Apocalypse Now (1979)

 

This is the quintessential movie about Vietnam.  I never saw it in my youth--or ever before--but it was the definitive statement about what was wrong with the war.  The chaos that it conveys is remarable and moving.  I watched it related to a film analysis class, and it showed in the weeks between cinematopgraphy and editing--two things that the film has come to be known for.  Coppola edited it to a 2 1/2 hour movie, but then issued a 3 1/2 hour version.  having just watched the 2 1/2 hour version, that is definitely enough time to get the gist of the message, which is that no one in the combat theatre of Southeast Asia was entirely with it.  The commanding officers are all over the place--inured to the danger, gone rogue, or just plain gone--men are left commander-less to fight as best they can.  The use of drugs and alcohol was rampant and only escalated the disorder that prevailed.  The intensity of the color and the sound that pervades the movie leads to a sense of entering an alternative world as you watch the movie.  It is bold and sweeping and frightening, just like war.

The story concerns a journey upriver by Capt. Willard (Martin Sheen, looking even younger than his 36 years here), who commands a patrol boat to penetrate behind enemy lines and discover the secret redoubt of the almost mythical Col. Kurtz (Marlon Brando, looking older and more haggard than his 55 years) -- one of the Army's most decorated soldiers, who had gone rogue and was now leading his own band of tribesmen, decapitating and hanging people left and right. The story is based on Conrad's Heart of Darkness, but replaces the implacable mystery of the upper reaches of the Congo with the equally unfathomable mystery of the American venture in Vietnam. When you get to the bottom of who Kurtz has become and what he is thinking, you can see how the war transformed the original American idealism.

The film was shot in the Philippines and, much like Herzog's 'Fitzcaraldo', it was plagued by it's own disasters from the very beginning (maybe when you are telling a real life horror story in the medium of film, the story recapitulates itself in the real life filming).  Coppola invested millions of his own dollars into the movie, ignored warnings about jungle filming and monsoons, displayed his spectacular and immature temper on a regular basis, and had a cast and crew that were taking their parts seriously enough to be stoned and drunk every day of filming.  It was the 1970's after all.  Despite all this, it was a pleasure to watch Martin Sheen, but apparently he had a heart attack during the filming and the alcoholic bender that his character is on at the front end of the movie was not acting on his part.  What they say about making sausage appears to apply to this film, but in the end, it is a masterpiece.