Apocalypse Now wikipedia pages

 

Apocalypse Now

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
 
Jump to: navigation, search

For the Pere Ubu album, see Apocalypse Now (album).

Apocalypse Now
Apocnow.jpg
Theatrical release poster by Bob Peak
 
Directed by
Francis Ford Coppola
Produced by
Francis Ford Coppola
Written by
John Milius
Francis Ford Coppola
Michael Herr (narration)
 
Based on
Heart of Darkness
 by Joseph Conrad (uncredited)
Starring
Marlon Brando
Robert Duvall
Martin Sheen
Frederic Forrest
Albert Hall
Sam Bottoms
Laurence Fishburne
Dennis Hopper
 
Music by
Carmine Coppola
Francis Ford Coppola
 
Cinematography
Vittorio Storaro
Editing by
Richard Marks
Walter Murch
Gerald B. Greenberg
Lisa Fruchtman
 
Studio
Zoetrope Studios
Distributed by
United Artists
Release date(s)
August 15, 1979
 
Running time
153 minutes
Country
United States
Language
English
Budget
$31.5 million
Box office
$83,471,511[1]
Apocalypse Now is a 1979 American epic war film set during the Vietnam War, directed and produced by Francis Ford Coppola and starring Marlon Brando, Robert Duvall, and Martin Sheen. The film follows the central character, U.S. Army special operations officer Captain Benjamin L. Willard (Sheen), of MACV-SOG, on a mission to kill the renegade and presumed insane U.S. Army Special Forces Colonel Walter E. Kurtz (Brando).
The screenplay by John Milius and Coppola came from Milius's idea of adapting Joseph Conrad's novella Heart of Darkness into the Vietnam War era. It also draws from Michael Herr's Dispatches,[2] the film version of Conrad's Lord Jim[citation needed] which shares the same character of Marlow with Heart of Darkness, and Werner Herzog's Aguirre, the Wrath of God (1972).[3] The film drew attention for its lengthy and troubled production as Hearts of Darkness: A Filmmaker's Apocalypse documented: Brando showed up on the set overweight, Sheen suffered a heart attack, and severe weather destroyed several expensive sets. The film's release was postponed several times while Coppola edited millions of feet of footage.
Upon release, Apocalypse Now earned widespread critical acclaim and its cultural impact and philosophical themes have been extensively discussed since. Honored with the Palme d'Or at Cannes, and nominated for the Academy Award for Best Picture and the Golden Globe Award for Best Motion Picture – Drama, the film was also deemed "culturally, historically or aesthetically significant" and was selected for preservation by the National Film Registry in 2000. In the Sight and Sound Greatest Films poll, the film was ranked #14.

