Category: Filmography

Bella Mafia (1997)

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Dir: David Greene
Star: Vanessa Redgrave, Nastassja Kinski, Jennifer Tilly, Dennis Farina

bellamafiaI was curious about this TV mini-series, as it was based on a novel by Lynda La Plante, whose other televisual work we’ve been enjoying of late. She’s pretty much the doyenne of female crime drama, in particular for having created Prime Suspect, the series of films starring Helen Mirren, which ran intermittently for 15 years to much critical acclaim, and inspired innumerable other shows, from The Closer to The Killing, as well as a short-lived US remake. But more relevant to this, is perhaps Widows, her career breakthrough, which had three seasons on British TV in the first half of the eighties (and was also remade for the States). Its focus was a group of women, whose husbands were career criminals: when their men end up getting killed in the course of a botched robbery, they take up the mantle and continue with the plan.

There’s more than an echo of that here, with the series [originally screened in two feature-length episodes, now combined into a single DVD] based on a novel she wrote which was published in 1991, just when Prime Suspect was getting started. It tells the story of the Luciano crime family, part of the Mafiosi operating in Sicily under their patriarch, Don Roberto (Farina) and his wife, Graziana (Redgrave). He refused to allow another family, the Carollas, to traffic drugs through the port, and their boss, Pietro, angrily retaliates, kill Roberto’s son and heir, Michael, leaving his secret girlfriend, Sophia (Kinski), pregnant with his child. The resulting son is given up for adoption, but Sophia ends up marrying another of Roberto’s sons, and joins the family along with other “Mafia wives” Teresa (Illeana Douglas) and Moyra (Tilly).

The years go by, with Teresa having a daughter, Rosa, who grows into a young woman. However, the family has long memories, and are eventually able to have Pietro arrested, albeit not for the murder of Michael. Carolla’s men, and in particular his adopted son Luka, retaliate in savage fashion: the men are poisoned during a celebratory dinner before Rosa’s wedding, and Luka even sneaks into the family home, killing Sophia’s young twin sons. Bereft of all male help, the surviving widows appear easy pickings, as the other mob families look to strip the Lucianos of their remaining assets. Worse still, Luka (literally) bumps into them, and is soon embedding himself like… like an embeddy thing. And this is where the film finally becomes interesting, showcasing the strong female characters for which La Plante is famous, as they have to fight for what’s rightfully theirs [the film, wisely, ignores the fact that these are the proceed of organized crime] and against the snake in their bosom.

Got to love the cast, led by Redgrave – nominated for a Golden Globe as a result of this performance – but ably supported by Kinski, and in particular, Tilly, whose character claws her way up from casino croupier (and, according to her, poodle grooming!) to marry her way to respectability, despite Roberto throwing her out of a family wedding as a “whore” – fair comment, in some ways. But Kinski, with her “devil’s eyes”, cuts no less imposing a figure, particular at the end where it becomes clear that their quest for revenge is not a one-off incident, and Sophia won’t stop until every single person she holds responsible, has paid for their crimes. The male cast, led by Farina, is also pretty good, with support from Tony Lo Bianco, Peter Bogdanovich and Franco Nero, among others, but it’s once they step aside (or, more accurately, get bumped off) that proceedings take on an almost Shakespearean quality of vengeance.

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The big flaw is the story, however, which relies on some quite incredible coincidence. If you didn’t work it out from the synopsis above, and I wouldn’t blame you for missing this nugget, Luka, the psychopathic adopted son of Pietro Carolla, is the grown-up version of the baby given up for adoption by Sophia. This first requires him to find his way to the same institution where Pietro’s real son has been hidden, because his crippled nature is an embarrassment to his father, where the two become best friends. Then, when the real son dies, Pietro is so guilt-stricken that, more or less on the spot, agrees to adopt Luka to make up for not having been a good father. Then, while escaping from one of his killings, Luka runs out in front of a car driven by the women, including his biological mother – who, rather than calling an ambulance, take him back to their house to recuperate, and become one of the family. Yeah, that’s an industrial-sized serving of disbelief you see me suspending.

