Werner Herzog's story comes from actual accounts of a mystery man who turned up on the streets of Nuremberg in the 1820s, and who, after being force-fed a few proprieties of polite society, was unaccountably murdered. Herzog doesn't shrink from supplying this strange case with a possible beginning and ending: a hypothetical Body Snatcher character, dressed in a black cloak and a beaver hat raises Kasper in a dungeon, teaches him a few useful phrases in preparation for his belated coming-out in the world ("I wish to be a gallant rider like my father before me"), deposits him in the Nuremberg town square with a letter of introduction clamped in his hand, and then reappears without explanation at the end to make repeated attacks on Kasper's life. Sorting out the elements, true or false, in the Kasper Hauser legend is really not what interests Herzog in the subject, however. He, a Leftist polemicist with a sure sense of just what's useful to him, transforms the available evidence into a tale of Innocence manhandled by prisses, pedants, commercial exploiters, and fussbudget bureaucrats. For the lead role, Herzog enlisted an authentic mental case named Bruno S., a wall-eyed, stiff-necked fellow with a heavily punctuated speech rhythm in which words are spat out like watermelon seeds. This unique performance gives Herzog a fund of inimitable behavioral quirks to fuel his strong-stomached humanism and his empathy for outcasts. (1975) — Duncan Shepherd
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