoured By Demons

Here's an old article about Klaus from the pages of Salon that halfway gets what the actor was all about. While author Cintra Wilson does a good job of understanding the inner demons that drove Kinski in both his professional and personal life, she unjustly disses pretty much everything but his work for Herzog, dismissing his post-AGGUIRE/pre-NOSFERATU output as "a laundry list of schlocky Italian films that nobody has ever heard of."

No matter how many times I read the piece, though, I always get a kick out of this passage about director David Schmoeller's posthumous stabs at the brilliant, but tempermental, star:

Actually, Kinski, for all his awful behavior, is the sole redeeming element of Schmoeller's otherwise worthless, puerile, prurient film. Schmoeller should crawl to put calla lilies on Kinski's grave daily for lifting him from what would otherwise have been a "film career" confined to a couple of dusty video-transfers on his mom's bookshelf.

Somewhere, Klaus is chuckling...