Contents
  [hide] 1 Plot
2 Cast
3 Adaptation 3.1 Use of T. S. Eliot's poetry
4 Development 4.1 Screenplay
4.2 Pre-production
4.3 Casting
4.4 Principal photography
4.5 Post-production
5 Other versions 5.1 Endings
5.2 Extended bootleg version
5.3 Apocalypse Now Redux
6 Reception 6.1 Cannes screening
6.2 Box office
6.3 Critical response
6.4 Legacy
7 Awards and honors
8 Home video release aspect ratio issues
9 Documentaries
10 See also
11 Notes
12 References
13 Further reading
14 External links
Plot[edit]
U.S. Army Captain and special operations veteran Benjamin L. Willard (Martin Sheen) has returned to Saigon since his involvement in the ongoing Vietnam War, where he drinks heavily and destroys his hotel room. One day Willard is called upon by military intelligence officers Lt. General Corman (G. D. Spradlin) and Colonel Lucas (Harrison Ford) about a top-secret assignment to follow the Nung River into the remote jungle, find rogue Special Forces Colonel Walter E. Kurtz (Marlon Brando) and kill him ("terminate...with extreme prejudice"). Kurtz apparently went insane and began practicing "unsound" methods of dehumanization with his own private army of Montagnard troops inside neutral Cambodia, having established among them a cult-like following.
Willard joins a Navy patrol boat, or PBR, commanded by "Chief" (Albert Hall) and crewmen Lance (Sam Bottoms), "Chef" (Frederic Forrest) and "Mr. Clean" (Laurence Fishburne). For escort through the Viet Cong-filled coastal mouth of the Nung River, they rendezvous with reckless Lieutenant Colonel Bill Kilgore (Robert Duvall), who commands a squadron of armed transport helicopters. Initially scoffing at them, Kilgore befriends Lance as both are keen surfers. Citing the favorable surfing conditions at the mouth of the river, Kilgore agrees to escort Willard and his PBR associates, along the way unleashing a devastating napalm airstrike on the locals and playing Ride of the Valkyries over the helicopter loudspeakers. While the beach is being taken, Kilgore orders Lance and other soldiers to surf it amid continuing enemy fire. Willard then gathers his men back onto the PBR, which had been transported via helicopter, and they begin their journey upriver.
Willard sifts through files of Kurtz, learning that he was a once-promising, model officer and could have eventually been promoted to general. Exploring the riverbank, Willard and Chef encounter a tiger. The crew later visits a USO supply depot and watch a show featuring Playboy Playmates that quickly goes awry. Afterwards, the crew come across and inspect a sampan for weapons, but Mr. Clean snaps, machine-gunning the Vietnamese civilians on board. When they discover one woman is still alive but badly injured, Willard coldly shoots her dead to prevent any further delay of his mission. Chief and Willard begin to butt heads; Willard believes himself to be in command of the PBR, while Chief prioritizes other objectives over Willard's still-secret mission. On entering the chaos of a US outpost at a bridge under constant attack without any apparent commanding officer, Willard learns that a soldier was sent on an earlier mission, identical to his own, with the same objective of killing Kurtz; however, this soldier ending up defecting, apparently joining Kurtz's followers, and has not been heard from since.
Meanwhile, Lance and Chef are continually under the influence of drugs. Lance in particular smears his face with camouflage paint and becomes withdrawn. The next day the boat is fired upon by an unseen enemy in the trees, killing Mr. Clean and making Chief even more hostile toward Willard. They are ambushed again, by Montagnard warriors, and return fire, despite Willard's objections. In the fight, Chief is impaled with a spear and tries to pull Willard onto the spearhead before dying. Afterwards, Willard confides in the two surviving crewmembers—Chef and Lance—about the true nature of his mission, and they reluctantly agree to continue upriver where they find the banks littered with mutilated bodies. Arriving at Kurtz's outpost at last, Willard takes Lance with him to the village, leaving Chef behind with orders to call an airstrike on the village if they do not return.
In the camp, the two soldiers are met by an eccentric American freelance photographer (Dennis Hopper), who manically praises Kurtz's genius. As they proceed, Willard and Lance see corpses and severed heads scattered about the nearby temple that serves as Kurtz's living quarters. Willard is bound and brought before Kurtz in the darkened temple, where Kurtz derides him as an errand boy. Meanwhile, Chef prepares to call in the airstrike but is kidnapped. Later imprisoned, Willard screams helplessly as Kurtz drops Chef's severed head into his lap. After some time, Willard is released and given the freedom of the compound. Kurtz lectures him on his theories of war, humanity, and civilization while praising the ruthlessness and dedication of the Viet Cong. Kurtz discusses his son and asks that Willard tell his son everything about him in the event of his death.
That night, as the villagers ceremonially slaughter a water buffalo, Willard enters Kurtz's chamber as Kurtz is making a tape recording, and attacks him with a machete. Lying mortally wounded on the ground, Kurtz whispers his final words "The horror ... the horror ..." before dying. Willard discovers a substantial typed work of Kurtz's personal writings—which includes, in red ink, the phrase "Drop the bomb. Exterminate them all!"—and takes it with him before exiting. Willard descends the stairs from Kurtz's chamber and drops his bloodied weapon. The villagers, kneeling before him, do likewise with all of their own weapons and allow Willard to take Lance by the hand and lead him to the boat. The two of them ride away as Kurtz's final words echo eerily.
Cast[edit]
Marlon Brando as Colonel Walter E. Kurtz, a highly decorated U.S. Army Special Forces with the 5th Special Forces Group who goes rogue. He runs his own operations out of Cambodia and is feared by the US military as much as the North Vietnamese and Vietcong.
Martin Sheen as Captain Benjamin L. Willard, a veteran U.S. Army special operations officer who has been serving in Vietnam for three years. The soldier who escorts him at the start of the film recites that Willard is from 505th Battalion, of the elite 173rd Airborne Brigade, assigned to MACV-SOG. It is later stated in the briefing scene that he worked intelligence/counterintelligence for the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency, carrying out secret operations and assassinations. Both scenes also establish he worked COMSEC. An attempt to re-integrate into home-front society had apparently failed prior to the time at which the film is set, and so he returns to the war-torn jungles of Vietnam, where he seems to feel more at home.
