Real Depravities: The Films of Klaus Kinski is a paperback edition, and features a good mix of text & often exclusive reprints of posters, stills, and behind the scenes pictures. It’s purely a black & white edition, though all the pictures are well scanned & reproduced. The books written by Troy Howarth, who also wrote the well respected Giallo film study So Deadly, So Perverse: 50 Years of Italian Giallo Films.

Amazingly this is the first time Kinski's truly huge body of work has been assessed, and the book really gets down to the films themselves, instead of constantly harking on about Kinski’s unpredicaticbity & discernments with directors & crew. Sure this side of things is inevitably covered, but the focus here is primarily the films & Mr Kinski's performance with in each.

After an introduction, a selection of Kinski quotes from his controversial biography 1988’s All You Need Is Love, and a short life overview.  The main body of book starts in 1948 with Morituri- a German produced  prisoner of war film about a escape attempt, where Kinski plays the part of unnamed Dutch prisoner. And it ends in 1989 with Paganini, which was not only his final film but his one & only directorial credit-  the film charted the debauchery fuelled life of 19th century Italian violinist Niccolò Paganini . 

This main film section of the book, takes in both smaller roles, supporting roles, and leads. Going from his recurring parts in  German “Krimi” thrillers, his work in many spaghetti westerns. Onto his break through & highly revered roles in likes of Doctor Zhivargo, and the five films he did with German new wave director Werner Herzog. Thorough to his later roles in low budget horror fare

Each film gets between two & ten page write-up. And these write-ups are subtitled into: What’s It about?, Overview, Who’s Involved, and How Does Klaus Fare?. Each film write-up is a nice balance of critique, facts, along with quotes from interviews with Kinski & those involved in the  films production.  It’s a book you can either dip in & out of, use as a reference book, or as I did read from cover-to-cover.

The main film section of is broken up into decades, and after each of these you get a ten page plus selection of stills relating to pervious decade. As well as this dotted through-out the book you get more stills, poster artwork, and behind the scene pictures. And some of these are very interesting/ revealing, in the review of 1976’s Jack The Ripper, you get a great selection of rare behind the scenes photos of Kinksi with the films director & euro sleaze icon Jess Franco.

The books last fifty or so pages take in shorter write-ups about his roles on TV,  a section called-Near misses: Some of the films Kinski Didn’t end up appearing in. And a short write-up from Italian writer/director Luigi Cozzi  experience with working with Kinski on late 80’s vampire movie Nosferatu in Venice.

In conclusion Real Depravities: The Films of Klaus Kinski, is a very balanced, well thought-out, and wholly rewarding look into the film work of this most distinctive, talented, and one-off actor. I’m not completely sure what the print run on this book was, but I can’t imagine it been huge as it’s published on a smaller publishing label- so if you thinking of picking this up, I’d do it sooner than later!.