He also loves opera beyond good sense, and comes up with a scheme to build an opera house in Iquitos so that his idol, the great opera star Enrico Caruso, will come and sing there. This seems an improvement on his previous wacky scheme to sell ice to Peruvian Indians. The catch is that his scheme to become a rubber baron requires him to stake a claim to some land that is upriver, on the Pachitea, an Amazon tributary laden with headshrinkers. This requires him to haul his steamboat, bought for him by Molly and renamed the Molly Aida, up the side of a small mountain, so that he can access a cache of rubber trees on four hundred square miles of land that Molly buys the rights to but are thought to be worthless because deadly rapids prevent boats from reaching them.
However, Fitz makes it over the mountain, then unsuccessfully avoids the rapids in the river on the other side of the mountain. The Indians who helped him set his boat free, as it is revealed that the reason they helped him and set the boat free was to fulfill a prophecy to exorcise the rapids of demons. Eventually, Fitz makes it back to Iquitos, having failed to make his fortune, but still able to bring an opera company to his town, if not an opera house, as they sail into town singing an aria from I Puritani, even though he has been bought out by the steamboat’s original owner, Don Aquilino (Jose Lewgoy), and saved from total ruin again.
The film violates so many Hollywood precepts of what should be in a film like this. First, although we see that Fitz and Molly are in love, their romance is briefly limned. One might complain that more of Cardinale’s legendary looks and flesh should be on display, but for the brief rapture that would bring, the film would pay a price in banality.
Then there is Herzog’s famed ‘eye level realism’. Like Aguirre, this film, while it has some airborne shots and vistas, is mostly told as if the camera is right there with Fitz and his crew. There is no God-like all-seeing eye that lets the viewer know things the characters do not. We thus empathize far more with them.
The film also takes a good hour before the journey upriver begins. In this way we spend the first portion of the film getting a sense of Fitz, the town, and the locals, much as is done in a film whose narrative structure is manifestly written into this film’s DNA — Henri-Georges Clouzot’s 1953 black and white masterpiece The Wages Of Fear, which also takes an hour to set up its characters before setting them on their adventure, also in South America.
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