Robert Duvall as Lieutenant Colonel William "Bill" Kilgore, 1st Squadron, 9th Air Cavalry Regiment commander and surfing fanatic. Kilgore is a strong leader who loves his men but has methods that appear out-of-tune with the setting of the war. His character is a composite of several characters including Colonel John B. Stockton, General James F. Hollingsworth (featured in The General Goes Zapping Charlie Cong by Nicholas Tomalin), George Patton IV, also a West Point officer whom Robert Duvall knew[4] and possibly Col. David Hackworth.[5]
Frederic Forrest as Engineman 3rd Class Jay "Chef" Hicks, a tightly wound former chef from New Orleans who is horrified by his surroundings.
Albert Hall as Chief Quartermaster George Phillips. The chief runs a tight ship and frequently clashes with Willard over authority. Has a father-son relationship with Clean.
Sam Bottoms as Gunner's Mate 3rd Class Lance B. Johnson, a former professional surfer from California. He is known to drop acid. He becomes entranced by the Montagnard tribe, even participating in the sacrifice ritual.
Laurence Fishburne (credited as "Larry Fishburne") as Gunner's Mate 3rd Class Tyrone "Mr. Clean" Miller, the seventeen-year-old cocky South Bronx-born crewmember.
Dennis Hopper as an American photojournalist, a manic disciple of Kurtz who greets Willard. According to the DVD commentary of Redux, the character is based on Sean Flynn, a famed news correspondent who disappeared in Cambodia in 1970. His dialogue follows that of the Russian "harlequin" in Conrad's story.
G. D. Spradlin as Lieutenant General Corman, military intelligence (G-2) an authoritarian officer who fears Kurtz and wants him removed.
Jerry Ziesmer as a mysterious man (who is coincidentally addressed by General Corman as 'Jerry'; document visible on the Blu-ray version mentions a C.I.A. agent named R.E. Moore) in civilian attire who sits in on Willard's initial briefing. His only line in the film is the famous "Terminate with extreme prejudice".
Harrison Ford as Colonel G. Lucas, aide to Corman and a general information specialist who gives Willard his orders. The character's name is a reference to George Lucas, who was involved in the script's early development with Milius and was the original director intended to direct the film.
Scott Glenn as Captain Richard M. Colby, previously assigned Willard's current mission before he defected to Kurtz's private army and sent a message to his wife telling her to sell everything they owned (but he goes on to tell her to sell their children, as well).
Bill Graham as Agent (announcer and in charge of the Playmates' show)
Cynthia Wood (1974 Playmate of the Year) as "Playmate of the Year"
Linda (Beatty) Carpenter (August 1976 Playmate) as Playmate "Miss August"
Colleen Camp as Playmate "Miss May"
R. Lee Ermey as Helicopter Pilot
Francis Ford Coppola (cameo) as a TV director filming beach combat; he shouts "Don't look at the camera, keep on fighting!" Cinematographer Vittorio Storaro plays the cameraman by Coppola's side.
Several actors who were, or later became, prominent stars have minor roles in the movie including Harrison Ford, G. D. Spradlin, Scott Glenn, R. Lee Ermey and Laurence Fishburne. Fishburne was only fourteen years old when shooting began in March 1976, and he lied about his age in order to get cast in his role.[6] Apocalypse Now took so long to finish that Fishburne was seventeen (the same age as his character) by the time of its release.
Adaptation[edit]
Although inspired by Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness, the film deviates extensively from its source material. The novella, based on Conrad's real experiences as a steam paddleboat captain in Africa, is set in the Congo Free State during the 19th century.[7] Kurtz and Marlow (who is named Willard in the movie) both work for a Belgian trading company that brutally exploits its native African workers.
When Marlow arrives at Kurtz's outpost, he discovers that Kurtz has gone insane and is lording over a small tribe as a god. The novella ends with Kurtz dying on the trip back and the narrator musing about the darkness of the human psyche: "the heart of an immense darkness".
In the novella, Marlow is the pilot of a river boat sent to collect ivory from Kurtz's outpost, only gradually becoming infatuated with Kurtz. In fact, when he discovers Kurtz in terrible health, Marlow makes an effort to bring him home safely. In the movie, Willard is an assassin dispatched to kill Kurtz. Nevertheless, the depiction of Kurtz as a god-like leader of a tribe of natives and his malarial fever, Kurtz's written exclamation "Exterminate the brutes!" (which appears in the film as "Drop the bomb. Exterminate them All!") and his last words "The horror! The horror!" are taken from Conrad's novella.
Coppola argues that many episodes in the film—the spear and arrow attack on the boat, for example—respect the spirit of the novella and in particular its critique of the concepts of civilization and progress. Other episodes adapted by Coppola, the Playboy Playmates' (Sirens) exit, the lost souls, "taking me home" attempting to reach the boat and Kurtz's tribe of (white-faced) natives parting the canoes (gates of Hell) for Willard, (with Chef and Lance) to enter the camp are likened to Virgil and "The Inferno" (Divine Comedy) by Dante. While Coppola replaced European colonialism with American interventionism, the message of Conrad's book is still clear.[8]
Coppola's interpretation of the iconic Kurtz character is often speculated to have been modeled after Tony Poe, a highly decorated Vietnam-era paramilitary officer from the CIA's Special Activities Division.[9] Poe's actions in Vietnam and in the 'Secret War' in neighbouring Laos, in particular his highly unorthodox and often savage methods of waging war show many similarities to those of the fictional Kurtz; for example, Poe was known to drop severed heads into enemy-controlled villages as a form of psychological warfare and use human ears to record the number of enemies his indigenous troops had killed. He would send these ears back to his superiors as proof of the efficacy of his operations deep inside Laos.[10][11] Coppola, however, denies that Poe was a primary influence and instead says the character was loosely based on Special Forces Colonel Robert B. Rheault, whose 1969 arrest over the murder of a suspected double agent Thai Khac Chuyen in Nha Trang generated substantial contemporary news coverage.[12]


