In a scene that I find creepier every time I see it, he is briefed by senior officers over lunch. He is to take a patrol boat up river and assassinate a U.S. officer, Colonel Walter E. Kurtz for unsound methods. Shocked, he accepts and gets on the boat. After this mission, he would never want another.
Francis Ford Coppola's Vietnam opus was considered a massive folly at the time, its then forty million dollar budget and interminable production time were considered part of the bloated decadence of the New Hollywood decade of star directors. It seemed destined for the jokes of history folder (to perish in the last paper office fire of the '90s). Not only did it defy expectations by handing Coppola his next timeless classic but has travelled down the decades with a quietly persistent reputation for cinematic power and awe-inspiring scope. That its creator keeps fiddling with it does nothing to damage the basic text of the thing which remains robust.
Oh, that's important: if you see this for the first time, it shouldn't go for more than two and a half hours. Avoid the Redux and Final Cut versions until after you see the 1979. As with The Exorcist, Amadeus and a host of others, the original, while it can be costly to find, remains the definitive one, regardless of what Coppola himself says.
Willard's journey up river knocks him into the American war effort in Vietnam with its gigantically wasteful devastation and self-indulgence. Colonel Kilgore runs his helicopter unit like a posse of surfing cowboys, destroying a beach with napalm so he can watch his men surf. A huge fairy lit entertainment event in the middle of the jungle goes nightmarishly out of control while trying to bring a little Las Vegas to the boys. A bridge, kept open despite constant successful enemy destruction, is maintained in a Boschian hellscape just so the generals can tell their bosses that the road is open. And then there's Kurtz, rogue military muscle with a mind heated by delirium. These really aren't spoilers. They add to Willard's weird and damaging journey to the war and America's heart of darkness.
Oh, you can also read about it. This film is quite closely based on Joseph Conrad's forbidding short novel Heart of Darkness, based on his sobering experiences in the Belgian Congo under the new imperialism of the late nineteenth century. That tale's hero, Marlow, is sent on a similar mission to control an administrative loose canon and comes into contact with the worst excesses of a darkness visited on native peoples. Change a steamboat for a patrol boat, ivory harvesting for cold war aggression and you're there.
I'll say little more of the plot here, or of the great rumbling monster of the production. You can see the movie yourself and read any of the masses of content about how it was made. My more pressing concern here is the film's resonance.
But we'll need to say something of the resonance of the Vietnam War. The U.S. withdrew from the conflict in 1975 and it was popularly considered a defeat. Unlike the returning veterans from previous wars, Vietnam vets were yoked with the guilt of American hegemony in Asia and were despised. In film culture, the gung ho attempts from the '60s like John Wayne's own Ballad of the Green Berets gave way to far more cynical efforts like The Boys in Company C or Go Tell the Spartans. By the later years of the decade there was a sense of a need to tell the story rather than keep it repressed. Michael Cimino's The Deer Hunter was celebrated for its approach of showing the soldiers as ordinary citizens first, emphasising the trauma they suffered with a more thorough examination.
When Apocalypse Now appeared it changed the game of depicting war from a representation of history to something more like a grotesque or grand guignol. Everything on screen looked as expected, uniforms, hardware the movement of conflict but things were odd from the off. The helicopters of the prelude scene move more like birds of prey than military hardware. The spinning ceiling fan and gravel voiced narration of the opening suggest an intense film noir. We get glimpses of Willard's life back home but one of them is a photo of his wife which he burns through with a cigarette. The drop needle music that had haunted New Hollywood since Easy Rider was also different. The Rolling Stones sequence is diegetic but the closest the film will come to jukeboxing the soundtrack. The opening swirl and whispers and drones and croons of The End are offered almost as sounds rising from the glare and humidity. Apocalypse Now wasn't interested in humanising the stigmatised vets, that's a given, he wanted to show the trip of it.
At some point in the epic preproduction, Michael Herr's compounded journalistic account of the war, Despatches, was absorbed into the thinking and it was he who wrote Willard's voiceover. This travels from the hard boiled detective cynicism of the hotel room to the musings on his dark and bizarre mission where it takes a flavour more like an Americanised Marlowe from Conrad's novel. This does flow from Herr's own prose style in which his observations of military life in-country read like a Lewis Carroll story with napalm.
And that's a major point of resonance: this film is supremely quotable. Decades on, saying you love the smell of napalm in the morning could refer to burnt toast or even something pleasant, the value is napalm and the joke, if it's a one-off, is always good. See also "terminate with extreme prejudice" when you need to be firm or "Charley dont surf!" when an objection is trivial. When I found myself in the blinding glare and heat of the family home on a holiday, I'd peer through the louvres in the morning and rasp: "Townsville, shit, still only in Townsville." The lot of us who saw it at the time, and especially at Uni, knew the movie line by line and, until, we got sick of it ourselves, that's how we'd watch it.
