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1979, 153 minutes. Colour, US
CAST:
(United Artists)
Dvds | Videos
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Click here to buy posters!
1979, 153 minutes. Colour, US
CAST:
(United Artists)
|
|
- Brando to his nemesis, Martin Sheen
What we have here is a great, sprawling, deeply flawed, pretentious, self-indulgent and yet, in the end, magnificent picture. When Francis Coppola
showed it as a work in progress at the
Cannes Film Festival he said it was
'more of an experience than a movie'
and that just about sums it up.
Ostensibly, of course, it's about the
Vietnam War, about US Army captain
Martin Sheen's progress through the
jungle, the skirmishes and the battlefields on a mission to assassinate
Marlon Brando's mad and dangerous
Colonel Kurtz, a maverick soldier who
had become a kind of demigod. But,
starting out as a modern parallel yo
Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness,
the film proceeds to encompass all
manner of psychology and myth (death
and regeneration, for example) to
become both a nightmare journey
through the horror and madness of
war and an examination of the evil
rooted in men's souls.
What remains in
the mind is not so much the story - as
Coppola has said, that becomes less
important as the film goes on - as a
series of astonishing vignettes: Robert Duvall as a crazy, water-skiing commander; helicopter gunships going into
action to the accompaniment of The
Ride of the Valkyries; the huge, gross
appearance of Brando, half in light,
half in darkness.
By all accounts the
filming (in the Philippines) was a horrendous experience: the budget soared
from $iz million to more than $30 million; Martin Sheen had a massive heart
attack; and the picture went so far over
schedule that in Hollywood it was
known as 'Apocalypse Later'.
Somehow
one feels that what Coppola set out to
shoot was not the film he finally delivered, but no matter. For all its faults
Apocalypse Now is still by far the best
of all the Vietnam movies and a riveting condemnation of the appalling
damage war can do to people, psychologically as well as physically.
(Winner best film 1979: Kramer rs. Kramer)
yul brynner | christopher plummer | romy schneider
dvds | videos yul brynner | christopher plummer | romy schneider
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