Use of T. S. Eliot's poetry[edit]
In the film, shortly before Colonel Kurtz dies, he recites part of T. S. Eliot's poem "The Hollow Men". Not only is Kurtz in the novel characterized as "hollow at the core", the poem is preceded in printed editions by the epigraph "Mistah Kurtz – he dead", a quotation from Conrad's Heart of Darkness.
In addition, two books seen opened on Kurtz's desk in the film are From Ritual to Romance by Jessie Weston and The Golden Bough by Sir James Frazer, the two books that Eliot cited as the chief sources and inspiration for his poem "The Waste Land". Eliot's original epigraph for "The Waste Land" was this passage from Heart of Darkness, which ends with Kurtz's final words:[13]

Did he live his life again in every detail of desire, temptation, and surrender during that supreme moment of complete knowledge? He cried in a whisper at some image, at some vision, – he cried out twice, a cry that was no more than a breath –
"The horror! The horror!"
When Willard is first introduced to Dennis Hopper's character, the photojournalist describes his own worth in relation to that of Kurtz with: "I should have been a pair of ragged claws/Scuttling across the floors of silent seas", from "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock".
Development[edit]
Screenplay[edit]
While working as an assistant for Francis Ford Coppola on The Rain People, George Lucas and Steven Spielberg encouraged their friend and filmmaker John Milius to write a Vietnam War film.[14] Milius came up with the idea for adapting the plot of Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness to the Vietnam War setting. He had read the novel when he was a teenager and was reminded about it by one of his college lecturers who had mentioned the several unsuccessful attempts to adapt it into a movie.[15][note 1]
Coppola gave Milius $15,000 to write the screenplay with the promise of an additional $10,000 if it were green-lit.[16][17] Milius claims that he wrote the screenplay in 1969[15] and originally called it The Psychedelic Soldier.[18] He wanted to use Conrad's novel as "a sort of allegory. It would have been too simple to have followed the book completely".[16]
Milius based the character of Willard and some of Kurtz's on a friend of his, Fred Rexer, who had experienced, first-hand, the scene related by Marlon Brando's character wherein the arms of villagers are hacked off by the Viet Cong. Kurtz was based on Robert B. Rheault, head of special forces in Vietnam.[19]
At one point, Coppola told Milius, "Write every scene you ever wanted to go into that movie",[15] and he wrote ten drafts, amounting to over a thousand pages.[20] Milius changed the film's title to Apocalypse Now after being inspired by a button badge popular with hippies during the 1960s that said "Nirvana Now". He was also influenced by an article written by Michael Herr titled, "The Battle for Khe Sanh", which referred to drugs, rock 'n' roll, and people calling airstrikes down on themselves.[15] He was also inspired by such films as Dr Strangelove.
Milius says the classic line "Charlie don't surf" was inspired by a comment Ariel Sharon made during the Six Day War, when he went skin diving after capturing enemy territory and announced "We're eating their fish". He says the line "I love the smell of Napalm in the morning" just came to him.[21]
Milius had no desire to direct the film himself and felt that Lucas was the right person for the job.[15] Lucas worked with Milius for four years developing the film, alongside his work on other films, including his script for Star Wars.[22] He approached Apocalypse Now as a black comedy,[23] and intended to shoot the film after making THX 1138, with principal photography to start in 1971.[16] Lucas' friend and producer Gary Kurtz traveled to the Philippines, scouting suitable locations. They intended to shoot the film in both the rice fields between Stockton and Sacramento, California and on-location in Vietnam, on a $2 million budget, cinéma vérité style, using 16 mm cameras, and real soldiers, while the war was still going on.[15][22][24] However, due to the studios' safety concerns and Lucas' involvement with American Graffiti and Star Wars, Lucas decided to shelve the project for the time being.[16][22]
Pre-production[edit]
Coppola was drawn to Milius' script, which he described as "a comedy and a terrifying psychological horror story".[25] In the spring of 1974, Coppola discussed with friends and co-producers Fred Roos and Gray Frederickson the idea of producing the film.[26] He asked Lucas and then Milius to direct Apocalypse Now, but both men were involved with other projects;[26] in Lucas' case, he got the go-ahead to make Star Wars, and declined the offer to direct Apocalypse Now.[15] Coppola was determined to make the film and pressed ahead himself. He envisioned the film as a definitive statement on the nature of modern war, the difference between good and evil, and the impact of American society on the rest of the world. The director said that he wanted to take the audience "through an unprecedented experience of war and have them react as much as those who had gone through the war".[25]
In 1975, while promoting The Godfather Part II in Australia, Coppola and his producers scouted possible locations for Apocalypse Now in Cairns in northern Queensland, that had jungle resembling Vietnam.[27] He decided to make his film in the Philippines for its access to American equipment and cheap labor. Production coordinator Fred Roos had already made two low-budget films there for Monte Hellman, and had friends and contacts in the country.[25] Coppola spent the last few months of 1975 revising Milius' script and negotiating with United Artists to secure financing for the production. According to Frederickson, the budget was estimated between $12–14 million.[28] Coppola's American Zoetrope assembled $8 million from distributors outside the United States and $7.5 million from United Artists who assumed that the film would star Marlon Brando, Steve McQueen, and Gene Hackman.[25] Frederickson went to the Philippines and had dinner with President Ferdinand Marcos to formalize support for the production and to allow them to use some of the country's military equipment.[29]
Casting[edit]
Steve McQueen was Coppola's first choice to play Willard, but the actor did not accept because he did not want to leave America for 17 weeks.[25] Al Pacino was also offered the role but he too did not want to be away for that long a period of time and was afraid of falling ill in the jungle as he had done in the Dominican Republic during the shooting of The Godfather Part II.[25] Jack Nicholson, Robert Redford, and James Caan were approached to play either Kurtz or Willard.[24]
Coppola and Roos had been impressed by Martin Sheen's screen test for Michael in The Godfather and he became their top choice to play Willard, but the actor had already accepted another project and Harvey Keitel was cast in the role based on his work in Martin Scorsese's Mean Streets.[30] After the first week of shooting in the Philippines, Coppola replaced Keitel with Sheen. By early 1976, Coppola had persuaded Marlon Brando to play Kurtz for a then-enormous fee of $3.5 million for a month's work on location in September 1976. Dennis Hopper was cast as a kind of Green Beret sidekick for Kurtz and when Coppola heard him talking nonstop on location, he remembered putting "the cameras and the Montagnard shirt on him, and we shot the scene where he greets them on the boat".[24]
Principal photography[edit]
On March 1, 1976, Coppola and his family flew to Manila and rented a large house there for the five-month shoot.[24] Sound and photographic equipment had been coming in from California on a regular basis since late 1975. Principal photography began three weeks later. Within a few days, Coppola was not happy with Harvey Keitel's take on Willard, saying that the actor "found it difficult to play him a passive onlooker".[24] After viewing early footage, the director took a plane back to Los Angeles and replaced Keitel with Martin Sheen.
