"Little Dieter Needs to Fly"

Directed by Werner Herzog
USA, 1997

I love almost all the Herzog films I've seen so far, but I decided to skip the recent Rescue Dawn after finding out it was only a remake of one of the filmmaker's earlier docs. While I'm still not really interested in seeing Hollywood actors "interpret" this story, I gotta say that Little Dieter Needs to Fly--the director's original take on the material--makes me wonder whether I made the right choice. Excellent 75-minute jobber (part of the ace 2004 Werner Herzog Collection on Anchor Bay Entertainment) follows subject/protagonist Dieter Dengler to hell and back from a WWII childhood spent being bombed by allied warplanes, on to a postwar Germany where the poor were reduced to eating boiled wallpaper for the nutrients in the paste, over to the U.S. for a teenage relocation and eventual citizenship--and almost immediately into POW status after being shot down over Laos for his new country in 1966. While no Woody Harrelson-lookalikes get eaten onscreen by bears here, the riveting true story of Dengler's incredible jungle escape, miraculous avoidance of an early death at every turn, and subsequent lust for life (above all, for the freedom of flying) is yet more proof that Herzog is the man when it comes to making an oddly affecting documentary. Yeah.