I just got the Herzog collection, and watched Fitzcarraldo first. The German and English tracks for that film are both equally awful. I can't believe how bad the first hour is, especially. What's worse is that in the documentary, My Best Fiend, we can hear Kinski doing the tree top and bell tower scenes perfectly in his own own German voice. So why the hell did they go with crappy dubs?

Is there a video version that has the original languages, and no dubbing? I realize other cast members were over dubbed, and for good reason, but Kinski could speak English very well, and yet he's overdubbed anyway. It's not his voice we hear in either German or English. Even Claudia sounds terrible, with all that additional breathing.


PS - How goofy were Robards and Jagger compared to Kinski in the bell tower scene? Thank God Kinski got the role, even though it cost Herzog a lot of wasted time and energy.

PPS - Anyone know where I can get the documentary on the film, "Burden of Dreams: Making Fitzcarraldo" by Les Blank? Has anyone seen it? Is it that good?

http://www.dvdtalk.com/forum/showthr...hreadid=346646

A recent thread reported that Criterion would be releasing this doc. at the end of this year.
I've never seen it before.

The movie was shot in english you know.

Okay, I've seen Nosferatu, and the little making of, and when they practice their scenes for the camera, they speak in English, though they obviously speak in German for the movie. So, maybe in the footage in My Best Fiend, they did it in German for some reason.

However, that doesn't excuse the horrible ADR job they did for the whole length of Fitzcarraldo. Has anyone recently listened to it? Is there a better source/version?

Herzog shot Nosferatu completely in GERMAN AND ENGLISH!!! You can get both cuts on the original Anchor Bay DVD (flipper now OOP) or the new 2-Disc Nosferatu set. Unfortunatly the Herzog set only has the German language dvd.

I don't remember anything bad about the audio in Fitzcarraldo, but I haven't seen it in 3 year or more.

A lot of European films at that time were looped. In Italy I believe *all* movies were dubbed. It saved money and solved problems with international casts (e.g. one actor's speaking Italian and the other English).

I think Herzog even addresses this in one of the Anchor Bay commentaries, and expresses his preference for the German dub.

The Aguirre DVD has an example where the dub is preferable to the subtitles: one of the soldiers is killed with a spear and the English subtitles has him saying, "The long spears are becoming more fashionable." In the English dub, the soldier says "I thought it would hurt more than this." Definitely preferable to the subtitled version! Kinski's voice, however, is far more sinister in the German dub.