Typhoon Olga wrecked the sets at Iba and on May 26, 1976, production was closed down.[31] Dean Tavoularis remembers that it "started raining harder and harder until finally it was literally white outside, and all the trees were bent at forty-five degrees".[31] One part of the crew was stranded in a hotel and the others were in small houses that were immobilized by the storm. The Playboy Playmate set had been destroyed, ruining a month's shooting that had been scheduled. Most of the cast and crew went back to the United States for six to eight weeks. Tavoularis and his team stayed on to scout new locations and rebuild the Playmate set in a different place. Also, the production had bodyguards watching constantly at night and one day the entire payroll was stolen. According to Coppola's wife, Eleanor, the film was six weeks behind schedule and $2 million over budget.[31]
Coppola flew back to the U.S. in June 1976. He read a book about Genghis Khan to get a better handle on the character of Kurtz.[31] After filming commenced, Marlon Brando arrived in Manila very overweight and began working with Coppola to rewrite the ending.[32] The director downplayed Brando's weight by dressing him in black, photographing only his face, and having another, taller actor double for him in an attempt to portray Kurtz as an almost mythical character.[32]
In the days after Christmas 1976, Coppola viewed a rough assembly of the footage he had to date but still needed to improvise an ending. He returned to the Philippines in early 1977 and resumed filming.[32] On March 5, 1977, Sheen had a heart attack and struggled for a quarter of a mile to reach help.[33] He was back on the set on April 19. A major sequence in a French plantation cost hundreds of thousands of dollars but was cut from the final film. Rumors began to circulate that Apocalypse Now had several endings but Richard Beggs, who worked on the sound elements, said, "There were never five endings, but just the one, even if there were differently edited versions".[33] These rumors came from Coppola departing frequently from the original screenplay. Coppola admitted that he had no ending because Brando was too fat to play the scenes as written in the original script. With the help of Dennis Jakob, Coppola decided that the ending could be "the classic myth of the murderer who gets up the river, kills the king, and then himself becomes the king — it's the Fisher King, from The Golden Bough".[33]
A water buffalo was slaughtered with a machete for the climactic scene. The scene was inspired by a ritual performed by a local Ifugao tribe which Coppola had witnessed along with his wife (who filmed the ritual later shown in the documentary Hearts of Darkness) and film crew. Although this was an American production subject to American animal cruelty laws, scenes like this filmed in the Philippines were not policed or monitored, and the American Humane Association gave the film an "unacceptable" rating.[34] Principal photography ended on May 21, 1977.[35]
Post-production[edit]
In the summer of 1977, Coppola told Walter Murch that he had four months to assemble the sound. Murch realized that the script had been narrated but Coppola abandoned the idea during filming.[35] Murch thought that there was a way to assemble the film without narration but it would take ten months and decided to give it another try.[36] He put it back in, recording it all himself. By September, Coppola told his wife that he felt "there is only about a 20% chance [I] can pull the film off".[37] He convinced United Artists executives to delay the premiere from May to October 1978. Author Michael Herr received a call from Zoetrope in January 1978 and was asked to work on the film's narration based on his well-received book about Vietnam, Dispatches.[37] Herr said that the narration already written was "totally useless" and spent a year writing various narrations with Coppola giving him very definite guidelines.[37]
Murch had problems trying to make a stereo soundtrack for Apocalypse Now because sound libraries were devoid of any stereo recordings of any weapons and, specifically, weapons used in Vietnam.[37] In addition, the sound material brought back from the Philippines was inadequate because the small location crew lacked time and resources sufficient to record jungle sounds and ambient noises. Murch and his crew had to fabricate the mood of the jungle on the soundtrack. Apocalypse Now would feature innovative sound technique for movies as Murch insisted on recording the most up-to-date gunfire and employed the Dolby Stereo 70 mm Six Track system for the 70mm release. This used two channels of sound from behind the audience as well as three channels of sound from behind the movie screen.[37] The 35mm release used the then still new Dolby Stereo optical stereo system that has a single surround channel and three screen channels.
In May 1978, Coppola decided that it would not be possible to finish the film for a December release and postponed the opening until spring of 1979. He screened a "work in progress" for 900 people in April 1979 that was not well received.[38] That same year, he was invited to screen Apocalypse Now at the Cannes Film Festival.[39] United Artists were not keen on showing an unfinished version in front of so many members of the press but Coppola remembered that The Conversation won the Palme d'Or and agreed, less than a month prior to the start of the festival, to screen Apocalypse Now at Cannes. The week prior to Cannes, Coppola arranged three sneak previews that each featured their own slightly different versions. He allowed critics to attend the screenings and believed that they would honor the embargo placed on reviews. On May 14, Rona Barrett reviewed the film on television and called it "a disappointing failure".[39] At Cannes, Zoetrope technicians worked during the night before the screening to install additional speakers on the theater walls in order to achieve Murch's 5.1 soundtrack.[39] On August 15, 1979 Apocalypse Now was released in the U.S. in 15 theaters equipped to play the first Dolby Stereo 70mm film with stereo surround sound.
Other versions[edit]
Endings[edit]
At the time of its release, many rumors surrounded the ending of Apocalypse Now. Coppola stated an ending was written in haste in which Willard and Kurtz joined forces and repelled the air strike on the compound; however, Coppola never fully agreed with the two going out in apocalyptic intensity, preferring to end the film in a more encouraging manner.
When Coppola originally organized the ending of the movie, he had two choices. One involved Willard leading Lance by the hand as everyone in Kurtz's base throws down their weapons, and ends with images of Willard's boat pulling away from Kurtz's compound superimposed over the face of a stone idol which then fades into black. Another option showed an air strike being called and the base being blown to bits in a spectacular display, consequently killing everyone left at the base.
The original 1979 70mm exclusive theatrical release ended with Willard's boat, the stone statue, then fade to black with no credits, save for '"Copyright 1979 Omni Zoetrope"' right after the film ends. This mirrors the lack of any opening titles and supposedly stems from Coppola's original intention to "tour" the film as one would a play: the credits would have appeared on printed programs provided before the screening began.[40]
There have been, to date, many variations of the end credit sequence, beginning with the 35mm general release version, where Coppola elected to show the credits superimposed over shots of Kurtz's base exploding.[40] Rental prints circulated with this ending, and can be found in the hands of a few collectors. Some versions of this had the subtitle "A United Artists release", while others had "An Omni Zoetrope release". The network television version of the credits ended with "...from MGM/UA Entertainment Company" (the film made its network debut shortly after the merger of MGM and UA). One variation of the end credits can be seen on both YouTube and as a supplement on the current Lionsgate Blu-ray.
