On Saturday night, I went to the Somerville Theatre to attend a screening of Francis Ford Coppola's Apocalypse Now starring Martin Sheen, Marlon Brando and Robert Duvall.
We were being treated to a screening of the original 70 mm print which did not have any credits. As was the case when the film was originally released in 1979, we were provided with a reprint of a booklet which included all of the credits and a short essay from Coppola.
On a side note, it is interesting that I watched a Coppola film only eight days after his nephew Robert Schwartzman appeared at the Somerville Theatre to promote his documentary Hung Up on a Dream: A Zombies Documentary.
There was a very large, young crowd who attended - many of whom who had never viewed Apocalypse Now. After an extraordinarily long introduction to the film by the projectionist who ran the same print nearly half a century ago, the film began. For the next 2 hours and 27 minutes, there was complete silence. I think some people had difficulty processing the film. This does not come as a surprise because it was loosely adapted from Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness which I read in high school. Conrad's prose was so dense that our English teacher had to take us through the book page by page to convey its meaning.
I have seen bits and pieces of Apocalypse Now on TV over the years but had never seen the film from start to finish let alone on a big screen. When you see it on the big screen you get the full impact of the cinematography making it evident why Vittorio Storaro earned an Oscar.
Set during the Vietnam War, Captain Willard (Martin Sheen) is sent on a mission to by Lt General Forman (G.D. Spradlin) and Colonel Lucas (played by a pre-Star Wars Harrison Ford) to kill Colonel Kurtz (Marlon Brando). They are the two most stoic yet sinister characters in the entire movie. Everyone else around them is volatile and waiting to explode at any moment be Willard's crew as portrayed by Albert Hall, Frederic Forrest, Sam Bottoms and a teenaged Laurence Fishburne (credited as Larry Fishburne) as well as Dennis Hopper, who portrays a photojournalist who becomes a disciple of Colonel Kurtz.
I would remiss if I didn't mention Robert Duvall's portrayal of Lt. Col Bill Kilgore who utters the movie's most famous, "I love the smell of napalm in the morning....it smells like victory." He too has a manic intensity but is unaffected by chaos and explosions going on around him. Duvall would earn an Oscar nomination for Best Supporting Actor for his performance.
For all of Captain Willard's descent into madness as he goes up the river in pursuit of Colonel Kurtz, when Willard finally kills Kurtz, he lays down his sword in front of Kurtz's devotees who follow suit and Willard leaves. Where he goes is anyone's guess.
Apocalypse Now is one of those movies which does not lend itself to multiple viewings as reflected by Colonel Kurtz's last words, "The horror! The horror!" There are other movies from this era which I would give the same characterization such as Deliverance and A Woman Under the Influence. Yet neither of those movies has the body count of Apocalypse Now. It's not so much because of graphic violence although that is there in abundance. The most horrific aspect of the movie is all of the bodies which Captain Willard finds on Colonel Kurtz's territory - some mutilated, others beheaded with one man hung naked from the waist down. We don't see the violence, but we feel its impact just the same.
Outside of the first two Godfather films, Apocalypse Now is Francis Ford Coppola's most significant work although The Conversation is in the conversation. Although Coppola has had some successful films over the years such as The Outsiders, Peggy Sue Got Married, Bram Stoker's Dracula and The Rainmaker, he has had more misses than hits (i.e. One from the Heart, The Cotton Club, Youth Without Youth and, most recently, Megalopolis). Above all else none of the aforementioned hit movies measure up to his peak from the 1970's. Alas, Apocalypse Now is truly the last great film directed by Francis Ford Coppola. The horror, the horror.
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