How much you get out of this depends on whether you fell the undoubted quality of the performances, outweighs the equally incontrovertible shakiness of the plot. Both are more notable in the second half, with the first largely being a case of arranging the various pieces on the board, in preparation for what’s to come. On balance, I think the dramatic nature of the climax does deserve cutting the series some slack. There’s a horrific power to seeing Luka tied up by the women, and Sophia hovering menacingly over him, unaware it’s her own flesh and blood responsible for her situation, and that she’s contemplating killing as a result. It’s certainly a memorable moment, particularly by the low standards of the mini-series genre, and if getting there takes a significant amount of creative fortune, I’m more inclined to forgive this its trespasses, than the ladies involved are to let their bygones be bygones.

Am laufenden Band (1977)

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This was something of a find, and isn’t even listed by the Internet Movie Database in Nastassja’s filmography. I stumbled across the first hint of it while browsing a picture archive, my attention being drawn by the picture above. It and the other, related pictures, showed Kinski with Rudi Carrell, a Dutch-born entertainer who found great success hosting variety programs and game shows in Germany, from the sixties through the nineties. The Rudi Carrell Show was the most well-known, but the picture caption referenced another show of his, Am laudenden Band, which ran for 51 two-hour episodes from 1974 through to 1979.

This combined aspects of both variety and game show. The latter angle pitted four couples, each family members from different generations, against each others, over several rounds of competition, in things like observation, as well as trying to emulate the skills of professionals, e.g. a painter. The eventual winner sat in a chair while a variety of objects passed in front of them on a conveyor belt – hence the title of the show. They then had 30 seconds to remember as many items as they could, and whatever they recalled, they got to keep. [If this sounds more than slightly familiar to British readers, popular seventies series The Generation Game was also based on the same Dutch show that inspired this, Eén van de Eight]

Nastasssja wasn’t actually the first member of the Kinski clan to appear on the show, as father Klaus had appeared on the 11th edition, in March 1975. On New Year’s Eve 1977, in program #35, Nastassja followed suit, playing a mermaid in one of the skits that alternated with the game-show components. Miraculously, someone had uploaded the entire episode to Youtube, which I’ve embedded below for your viewing pleasure. The sketch starts at around one hour, 32 minutes in, with Kinski showing up a couple of minutes later, after castaway Carrell wishes for a woman as he falls asleep. She sings/lip-syncs a song about her life, which begins, somewhat unnecessarily, “I’m half woman, and I’m half fish.” But it has to be said, if I wished for a woman and Kinski showed up, I’d be happy to take the rough – or perhaps, more appropriately, the scaly – with the smooth…


Am laufenden Band (1977)
Am laufenden Band (1977)
Am laufenden Band (1977)
Am laufenden Band (1977)
Am laufenden Band (1977)
Am laufenden Band (1977)
Am laufenden Band (1977)

The Ring (1996)

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Dir: Armand Mastroianni
Star: Nastassja Kinski, Rupert Penry-Jones, Tim DeKay, John Tenney

Which living author has sold the most books? Stephen King? J.K. Rowling? Not even close. The champion is Danielle Steele, with estimates ranging from 500 to 800 million copies sold – for comparison, the number for Rowling, the next-highest, is 350-450 million. Of course, it helps considerably that Steele has written an awful lot more books: 120 since her debut over four decades ago, so her average sale is a good deal less. But she certainly has her market, even if some decry her work as formulaic rubbish, rather than great literature. More than 20 of Steele’s novels have been turned into movies or TV miniseries, including this, a  two-part example of the latter screened on NBC.

It covers the von Gotthard family over a period of almost forty years, beginning with the matriarch’s tryst being rudely interrupted by the Nazis in pre-war Germany, due to her lover being a Jew. He’s shot dead in front of her, and she ends up committing suicide in the bathtub, being discovered by her young daughter, Ariana. A decade later, the war is in full, and Ariana (Kinski), her younger brother Gerhard (Penry-Jones) and their father Walmar (Michael York) are making plans to exit the country before Gerhard is sent to the Russian front. The attention of the authorities is attracted when they help a family friend Max Thomas (DeKay) escape by train, and it’s decided that the father and son will go to Switzerland first, leaving Ariana behind to allay suspicions. However, Walmar is shot trying to cross the border, splitting the family up. It takes a quarter-century of time, and a great deal of drama, before Ariana and Gerhard are re-united.