In any case, when Coppola heard that audiences interpreted this as an air strike called by Willard, Coppola pulled the film from its 35 mm run, and put credits on a black screen. (However, prints with the "air strike" footage continued to circulate to "repertory" theatres well into the 1980s.) In the DVD commentary, Coppola explains that the images of explosions had not been intended to be part of the story; they were intended to be seen as completely separate from the film. He had added them to the credits because he had captured the footage during the demolition of the sets (required by the Philippine government), which was filmed with multiple cameras fitted with different film stocks and lenses to capture the explosions at different speeds.[41]
Extended bootleg version[edit]
There is a longer 289-minute version which has never been officially released but circulates as a video bootleg, containing extra material not included in either the original theatrical release or the "redux" version.[42]
Apocalypse Now Redux[edit]
Main article: Apocalypse Now Redux
In 2001, Coppola released Apocalypse Now Redux in cinemas and subsequently on DVD. This is an extended version that restores 49 minutes of scenes cut from the original film. Coppola has continued to circulate the original version as well: the two versions are packaged together in the Complete Dossier DVD, released on August 15, 2006 and in the Blu-ray edition released on October 19, 2010.
The longest section of added footage in the Redux version is a chapter involving the de Marais family's rubber plantation, a holdover from the colonization of French Indochina, featuring Coppola's two sons Gian-Carlo and Roman as children of the family. These scenes were removed from the 1979 cut, which premiered at Cannes. In behind-the-scenes footage in Hearts of Darkness, Coppola expresses his anger, on the set, at the technical aspects of the shot scenes, the result of tight allocation of resources. At the time of the Redux version, it was possible to digitally enhance the footage to accomplish Coppola's vision. In the scenes, the French family patriarchs argue about the positive side of colonialism in Indochina and denounce the betrayal of the military men in the First Indochina War. Hubert de Marais argues that French politicians sacrificed entire battalions at Điện Biên Phủ, and tells Willard that the US created the Viet Cong (as the Viet Minh), to fend off Japanese invaders.
Other added material includes extra combat footage before Willard meets Kilgore, a humorous scene in which Willard's team steals Kilgore's surfboard (which sheds some light on the hunt for the mangoes), a follow-up scene to the dance of the Playboy playmates, in which Willard's team finds the playmates awaiting evacuation after their helicopter has run out of fuel (trading two barrels of fuel for two hours with the Bunnies), and a scene of Kurtz reading from a Time magazine article about the war, surrounded by Cambodian children.
There is a deleted scene titled "Monkey Sampan", which was used as a way to represent the whole movie in a three-minute scene. The scene shows Willard and the PBR crew suspiciously eyeing an approaching sampan juxtaposed to Montagnard villagers joyfully singing "Light My Fire" by The Doors. As the sampan gets closer, Willard realizes there are monkeys on it and no helmsman. Finally, just as the two boats pass, the wind turns the sail and exposes a naked dead civilian tied to the sail boom. His body is mutilated and looks as though the man had been whipped. The singing stops. It is assumed the man was tortured by the Viet Cong. As they pass on by, Chef notes out loud, "That's comin' from where we're going, Captain." The boat then slowly passes the giant tail of a shot down B-52 bomber. The scene is ominous and the noise of engines way up in the sky is heard. Coppola said that he made up for cutting this scene by having the PBR pass under an airplane tail in the final cut.
Reception[edit]
Cannes screening[edit]
A three-hour version of Apocalypse Now was screened as a "work in progress" at the 1979 Cannes Film Festival and met with prolonged applause.[43] At the subsequent press conference, Coppola criticized the media for attacking him and the production during their problems filming in the Philippines and famously uttered, "We had access to too much money, too much equipment, and little by little we went insane", and "My film is not about Vietnam, it is Vietnam".[43] The filmmaker upset newspaper critic Rex Reed who reportedly stormed out of the conference. Apocalypse Now won the Palme d'Or for best film along with Volker Schlöndorff's The Tin Drum - a decision that was reportedly greeted with "some boos and jeers from the audience".[44]
Box office[edit]
Apocalypse Now performed well at the box office when it opened in August 1979.[43] The film initially opened in one theater in New York City, Toronto, and Hollywood, grossing USD $322,489 in the first five days. It ran exclusively in these three locations for four weeks before opening in an additional 12 theaters on October 3, 1979 and then several hundred the following week.[45] The film grossed over $78 million domestically with a worldwide total of approximately $150 million.[40]
The film was re-released on August 28, 1987 in six cities to capitalize on the success of Platoon, Full Metal Jacket, and other Vietnam War movies.[46] New 70mm prints were shown in Los Angeles, San Francisco, San Jose, Seattle, St. Louis, and Cincinnati — cities where the film did financially well in 1979. The film was given the same kind of release as the exclusive engagement in 1979 with no logo or credits and audiences were given a printed program.[46]
Critical response[edit]
Upon its release, Apocalypse Now received near-universal critical acclaim. In his original review, Roger Ebert wrote, "Apocalypse Now achieves greatness not by analyzing our 'experience in Vietnam', but by re-creating, in characters and images, something of that experience".[47] In his review for the Los Angeles Times, Charles Champlin wrote, "as a noble use of the medium and as a tireless expression of national anguish, it towers over everything that has been attempted by an American filmmaker in a very long time".[45]
Ebert added Coppola's film to his list of Great Movies, stating: "Apocalypse Now is the best Vietnam film, one of the greatest of all films, because it pushes beyond the others, into the dark places of the soul. It is not about war so much as about how war reveals truths we would be happy never to discover".[48]
Other reviews were less positive; Frank Rich in Time said: "While much of the footage is breathtaking, Apocalypse Now is emotionally obtuse and intellectually empty".[49]
Various commentators have debated whether Apocalypse Now is an anti-war or pro-war film. Some commentators' evidence of the film's anti-war message include the purposeless brutality of the war, the absence of military leadership, and the imagery of machinery destroying nature.[50] Advocates of the film's pro-war stance, however, view these same elements as a glorification of war and the assertion of American supremacy. According to Frank Tomasulo, “the U.S. foisting its culture on Vietnam,” including the destruction of a village so that soldiers could surf, affirms the film's pro-war message.[50] Additionally, a Marine named Anthony Swofford recounted how his platoon watched Apocalypse Now before being sent to Iraq in 1990 in order to get excited for war.[51] According to Coppola, the film may be considered anti-war, but is even more anti-lie: “...the fact that a culture can lie about what's really going on in warfare, that people are being brutalized, tortured, maimed, and killed, and somehow present this as moral is what horrifies me, and perpetuates the possibility of war”.[52]
In May 2011, a newly restored digital print of Apocalypse Now was released in UK cinemas, distributed by Optimum Releasing. Total Film magazine gave the film a five-star review, stating: "This is the original cut rather than the 2001 ‘Redux’ (be gone, jarring French plantation interlude!), digitally restored to such heights you can, indeed, get a nose full of the napalm."[53]
Rotten Tomatoes ranked the film 99% "Certified Fresh" with an average rating of 8.9/10, and the stated consensus that "Francis Ford Coppola's haunting, hallucinatory Vietnam war epic is cinema at its most audacious and visionary".[54]
Legacy[edit]

