As Aguirre, Klaus Kinski, wearing a metal helmet that seemed to be soldered to his skull, had so little to do that he kept acting up a grotesque storm. Aguirre's glassy blue eyes didn't blink; they seemed to have popped open and stayed that way. He was like an angry, domineering Bette Davis....

The imagery of Aguirre—visionary, skewed, cuckoo—was a hallucinatory horror trip. The film took the edge off Coppola's still-to-come version of Conrad's dreamlike Heart of Darkness; Herzog had made the white-intruders-vs.-the-natives trip first. (Some moviegoers cheered each time an Indian's poisoned arrow hit its mark.) Apocalypse Now was clearly influenced by Aguirre. and Coppola may have acknowledged the debt in a visual gesture: his image of a wrecked plane nesting in a tree was possibly an homage to Herzog. though it couldn't match the shivery wit of that boat. Coppola's image could be accounted for; Herzog's had the purity of madness.