The thing which strikes me most is how little effort the production puts into showing the passage of time on the heroine. When we first meet Nastassja as Ariana, she must be twenty, based on her being ten (per the IMDb credits) when she discovers her dead mother in the bathtub. In her mid-thirties at the time of filming, Nastassja is probably a little mature, but still fresh-faced enough to pull it off without any real issues. However, the film finishes 27 years later, which would put Ariana near fifty years of age – yet she still looks almost exactly as she did at the start of the movie. The complete lack of effort put into the passage of time is oddly disconcerting, and I was left wondering if, along with the family’s treasured Renoir, there was a painting of Ariana in an attic somewhere, which was aging mysteriously.

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The rest of the film is the kind of melodrama with which you can safely curl up with on the sofa for a rainy winter Sunday afternoon’s entertainment, accompanied by a box of chocolates and a purring cat. The script does a good job of weaving the separate stories of the siblings, along with Max’s to a lesser extent, as they independently make their way out of the chaos that was post-war Germany, and try to make new lives for themselves, with varying success. It’s interesting to compare and contrast the similar kind of issues they face, e.g. pregnancies, be they unwanted or phantom; parental disapproval or demands. The titular ring doesn’t play much of a part in proceedings: it’s simply a family heirloom, passed down from Ariana’s mother to her, and then on to her daughter in law, though it does trigger the eventual reunion with Gerhard [Look, it’s a Danielle Steele book: saying there’s a happy ending is hardly a spoiler]

The acting is generally solid and after a couple of supporting roles, it’s good to see Kinski back at the centre of the film, around which the storyline turns. She delivers a winning performance, very quiet and soft-spoken, but also capable of incandescence, such as the smile when she discovers Gerhard may still be alive. She also possesses her share of steely resolve, most apparent when she’s arrested by the authorities, who want to find out where her father and brother have gone, and she withstands not just incarceration but also more direct brutality, before fortunately being rescued by sympathetic Nazi Manfred Von Tripp  (Carsten Norgaard) – their relationship ends with his death during the defense of Berlin, which is rather unfortunate, since Ariana is pregnant. This is pretty much par for the course here, since her troubles are largely because Ariana is a victim of unfortunate circumstance, rather than poor life choices.

For example, the only way she gets to America is on a Jewish refugee ship, but the pretense of being Jewish required, ends up causing more problems than it solves, further down the road, as she has a relation ship with Jewish refugee worker Paul Liebman (Tenney), whose family brings her into their home, unaware she’s faking her religion. There’s probably a lesson for us all there. Just don’t ask me what it is…  I haven’t read the book, so can’t say in detail how it compares to the film. But it does appear to pay more attention to the mother, which would probably be helpful, as the first time we see her – indeed, it’s the first scene of the entire film – she’s in bed with her lover, which makes her come across as a bit… Well, the word “whorish” does come to mind, and it certainly doesn’t do much to create sympathy for the character. The final reel also requires more than its fair share of disbelief suspension, as Ariana’s son ends up going out with her second husband’s daughter. What are the odds?

I enjoyed this rather more than the first occasion I watched it, back in 1998, when I watched it as the second part of an all-night Nastajssafest, and it seemed more like a test of endurance. This time round, it seemed a lot less of a chore, though I’d hardly call it more than reasonably well-made fluff. As such, it seems perfectly appropriate as an adaptation of Steele’s literary output. Random trivia: also seen here is Leigh Lawson, who played Alec d’Urbeville opposite Nastassja in Tess, almost two decades previously.