 

 The May 1, 2010 cover of the Economist newspaper, illustrating the 2010 European sovereign debt crisis with imagery from the movie, attests to the film's pervasive cultural impact.
Today, the movie is widely regarded by many as a masterpiece of the New Hollywood era, and is frequently cited as one of the greatest films of all time.[55][56][57] Roger Ebert considered it to be the finest film on the Vietnam war and included it on his list for the 2002 Sight and Sound poll for the greatest movie of all time.[58][59] It is on the American Film Institute's 100 Years...100 Movies list at number 28, but it dropped two spots to number 30 on their 10th anniversary list. Kilgore's quote, "I love the smell of napalm in the morning," written by Milius, was number 12 on the AFI's 100 Years...100 Movie Quotes list and was also voted the fourth greatest movie speech of all time in a 2004 poll.[60] It is listed at number 7 on Empire's 2008 list of the 500 greatest movies of all time. Entertainment Weekly ranked Apocalypse Now as having one of the "10 Best Surfing Scenes" in cinema.[61]
In 1981, shortly after introduction of martial law in Poland, a British-Polish photographer Chris Niedenthal took an iconic photo presenting a SKOT APC in front of Moscow Cinema (Kino Moskwa) with the film's poster behind it.[62]
In 2002, Sight and Sound magazine polled several critics to name the best film of the last 25 years and Apocalypse Now was named number one. It was also listed as the second best war film by viewers on Channel 4's 100 Greatest War Films and was the second rated war movie of all time based on the Movifone list (after Schindler's List) and the IMDb War movie list (after The Longest Day). It is ranked number 1 on Channel 4's 50 Films to See Before You Die. In a 2004 poll of UK film fans, Blockbuster listed Kilgore's eulogy to napalm as the best movie speech.[63] The helicopter attack scene with the Ride of the Valkyries soundtrack was chosen as the most memorable film scene ever by Empire magazine (although the same track was used earlier in 1915 to similar effect in the score written to accompany the silent film The Birth of a Nation).
In 2009, the London Film Critics' Circle voted Apocalypse Now the best movie of the last 30 years.[64]
In 2011, actor Charlie Sheen, son of Martin Sheen, started playing clips from the film on his live tour and played the film in its entirety during post-show parties. One of Charlie Sheen's films, the 1993 comedy Hot Shots! Part Deux, includes a brief scene in which Charlie is riding a boat up a river in Iraq while on a rescue mission and passes Martin, as Captain Willard, going the other way. As they pass, each man shouts to the other "I loved you in Wall Street!", referencing the 1987 film that had featured both of them. Additionally, the promotional material for Hot Shots! Part Deux included a mockumentary that aired on HBO titled Hearts of Hot Shots! Part Deux—A Filmmaker's Apology, in parody of the 1991 documentary Hearts of Darkness: A Filmmaker's Apocalypse, about the making of Apocalypse Now.[65]
Awards and honors[edit]
WinsAcademy Award for Best Cinematography (Vittorio Storaro)[66]
Academy Award for Best Sound (Walter Murch, Mark Berger, Richard Beggs, Nathan Boxer)[66]
Cannes Film Festival: Palme d'Or[67]
Golden Globe Award for Best Director (Francis Ford Coppola)
Golden Globe Award for Best Supporting Actor (Robert Duvall)
Golden Globe Award for Best Original Score (Carmine Coppola and Francis Ford Coppola)
National Society of Film Critics Award for Best Supporting Actor (Frederic Forrest)
David di Donatello Award for Best Director, Foreign Film (Migliore Regista Straniero) (Francis Ford Coppola)
American Movie Award for Best Supporting Actor (Robert Duvall)
BAFTA Award for Best Direction (Francis Ford Coppola)
BAFTA Award for Best Supporting Actor (Robert Duvall)
In 2000, Apocalypse Now was selected for preservation in the United States National Film Registry by the Library of Congress as being "culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant".
NominationsAcademy Award for Best Picture (Francis Ford Coppola, Fred Roos, Gray Frederickson and Tom Sternberg)[66]
Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor  (Robert Duvall)[66]
Academy Award for Best Art Direction — Set Decoration (Dean Tavoularis, Angelo P. Graham and George R. Nelson)[66]
Academy Award for Directing (Francis Ford Coppola)[66]
Academy Award for Film Editing (Richard Marks, Walter Murch, Gerald B. Greenberg and Lisa Fruchtman)[66]
Academy Award for Best Writing, Screenplay Based on Material from Another Medium (John Milius and Francis Ford Coppola)[66]
DGA Award for Outstanding Directorial Achievement in Motion Pictures (Francis Ford Coppola)
WGA Award for Best Drama Written Directly for the Screen (John Milius and Francis Ford Coppola)
Golden Globe Award for Best Motion Picture – Drama (Francis Ford Coppola, Fred Roos, Gray Frederickson and Tom Sternberg)
Grammy Award for Best Original Score Written for a Motion Picture (Carmine Coppola and Francis Ford Coppola)
César Award for Best Foreign Film (Meilleur film étranger) (Francis Ford Coppola)
American Movie Award for Best Actor (Martin Sheen)
BAFTA Award for Best Film Music (Carmine Coppola and Francis Ford Coppola)
BAFTA Award for Best Actor (Martin Sheen)
American Film Institute listsAFI's 100 Years...100 Movies – #28
AFI's 100 Years...100 Heroes and Villains: Colonel Walter E. Kurtz – Nominated Villain
AFI's 100 Years...100 Songs: "The End" – Nominated
AFI's 100 Years...100 Movie Quotes: "I love the smell of napalm in the morning." – #12
AFI's 100 Years...100 Movies (10th Anniversary Edition) – #30
AFI's 10 Top 10 – Nominated Epic film
Marlon Brando was also ranked #4 of the Top 25 American male screen legends.
Other
Number 7 on Empire magazine's 500 Greatest Movies of all time
Home video release aspect ratio issues[edit]