Ok, so, lefty students in the early '80s, you must have really dug the history of it. Nope, Apocalypse Now doesn't even state its setting year. There are no mentions of Tet or Rolling Thunder. The canvas is crammed with the reality of the war as an inescapable claustrophobia of noise, colour, lethal air, smoke and constant danger. Even if you had no idea that the Americans were involved in a war in Vietnam, even if you thought it was fabricated for the movie, you would still register it as war and war for no good reason. So, no history lessons beyond a chance to hone our young adult cynicism.
The point is that any major power does this, puts the hooks in lesser geopolitical entities to gain influence, flex or plunder the way they always have. Coppola wanted to show this latest iteration with newer hardware and rock and roll attitudes. It's as much a shopping war, a series of skirmishes and war crimes of opportunity whose chaos could not but engender the kind of transgressive monster of Colonel Kurtz. The casting comes in handy here.
Willard is our tour guide and Martin Sheen gives him an unerring intensity, never smiling once, His narration keeps you in the centre, whether you agree with him or not. His power brought up the joke that he was heading up river to despatch the former king of The Method, Marlon Brando whose Kurtz keeps to the shadows displaying the sole humane trait he has kept is the shame for all he has done. He fought and ranted at the head of his devoted band until even they, extreme as they became, ended up looking like rat race white collars. Brando uses his Buddha-like physicality to dominate his scenes and keeps his mumbling lines special enough that we don't notice that we're bending our own ears toward him.
This was my first encounter with the music of the Doors. There's just that one song of theirs on the soundtrack of the film but it's the one that hooked on to everyone under thirty who saw the movie. There was a rerelease campaign for the band, all the Morrison albums. We got into them because there was no hippydom to them. It was wordsalad mysticism, sure, but there was nothing Summer of Love about the monologue in The End. The playing could get daggily bluesy at times but mostly kept to that '60s compaction. The Doors were perfect for a post punk revival.
Martin Sheen made it into one of the new Cronenberg movies a year or so later, playing a ruthless, self promoting presidential candidate which suited fans of Apocalypse fine, especially as young adults indulging in the wish that their favourite people share all their views.
And the movie hung around the art houses, getting several screenings a year. It was one of the big hits on home video, managing to survive the crop from panavision to 4x3 visual molasses. By the time I took a friend to see it at the newly established Northcote Valhalla, I had seen it twenty times, mostly at cinemas. I'd written something like ten thousand words of undergraduate analysis on it and considered Coppola a bona fide genius of cinema.
And that's the last big point I'll make here: Coppola had an outstanding 1970s after which it all just flattened out or got embarrassing. That's why I'm writing an anniversary blog about it now instead of tomorrow onwards, as it wasn't released in Australia until the following year. I know there many who count the zero year of any decade the end of the last one (boy, they were fun at Y2K New Year's) but I still prefer starting with them. This keeps Francis and his best in the '70s.
I saw two versions in 1980 when it was released in Australia. I was later to learn that the 35 mm cut was identical to the 70 mm one but for the end credits air strike credits. I quite enjoyed these but will admit that the way the film ends without them allows for a punchy silence that they can only over egg.
As I say, I saw it twice. First at a cinema with friends in Brisbane and then at the end of the year with my father, while I was at home for the holidays between finishing high school and getting into Uni. We went to the drive-in as he was more comfortable there than at a cinema. We spoke very little which was normal. I wanted to show him this movie as, even with the dawning home video market at the time, there was little for the adventurous movie goer in Townsville outside of student film club screenings or rickety 16 mm prints. This was a mainstream film I thought he'd take something away from.
After the usual ads for the fast food kiosk and the trailers (can't remember one that was shown) the screen darkened and then the slow threatening choppers faded in against the beach that looked like so many around that part of Queensland. There were the usual flyovers of army helicopters which we'd almost tune out because we were so used to the sound. Halfway through, the monsoonal drizzle fell and kept falling until well after midnight. I had seen it in Hoyts in Brisbane with surround audio which was such a blast but there and then, with the normal military sounds rising in the air around us and the creeping humidity of the tropical night, we had happened on perfect conditions.
Viewing notes: I watched my now out of print Lionsgate anniversary 4K bought from the U.S. It's a crazy beautiful package. If you can find the original cut in 4K with dolby vision and atmos, get that, it's the closest it looks and feels to the original screened at a cinema. If you can't afford that, it is my pleasant duty to relate that there is a Blu-Ray release of the 1979 and redux versions that you can pick up for under twenty dollars in Australia. This movie has always looked great on home video, so if you haven't leaped to 4K the Blu-Ray will bring the goods.
