![]() ![]() There he is expected to track down the renegade Colonel Walter Kurtz – an extraordinary cameo by Marlon Brando – and “terminate his command”, because this once brilliant officer has, as the Brit imperialist used to say, gone native, and become drunk with power, ordering executions. He is tasked by hatchet-faced intelligence chiefs with travelling with a small crew upriver into Viet Cong territory and into Cambodia. Martin Sheen plays Captain Benjamin Willard, a troubled officer, recovering – or not recovering – from a breakdown caused by his last tour of Vietnam. He has removed some of the “Playmate” sequences that were in his 202-minute “Redux” edition from 2001, but this cut retains the extended “dinner party” scene with French planters in the jungle, like an encounter with angry imperial ghosts. Interestingly, this does not mean simply including everything he shot. Now Apocalypse Now has resurfaced for its 40th-anniversary in what Coppola is calling his definitive final cut. (The nearest that Vietnamese people get to actual importance in Apocalypse Now is the four South Vietnamese intelligence officers, executed by Col Kurtz as Communist spies, whose ID cards we briefly see.) Like Lawrence of Arabia, moreover, this is a film without women – or mostly. The production involved a filming expedition in the Philippines that felt hardly less colossal and traumatic to the participants than the actual war, though it became commonplace in Hollywood’s Vietnam for the anguish of American soldiers, not that of the Vietnamese people themselves, to be seen as important. It was famously an ordeal for all concerned. It was inspired by Joseph Conrad’s novel Heart of Darkness, Herr’s own Vietnam reportage-memoir Dispatches and maybe at one further remove by Rudyard Kipling’s lines about the US taking up the white man’s imperial burden. In fact, when Francis Ford Coppola’s grandiose epic masterpiece Apocalypse Now was first unveiled in 1979, the Vietnam war had only ended four years previously, and the succeeding war between Vietnam and Cambodia (where the film’s climax is set) was in full swing.Ĭoppola’s bad trip into south-east Asia was co-written by John Milius with narration written by Michael Herr. ‘S omeday this war’s gonna end,” is the sage comment from surf-crazed Wagner enthusiast Lieutenant Colonel Kilgore, brusquely played by Robert Duvall. ![]()
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