The 1970s, as film students and movie buffs know, was a seminal decade for movie-making in the United States. Several innovative film-makers came of age during the decade (Scorsese, Spielberg, De Palma, Bogdanovitch, Friedkin, Demme and a host of others) but one man stood taller than the rest. That larger-than-life personality was Francis Ford Coppola. He made four of the greatest-ever movies in that decade – The Godfather (1972), the art-house thriller The Conversation (1974), The Godfather Part II (1974), and, the most grandiose of them all, Apocalypse Now (1979).
Apocalypse Now was the ultimate “event movie” – more has been written about it, arguably, than all almost any other motion picture made by a major Hollywood studio before or since. It is difficult for modern audiences to imagine the kind of impact it had on contemporary audiences at the time. It was a movie no one really expected to come into being at various points of its creation. But it did, and when we look back on it, so many years later, it still has the power to evoke huge emotions in even the most jaded of film-viewers.The origins of the film are well-known but a recap is useful – Coppola associate John Milius wrote a screenplay based on the Joseph Conrad 1899 novella, The Heart of Darkness, transporting the action from the Belgian Congo to Vietnam, America’s key battlefield at the time. That was the basis of the movie’s storyline though it was to undergo many revisions in the years to come.
The basic plot is very simple and linear – an American soldier, Captain Willard, is given the job of “terminating with extreme prejudice” (military speak for execution) a Green Beret colonel, Kurtz, who has gone mad in the jungles of Cambodia and has formed an army of his own. The story is about Willard’s surreal and perilous journey up a river into the jungle, the adventures on the way and what happens when he finally meets the near-mythical Kurtz in his domain.
Martin Sheen plays Willard as a fairly passive character but it is fascinating to remember that it was the great Harvey Keitel who was Coppola’s original choice as Willard. But Coppola was not happy having Keitel in the key role and sacked him after a few days of shooting on location. That is just one of the many problems that plagued the production in the Philippines. Incidentally, the country was chosen as the stand-in for Vietnam as the landscape was similar.
The roll-call of the various woes the movie suffered during its shooting is worth listing. Other than Keitel’s sacking, these included:
- a major typhoon that destroyed much of the sets constructed for the film in the Philippines;
- the fighting with the rebels in the south which resulted in many of the Philippines Air Force helicopters not being available for key scenes;
- the heart-attack suffered by Sheen;
- the lack of a proper screenplay – Coppola was constantly revising and rewriting the Milius material;
- an ever-ballooning budget which went from an estimated US$10 million to nearly US$32 million (a huge amount of money at the time),
- and the biggest star of them all, Marlon Brando (playing Kurtz), turning up overweight and under-prepared, presenting yet another set of problems for the embattled production crew.
The theatrical release of the movie a few months later went on to make millions, was recognised as a landmark in motion picture history, and reaffirmed Coppola’s position as the greatest filmmaker of his era. Apocalypse Now was seen as the ultimate Vietnam war movie, even though other great Vietnam war films like The Deer Hunter and Platoon have their supporters too. In 2001, Coppola and legendary editor Walter Murch released a longer version called Apocalypse Now Redux, which added 49 minutes of footage (including the famous “French Plantation Sequence”) to the original theatrical release. Those extra bits helped to flesh out some of the characters and added more colour to the whole picture.
So, how good a movie is Apocalypse Now? Visually and sonically, it remains a stunner and if there is one movie that makes a major case for watching blockbuster films on a big screen it is this. The single most famous scene, Lt Col Kilgore’s (James Caan) Air Cavalry attack on a small village to the strains of Wagner’s Ride of the Valkyries, carries as much punch now as it did when first seen. This is Coppola at his very best as a showman.
And let’s not forget Kilgore’s immortal quote here: “I love the smell of napalm in the morning” – the single famous line of dialogue from the movie.
Stunning visuals abound throughout – the amazing opening scene with the choppers going whup-whup-whup against a napalm-devastated landscape with Jim Morrison singing “The End” playing in the background, the sampan massacre, Brando’s bald head looming out of the darkness of his den, Dennis Hopper’s manic photographer, Willard rising out of the mist-shrouded swamp on his way to kill Kurtz – all these are scenes that are never forgotten once seen. The acting, as in most Coppola movies, is top-notch with most of the big names making a mark. And there is even a cameo by a young Harrison Ford at the start! The cinematography by the famous Vittorio Storaro is gorgeous and justly lauded, as is the superb work by costume designer and Coppola regular Dean Tavoularis.
But there are flaws too – the ending especially comes across as makeshift and put-together. Brando mumbles his lines as usual (without making much sense) and you keep getting the feeling the scriptwriters were writing up dialogue for Brando even as they were shooting his scenes. Brando to me was the centre of The Godfather but here he is sadly the weak link. The movie has an intriguing beginning, a strong middle part which peaks with the Air Cavalry attack, and then falls apart. It is pretty much of a mess by the end, whatever way you look at it. Some viewers may also find the expanded cut to be way too long. The movie simply does not have the tightness of Coppola’s other epics of the 1970s.
Sadly, Coppola would never again rise to the levels that Apocalypse Now promised. Through the 1980s, he made several of his dream projects but no one great movie. By the 1990s, he had become a director for hire and by the 2000s he had become far more interested in his Napa Valley winery than in making cutting-edge movies. So, in a sense, Apocalypse Now was both his greatest moment and also the beginning of the end of his time as the world’s most famous movie-maker.
For those interested in the remarkable story behind the movie, there are plenty of resources available. Eleanor Coppola, Francis’s long-suffering wife, kept a journal during the crazy days of location shooting in the Philippines and this book titled Notes on the Making of Apocalypse Now, along with the invaluable footage she shot at the time, formed the basis of one of the most interesting documentaries ever released on the making of a movie. Called Hearts of Darkness: A Film-maker’s Apocalypse, it was released in 1991 to tremendous acclaim. Film historian Peter Cowie’s The Apocalypse Now Book is also a useful companion study to the whole project. And there are, of course, millions of words written on the film by dozens of critics over the years. Nothing about Apocalypse Now, of course, can be termed to be on a small scale!