[Screenshots from Cosas de Mar]

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The Great War and the Shaping of the 20th Century: Hatred and Hunger (1996)

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Dir: Margaret Koval
Star (voice): Salome Jens, Ian Richardson, Nastassja Kinski, Leslie Caron

rosaThis eight-part documentary series focuses on the period of World War I, from 1914-1918, and also covers the period leading up the assassination of Archduke Ferdinand which kicked things off, and also the chaos which followed the official cessation of hostilities in November 1918. It won two Prime-Time Emmys in 1996, one for Outstanding Informational Series, and the other going to Jeremy Irons for Outstanding Voice-Over Performance. He was just one of a host of famous names who did voice work in the series. Liam Neeson was Adolf Hitler, for example, with Ranulph Fiennes, Helena Bonham-Carter and Gary Oldman among many others involved. Narration was provided by Dame Judy Dench – well, except in the US, where she was replaced, for some reason, by Jens.

The seventh episode takes up after the guns fell silent, and starts by covering the ongoing struggle in Russia, where the new Bolshevik government was fighting a civil war against the White Russians. They also captured the ruling Romanovs, and uses the words of Czarina Aleksandra Romanov (Caron) to tell the story, leading up to the family’s execution. It then switches to Germany, a nation in hardly any less chaos, to tell the story of Rosa Luxemburg (Kinski), a revolutionary socialist whom the documentary says was “the equal of Lenin or Trotsky.” Imprisoned for the last two and a half years of the war, she resumed her political activities on her release. Despite misgivings, she supported the Spartacist uprising promoted by her lover, Karl Liebknecht, After the rebellion was ruthlessly crushed, she was captured, interrogated and, eventually, shot, her body dumped into a canal.

I recognized Kinski’s voice immediately, which is more than can be said for just about anyone else in this episode – and that includes other well-known names, including Martin Sheen, Martin Landau and Ned Beatty. Of course, Kinski had, more or less, cornered the market on German actresses known outside their native land – at the time of the documentary, it was probably her or Hanna Schygulla. Though having the very French Leslie Caron play the Tsarina, suggests true authenticity was not perhaps required. The rest of the documentary discusses the civilian toll due to famine, disease, etc. in post-war Europe, some of which was inflicted on the losers, to encourage them to accept settlement on the victors’ terms. There’s also discussion of the difference in approach to the negotiations taken by America and the colonial powers like Britain in France; the United States wanted self-determination for all, while the European nations were more interested in preserving their empires. My, how times have changed…

And that is as close as you’re going to get to political commentary on this site. It’s not an era with which I have much familiarity, so I certainly learned a lot, though the production falls a bit on the dry side. Not sure things really benefit much from the celeb voice-cast; while good enough, I can’t say I was blown away by any of them in terms of emotion: I also might have preferred Dame Judi doing the narration, but then she is a National Treasure. Definitely a nice change of pace for NK though; if they ever do a biopic version of Luxemburg’s life, maybe they could get Nastassja to play her? Below you can find the audio of the relevant section from the documentary, so you can enjoy her sultry tones.

Terminal Velocity (1994)

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Dir: Deran Serafian
Star: Charlie Sheen, Nastassja Kinski, Christopher McDonald, James Gandolfini

Watching this for the first time in 20 years has a whole new set of resonances that weren’t present originally. I now live in Arizona, where this film is set, rather than London. Co-villain Gandolfini is now inextricably linked to his role as patriarch of The Sopranos, a show still more than four years from making its debut. And Sheen’s subsequent, well-publicized antics act as a amusing backdrop to lines such as “I’m much more than a walking penis – I’m a flying penis!” At least his portrayal of a loudmouthed, arrogant womanizer seems rather more plausible than, say, Sheen as a radio astronomer in The Arrival (coincidentally, written by David Twohy, who also penned this script). One does have to wonder how this might have played if, as originally intended, Tom Cruise had played the role.

It’s probably not a bad thing, particularly because the plot here is so ludicrous, it may well benefit from having someone as the lead who can play it with a self-knowing wink. It involves a bunch of disgruntled former Soviet agents, who hijack a plane full of gold, land it in the Arizona desert, and have plans to return to Russia and use it to fund a coup. Fighting to stop that is “Chris Morrow”, real name Krista Moldova (Kinski), who apparently plunges to her death in what appears to be the latest in the long line of mishaps involving parachuting maverick Richard “Ditch” Brodie (Kinski). With the authorities, in the particular shape of local DA Ben Pinkwater (Gandolfini), Ditch seeks an escape, sure he did everything he should have. He eventually discovers Krista faked her own death because…. reasons…. and she enlists him to help with the battle against her former allies. Which, fortunately, will involve a lot more sky-diving, most notably at the end when they hurtle out the back of a plane in a red Cadillac: he in the driver’s seat, she locked in the boot.

