Cobra Verde (1987)
Werner Herzog and Klaus Kinski made five films together between 1972 and 1987, and the story of that partnership has, by now, almost eclipsed the films themselves. Herzog's 1999 documentary My Best Fiend laid it all out in uncomfortable detail: the threats, the tantrums, the mutual fascination that somehow kept pulling them back into the same room. Cobra Verde was the last of their joint efforts, and it arrived at a moment when the New German Cinema movement that had propelled Herzog to international prominence was already losing momentum. Based on Bruce Chatwin's 1980 novel The Viceroy of Ouidah, the film takes a loosely historical figure, Francisco Félix de Sousa, a 19th-century Portuguese-Brazilian slave trader who became a significant power broker on the West African coast, and turns him into something approaching a mythic antihero. Chatwin's source material is lean and elliptical; Herzog, characteristically, uses it as a launching pad rather than a blueprint.
The production was, by any measure, a serious undertaking. Filmed partly in Brazil and partly in Ghana, with the Ghana Film Industry Corporation coming on board as a co-producer alongside Herzog's own production company and the German broadcaster ZDF, it represented one of the more unusual international co-productions of the era. For context on the kind of filmmaking coming out of West Africa at the same time, it's worth noting that 1987 also gave us Yeelen, the Malian epic from Souleymane Cissé, which handled questions of power and tradition with a very different kind of authority. Herzog, for his part, was working in territory that had long interested him: the colonial encounter, the individual will pressed up against an indifferent landscape, the spectacle of human folly played out on a grand, sweat-soaked stage. That territory will be familiar to anyone who has read Macca's thoughts on Fitzcarraldo, which shares more than a passing resemblance to this film in its preoccupations and its sheer physical ambition. Herzog also brought in Ghanaian director King Ampaw as a co-writer, which gave the African portions of the script at least some grounding in local knowledge, even if the finished film remains, unmistakably, a Herzog picture from first frame to last.
As for Klaus Kinski, his presence here is, depending on your tolerance for full-throttle performance, either the film's greatest asset or its most persistent problem. Kinski had, by the mid-1980s, developed a screen persona that was essentially a single, very high-pitched note played at maximum volume. That approach had served him brilliantly in roles where his volatility was channelled and contained, in Nosferatu, in Woyzeck, in his early spaghetti westerns. The supporting cast includes José Lewgoy, a Brazilian veteran with dozens of films behind him, Salvatore Basile, and Peter Berling, a Herzog regular who appeared in several of the director's productions across this period. The Ghanaian sections of the film also feature non-professional performers, most notably a large ensemble of local women who were trained for a key sequence, which gives those scenes an energy and a rawness that sits at odds with the more constructed elements elsewhere. For those interested in cinematic portrayals of West Africa made around this time, Macca's review of Da Yie offers a more contemporary Ghanaian perspective worth reading alongside this one.
Whenever the names Werner Herzog and Klaus Kinski are mentioned in the same breath, the words "toxic relationship" practically echoes through the cinema halls. Their final collaboration, 1987’s Cobra Verde, is a glaring reminder of why.
I often find myself wondering why on earth they kept going back to each other, given the legendary, explosive hostility between them. While Kinski is undeniably a force of nature, I’ve always felt he is far better utilised as a volatile supporting character rather than the absolute lead. Here, tasked with carrying the entire film, his performance feels a bit of a miss. Less a compelling character study and more a grating, unhinged shouting match that quickly wears out its welcome.
The narrative follows a ruthless Brazilian bandit known as "Cobra Verde" who is exiled to a decaying plantation in Ghana. In a desperate bid for power, he involves himself in the grim realities of the local slave trade, only to eventually set sail for Brazil, the very destination of those enslaved, blissfully unaware that the trade has been outlawed there. It certainly has that familiar, arduous Herzogian feel to it; you can practically feel the sweat and the logistical nightmare of the production, much like Fitzcarraldo. However, it lacks the sheer, madcap ambition that made that earlier film so compelling, leaving this outing feeling somewhat hollow and meandering.
It isn't entirely without merit. It is pure Herzog in its thematic ambitions, packed with heavy social commentary and a palpable sense of underlying tension regarding colonialism and human greed. I must also give a nod to the production's casting choices; featuring an actual Ghanaian king in one of the roles was a genuinely cool, authentic touch. It grounds the otherwise theatrical proceedings and adds a layer of historical weight that the rest of the film desperately needed to anchor its lofty ideas.
I really don't think this film worked all that well as a cohesive piece of cinema. It remains a fascinating historical footnote, serving as the final curtain call for one of the medium’s most notoriously fractured director-actor partnerships. But as a standalone watch, it struggles to justify its runtime, feeling more like a stubborn exercise in endurance than a truly engaging narrative. It is a heavy, occasionally interesting, but ultimately exhausting experience.
Cobra Verde occupies an awkward position in Herzog's filmography: too personal to dismiss, too uneven to champion without reservation. It has found a modest critical rehabilitation in the years since its release, partly because the questions it circles around, colonial exploitation, the psychology of the outsider who becomes complicit in the systems he claims to oppose, have only grown more relevant, and partly because the circumstances of its making carry a kind of grim fascination all their own. Whether you come to it as a Herzog completist, a student of colonial history on film, or simply someone curious about how a director and his star managed to keep working together long past the point of mutual destruction, there is material here to chew on. It is not, to be clear, an easy or straightforwardly rewarding watch. But then, very little that Herzog touches ever really is, and that stubbornness is, depending on the day, either his greatest quality or his most maddening one.
Rating: ★★★ | Year: 1987 | Watched: 2026-08-04
Trailer
▶ Watch the official trailer for Cobra Verde (1987) on YouTube
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