In Billy Wilder’s “Sunset Boulevard,” the deluded, forgotten silent film star Norma Desmond lamented a lost and very different era in cinema — silent films.

“We didn’t need dialogue,” she bellows. “We had FACES!”

It’s a line that comes to mind when considering the quixotic, bug-eyed fury that was Klaus Kinski, a German actor with one of the most expressive faces of the sound film era.

Kinski appeared in some 130 films, and earned a measure of fame in just a few of them — a couple of tiny but memorable parts in the spaghetti Westerns of Sergio Leone, a searing, stand-out turn in a single scene in David Lean’s “Doctor Zhivago.”

But Kinski’s best showcase, he was certain, was as a monologist. Just him, a “role” and a spotlight — always ready for his closeup.

A World War II Wehrmacht veteran, his early post-war acting career established a pattern of firings from theater companies, but “success” doing one man shows. He toured as a largely unscripted, ranting Jesus in such shows in the early ’70s.

His acting career was well-established, if mostly German, by the late ’60s.

But the one filmmaker who truly indulged that need to be seen in camera-dominating closeups playing figures larger than life was the then-young German director Werner Herzog. They did five films together, with the first — “Aguirre, the Wrath of God” — making both men world famous in the mid-70s, formally launching Herzog’s half century career and re-launching Kinski as a star level international talent.

Legends grew up around their hate-love relationship, of violent tirades and threats with firearms, arranged murder and the like, with the actor embellishing this professional feud in his memoirs and Herzog allegedly helping Kinski come up with more “vile expletives” for Kinski to use in referring to Herzog in the book.

That’s helpful to remember in approaching Herzog’s mid-career summary documentary “My Best Fiend,” ostensibly about his relationship with his bug-eyed muse. It’s also an appreciation of Herzog’s epic undertakings with Kinski — movies shot in impossible locations with impossible tasks and impossible budgets, dangerous films where people got hurt and Kinski became one more obstacle to overcome to get “Aguirre,” “Nosferatu,” “Fitzcarraldo” and “Cobra Verde” made.

“Woyzek?” That Czech-filmed period piece, tucked into the end of production on “Nosferatu,” was a piece of cake compared to everything else they achieved together.

Herzog has long made documentaries, and became an Oscar-nominated/Directors Guild of America award winning doc maker after Kinski’s death in 1991. “My Best Fiend” was the world’s introduction to Werner as a top flight documentarian and narrator (in German here, with English subtitles) extraordinaire.

In the years since this film came out in 1999, more has been made of Kinski’s mental illness, his raging narcissism and megalomania. He’s been credibly accused of attempted sexual assault of a leading lady by one director he worked with and accused of molesting his oldest daughter in her memoirs, published years after his death.

Herzog refers to Kinski’s memoirs as “lies” in “My Best Fiend.” But in watching this film anew, I found it helpful to think of Herzog himself as an unreliable narrator. I’ve interviewed him several times over the years, and found him nothing but credible, every time out. But he is a “story teller,” after all. He helped Kinski come up with sorry names to call him on his book? A little self serving, even if it’s true.

There’s lots of on-set footage of Kinski flipping out, and the film begins with a long snippet of Kinski melting down, not wholly in character, in his “Jesus” touring show, before he and Herzog became a team. But Herzog, everybody’s favorite doomsaying German philosopher on film, comes off as more than a little disengenuous in this fond remembrance of his most important collaborator.

Herzog put huge crews and huge populations of Native extras at risk and under hardship making “Aguirre” and “Fitzcarraldo.” More than a few people got badly hurt, something emphasized by using lots of footage from one of the best “making of” documentaries ever, Les Blank’s “Burden of Dreams,” about Herzog filming and endangering himself and everybody else on “Fitzcarraldo.”

The shots of that river boat — NOT A MODEL — careening down a raging river in Amazonia, with a few camera folks and Herzog and crazy Kinski on board, are stunning to this day.

Herzog gives his version of the “getting my rifle” story from “Fitzcarraldo,” threatening his star with “eight bullet holes” before he could get away if Kinski followed-through on his latest threat to quit the film shoot. One bullet, Herzog intones, was saved for himself. Because if this movie — which had already lost original stars Jason Robards and Mick Jagger to sickness and the elements — was not finished, Werner would take his own life, too.

Or so he says. This Indian chief or that producer who offered to “kill” Kinski for him adds to the mythic lore of this relationship. And plans to “firebomb his house” when they got to Germany seem like a grand embellishment.

“We belonged together,” seems more to the point of their psychic connection. “We were ready to go down together.”

They were two crazy guys involved in all those high-degree-of-difficulty projects. And Herzog, the younger man, could call Kinski a bully and a coward once he was dead and gone. But footage on set shows him allowing his volatile star to berate “victims” on the crew without the director intervening.

You were going to fire bomb Kinski’s house? Sure you were, Werner.

Herzog has lived and worked and achieved enough to become cinematic royalty, a beloved figure as a character actor — more sinister than cuddly — lionized “Grizzly Man” documentarian and Grand Old Man of International Cinema, someone famous actors flock to the moment he calls. This documentary reminds us of what he went through to get there.

“My Best Fiend” thus builds two co-dependent legends, with Herzog revisiting their distant past, sharing a boarding house together (the one Herzog grew up in) and recalling the first time he was mesmerized by Kinski’s presence in a movie (sharing scenes with Maximillian Schell in 1955’s “Sons, Mothers and a General”). And Herzog’s tribute film sort of explains himself as he accepts his role in Kinski’s “all used up, spent” demise — at 65 — by refusing to work with him after their last collaboration, another agonizing jungle tale, “Cobra Verde” (1987).

The generous clip samples of their films together make “My Best Fiend” the best primer on prime Herzog, even if he has made Oscar-worthy documentaries and a decent thriller (“Rescue Dawn”) or two since, with new films in the works even today, twenty-five years removed from this revealing and riveting non-fiction film about his years spent managing a madman on the other side of the camera.

Rating: unrated

Cast: Werner Herzog, Klaus Kinski, Eva Mattes and Claudia Cardinale

Credits: Scripted and directed by Werner Herzog. An Anchor Bay release on Tubi, Amazon, other streamers.

Running time: 1:39