I’ve a lot of time for Twohy, not least for his work on the Riddick franchise, and also A Perfect Getaway, which is far more enjoyable than I should admit. But this one barely deserves to be considered a script, and is much more a paper-thin excuse to link some admittedly spectacular action set-pieces, sprinkled liberally with sexual tension between Ditch and Krista. Though, with this being the nineties and he being Charlie Sheen, it comes over less as tension, and more as harassment. But I was surprised how much of this had apparently stuck in my subconscious. The line “Pack your bags, we’re going on a guilt trip,” used by Ditch, has become one of my go-to phrases over the past two decades, even if I’d forgotten entirely where it came from, and the same goes for the three-legged dog to which Krista refers, that he says must be called “Tripod”. I used that a while back when one of our dogs broke her paw and had to cope with a cast, but similarly, forgot its origin.

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Given the barking insanity of the storyline here, Kinski keeps an admirably straight face through it all, whether parachuting on to a building because… reasons… Or whizzing through the desert on an entirely gratuitous two-seater rocket sled, equipped with a tandem ejector seat – purely, it appears, for that overhead shot of the seat coming towards the camera while a giant fireball explodes beneath it.  Once things get going, she is asked to give less a performance, more of a series of reactions to things  going boom. But she did get some kind reviews, Gary Thompson of the Philadelphia Daily News saying, “It’s awfully nice to see Kinski pick up an automatic pistol and blast away at villains after being cooped up in obscure art pictures all those years. She does quite well, bringing to Terminal Velocity a little of the spunk and sexy chemistry that Sandra Bullock brought to Speed.” Though the New York Times disagreed, saying she “gives a thin, jittery performance that is lacking in both sensuality and feeling.”

Perhaps that was a reflection of the relationship between the two stars: I read vague whispers that was a bit “jittery” as well. Still, in comparison to Crackerjack, which immediately preceded this, Kinski’s character is at least a great deal more pivotal to the plot, although Velocity is likely a good deal less coherent. However, in 1994, $50 million was a lot of money – it was only that year Hollywood made its first ever $100 million film, in True Lies, and for entertainment purposes, it’s much better to be spectacular and dumb, than cheap and dumb. There’s no denying the aerial unit certainly earned their slice of the pie, and considering its age, this aspect has stood up well: you can almost believe Sheen and Kinski are hurtling through the sky, especially when you remember this was made before CGI could be used to make anyone appear to do anything.

However, it wasn’t enough to stand out, particular in a year that, as well as the aforementioned True Lies and Speed, also gave us a plethora of great action films that have remained much more well-regarded, including The Crow, Leon: The Professional and Natural Born Killers. Charlie and Nastassja failed to depose Time Cop, in its second week, from the top slot when Velocity hit American cinemas over the last weekend of September. It ended up not even being the most successful parachuting action movie of 1994, even though this beat to the cinemas Drop Zone, which starred Wesley Snipes as another maverick skydiver who battles criminal activities. Neither came close to recouping their (simlar) budgets, but Drop Zone did earn about 50% more; whether it’s any better, I don’t know, Velocity may simply have prematurely entered the American market for wisecracking free-fall.

Crackerjack (1994)

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Dir: Michael Mazo
Star: Thomas Ian Griffith, Christopher Plummer, Nastassja Kinski, Richard Sali

crackerjackIt was certainly an interesting career move. There can’t be many people who have gone from a Wim Wenders philosophical meditation on what it means to be human, to playing the love interest in one of the more shameless Die Hard ripoffs, which seemed to come out every week in the nineties. But that’s what Kinski found for her return to Hollywood cinema, this just beating the similarly commercial Terminal Velocity to movie screens by about a month. She plays “KC”, the activities director at an upmarket ski resort, supposedly in Colorado though the film was actually made in British Columbia – she won’t tell the hero what her name stands for, saying “I’m afraid that information is reserved for relatives and close friends.”

