Fitzcarraldo - Plot

Plot

Brian Sweeney "Fitzcarraldo" Fitzgerald (Klaus Kinski) is a European living in Iquitos, a small city in Peru in the early part of the 20th century. He has an indomitable spirit, but in essence is little more than a dreamer with one major failure already behind him — the bankrupted and incomplete Trans-Andean railways. A lover of opera and a great fan of the famous tenor Enrico Caruso, he now dreams of building an opera house in Iquitos. This will require considerable amounts of money, and the most profitable industry in Peru at the time is rubber. The areas known to contain rubber trees have been parceled up by the Peruvian government and are leased for exploitation.

Fitzcarraldo investigates getting into the rubber business. He is shown a map by a helpful rubber baron, who points out the only remaining unclaimed parcel in the area. He explains why no one has yet claimed the parcel: while it straddles the Ucayali River, the parcel is cut off from the Amazon by a treacherous set of rapids. However, Fitzcarraldo notices that the Pachitea River, another Amazon tributary, comes within several hundred meters to the Ucayali upstream of the parcel.

To make his dream a reality, he leases the inaccessible parcel from the government. With the selfless underwriting of his paramour, Molly (Claudia Cardinale), a successful brothel owner, he buys a steamer (which he christens the Molly Aida) from the same rubber baron, raises a crew and sets off up the Pachitea, the parallel river. This river is known to be more dangerous the farther one gets from the Amazon because of the unfriendly tribes that inhabit the area. Fitzcarraldo's plan is to reach the point where the two rivers nearly meet and then, with the manpower of enlisted natives, physically pull his three-story, 320-ton steamer over the muddy 40° hillside across a portage, from one river to the next. Using the steamer, he will then collect rubber on the upper Ucayali and bring it down the Pachitea to market.

The majority of the ship's crew, at first unaware of Fitzcarraldo's plan, abandon the expedition soon after entering the territory of the natives, leaving him with only the captain, engineer, and cook. However, the natives are impressed by him and his ship, becoming his labor force without really understanding his intentions. After a devastating first attempt, the ship is successfully pulled over the mountain with a complex system of pulleys, worked by the natives and aided by the ship's engine. However, when the crew falls asleep after a drunken celebration, the chief of the natives severs the rope securing the ship to the shore, sending it floating down the river and crashing through the rapids. His reasoning for this is to appease the river gods, who would otherwise be angered that Fitzcarraldo defied nature by circumventing them.

Though the ship manages to traverse the rapids without major damage, they find themselves back in Iquitos with nothing to show for it. A despondent Fitzcarraldo sells the ship back to the rubber baron, but first sends the captain on one last voyage. He returns with the entire cast of the opera house, including Caruso. The entire city comes to the shore as Fitzcarraldo, standing atop the ship, proudly displays the cast.

The 1982 book Fitzcarraldo: The Original Story from Fjord Press (ISBN 0-940242-04-4) reproduces Herzog's first version of the story before the screenplay was written.