Needless to say, it’s revealed by the end of the film, though I won’t spoil the surprise here (not least because there isn’t one – I’d have been far more impressed if it had stood for “Kraut Chick” or something). Still, it’s a bit creepy the way she sets her sights on said cop hero, Jack Wild (Griffith), since he is still clearly suffering from what his partner calls “post-traumatic shock syndrome” – must be a variant of that well-known Helsinki Syndrome. It’s a result of a previous case, where he was working undercover, and his wife and children were blown up in a car-bomb intended for him. Since then he has become that most cliched of characters, the Loose Cannon, who yells things like “Keep that sonofabitch pinned down, and I’ll get you back to your little lady!”

Now, one could say that a heavily-armed, twitchy freakazoid might not be the best person for whom to throw a surprise birthday party. But his older brother, Mike (Sali) do just that, so he and his wife Anne can give Jack tickets to come along on their trip to the mountain resort previously mentioned. What could possibly go wrong? Well, what else, except for the visit coinciding with a plan to steal tens of millions in diamonds, then blow up a glacier so it falls on the hotel and obliterates all trace of the crime. This is the concept of Ivan Getz (Plummer, who must also have had a mortgage payment due, more or less re-useing his Captain Von Trapp voice), and so you can understand why he was fired by the East German Stasi for being too loony.

crackerjack2After parachuting his guys in, for no readily apparent reason [I’m fairly sure Jack, Mike and Anne didn’t get to the resort by jumping out the back of a plane. Well, Mike and Anne, anyway – Jack’s a wild and crayzee guy], Getz kicks his scheme into action. Jack is out on the balcony enjoying a quiet perv at a couple in a neighboring room, so manages to avoid the room-to-room sweep of the terrorists. From there, you would be entirely better off removing this video-cassette from your VCR [kids, ask your parents!] and slapping in Die Hard instead. I’ve no problem with taking the concept and giving it a new twist, but the makers don’t bring anything new to the party here. Plummer is actually not bad, but Alan Rickman was just so good as the Euro-villain, it renders every effort to go down the same route pointless. But at the risk of stating the obvious, the biggest difference is that Griffith is no Bruce Willis. with a career apex probably marked either by this or John Carpenter’s Vampires. It isn’t much of a contest.

KC more or less vanishes from proceedings entirely in the middle portion, as Jack is rampaging around the resort, offing henchmen and exchanging banter with Getz over walkie-talkies, when not trying to convince the authorities of his bona fides. [Like I said: shameless] But she returns with a vengeance later in the film, first attempting to seduce a terrorist and stab him, then, when that fails, whacking him upside the head with a pan. She also blasts the sole female terrorist with a shotgun, a bit later. Hey, it’s not Wim Wenders angst, but even stars have to stock the fridge somehow. It ends with things blowing up – in the interests of maintaining suspense, I’ll remain vague on the details of which specific things -and the hostages escaping through a convenient if painfully artificial cave. This was foreshadowed earlier in the movie, when we saw it feeding the hotel’s hot spring, and in which we also saw KC frolicking, albeit chastely (above left).

Like its inspiration, Crackerjack started a franchise, though it’s probably at least somewhat meaningful, that neither Kinski nor Griffith were involved in any way with the sequels which followed. Still, despite my grumblings about the lack of original thought that went into this, it came as a refreshing change after slogging through the entries in Kinski’s filmography during her retreat to Europe. Simply not being based on a book by a depressed Russian is enough to make it seem like a refreshing cinematic sorbet. And, let’s face it, if you’re going to steal, you might as well steal from the best, and Die Hard is perhaps the greatest action movie of all time. Even a pale imitation of it, as we have here, remains entertaining enough to pass muster, and if both Kinski and Plummer look vaguely embarrassed to be involved, I’ve seen far bigger stars slumming it in far worse pictures.