The first home video releases of Apocalypse Now were pan-and-scan versions of the original 35 mm Technovision anamorphic 2.35:1 print, and the closing credits, white on black background, were presented in compressed 1.33:1 full-frame format to allow all credit information to be seen on standard televisions. The first letterboxed appearance, on Laserdisc on December 29, 1991, cropped the film to a 2:1 aspect ratio (conforming to the Univisium spec created by cinematographer Vittorio Storaro), and included a small degree of pan-and-scan processing at the insistence of Coppola and Storaro. The end credits, from a videotape source rather than a film print, were still crushed for 1.33:1 and zoomed to fit the anamorphic video frame. All DVD releases have maintained this aspect ratio in anamorphic widescreen, but present the film without the end credits, which were treated as a separate feature. The Blu-ray releases of Apocalypse Now restore the film to a 2.35:1 aspect ratio, making it the first home video release to effectively display the film in its true aspect ratio; the theatrical release had an aspect ratio of 2.39:1.
As a DVD extra, the footage of the explosion of the Kurtz compound was featured without text credits but included commentary by Coppola, explaining the various endings based on how the film was screened.
On the cover of the Redux DVD, Willard is erroneously listed as "Lieutenant Willard".
Documentaries[edit]
Hearts of Darkness: A Filmmaker's Apocalypse (American Zoetrope/Cineplex Odeon Films) (1991) Directed by Eleanor Coppola, George Hickenlooper and Fax Bahr
Apocalypse Now – The Complete Dossier DVD (Paramount Home Entertainment) (2006) Disc 2 extras include:
The Post Production of Apocalypse Now: Documentary (four featurettes covering the editing, music and sound of the film through Coppola and his team)
"A Million Feet of Film: The Editing of Apocalypse Now" (18 minutes)
"The Music of Apocalypse Now" (15 minutes)
"Heard Any Good Movies Lately? The Sound Design of Apocalypse Now" (15 minutes)
"The Final Mix" (3 minutes)
See also[edit]
Reflections in a Golden Eye
Hearts of Darkness - A 1993 adaption of the original novel, starring Tim Roth & John Malkovich
Cinema of the United States
Anthony Poshepny
Notes[edit]
1.Jump up ^ However, filmmaker Carroll Ballard claims that Apocalypse Now was his idea in 1967 before Milius had written his screenplay. Ballard had a deal with producer Joel Landon and they tried to get the rights to Conrad's book but were unsuccessful. Lucas acquired the rights but failed to tell Ballard and Landon.[15]
References[edit]
1.Jump up ^ "Apocalypse Now, Box Office Information". Box Office Mojo. Retrieved 2012-01-27.
2.Jump up ^ Derek Malcolm (1999) Francis Ford Coppola: Apocalypse Now. The Guardian. Thursday 4 November 1999
3.Jump up ^ Peary, Gerald. "Francis Ford Coppola, Interview with Gerald Peary". Gerald Peary. Retrieved 2007-03-14.
4.Jump up ^ French, Karl (1998) Apocalypse Now, Bloomsbury, London. ISBN 978-0-7475-3804-2
5.Jump up ^ Col David Hackworth obituary The Independent, Weds, 11 May 2005
6.Jump up ^ Cowie 2001, p. 19.
7.Jump up ^ Murfin, Ross C (ed.) (1989): Joseph Conrad: Heart of Darkness. A Case Study in Contemporary Criticism. Boston: St. Martin's Press, pp. 3-16.
8.Jump up ^ "Heart of Darkness & Apocalypse Now: A comparative analysis of novella and film". Cyberpat.com. Retrieved 2010-03-06.
9.Jump up ^ Leary, William L. "Death of a Legend". Air America Archive. Retrieved on 2007-06-10.
10.Jump up ^ Warner, Roger. Shooting at the Moon.
11.Jump up ^ Ehrlich, Richard S. (2003-07-08). "CIA operative stood out in 'secret war' in Laos". Bangkok Post. http://web.archive.org/web/20090806040904/http://geocities.com/asia_correspondent/laos0307ciaposhepnybp.html. Retrieved on 10 June 2007.
12.Jump up ^ Isaacs, Matt (1999-11-17). "Agent Provocative". SF Weekly. Archived from the original on 12 June 2009. Retrieved 2009-05-02.
13.Jump up ^ Davidson, Harriet. "Improper desire: reading The Waste Land" in Anthony David Moody (ed.). The Cambridge companion to T. S. Eliot. Cambridge University Press, 1995, p. 121.
14.Jump up ^ Cowie 2001, p. 2.
15.^ Jump up to: a b c d e f g h Cowie 1990, p. 120.
16.^ Jump up to: a b c d Cowie 2001, p. 5.
17.Jump up ^ *Medavoy, Mike with Josh Young, You're Only as Good as Your Next One, Astria, 2002 p 8
18.Jump up ^ Cowie 2001, p. 3.
19.Jump up ^ Coppola's Vietnam Movie Is a Battle Royal: Francis Ford Coppola's Battle Royal By CHARLES HIGHAM. New York Times (1923-Current file) [New York, N.Y] 15 May 1977: 77.
20.Jump up ^ Cowie 2001, p. 7.
21.Jump up ^ Thom Patterson, "Apocalypse writer: Most scripts today 'are garbage' ", CNN, 9 March 2009 accessed 2012
22.^ Jump up to: a b c Lucas, George (2004). A Legacy of Filmmakers: The Early Years of American Zoetrope (documentary) (DVD). Warner Bros. Home Video.
23.Jump up ^ Marcus Hearn (2005). The Cinema of George Lucas. New York City: Harry N. Abrams, Inc. pp. 79–80. ISBN 0-8109-4968-7.
24.^ Jump up to: a b c d e Cowie 1990, p. 122.
25.^ Jump up to: a b c d e f Cowie 1990, p. 121.
26.^ Jump up to: a b Cowie 2001, p. 6.
27.Jump up ^ Cowie 2001, p. 12.
28.Jump up ^ Cowie 2001, p. 13.
29.Jump up ^ Cowie 2001, p. 16.
30.Jump up ^ Cowie 2001, p. 18.
31.^ Jump up to: a b c d Cowie 1990, p. 123.
32.^ Jump up to: a b c Cowie 1990, p. 124.
33.^ Jump up to: a b c Cowie 1990, p. 125.
34.Jump up ^ Burt, Jonathan (2002). Animals In Film: Apocalypse Now. Reaktion Books. ISBN 978-1-86189-131-0. Retrieved 2007-11-10.
35.^ Jump up to: a b Cowie 1990, p. 126.
36.Jump up ^ Cowie 1990, pp. 126-127.
37.^ Jump up to: a b c d e Cowie 1990, p. 127.
38.Jump up ^ Cowie 1990, p. 128.
39.^ Jump up to: a b c Cowie 1990, p. 129.
40.^ Jump up to: a b c Cowie 1990, p. 132.
41.Jump up ^ http://homevideo.about.com/od/dvdreview1/a/apocalypsenowra.htm
42.Jump up ^ Coates, Gordon (October 17, 2008). "Coppola's slow boat on the Nung". The Guardian (London). Archived from the original on 18 October 2008. Retrieved 2008-10-17.
43.^ Jump up to: a b c Cowie 1990, p. 130.
44.Jump up ^ "Sweeping Cannes". Time. June 4, 1979. Archived from the original on 16 December 2008. Retrieved 2008-11-22.
45.^ Jump up to: a b Cowie 1990, p. 131.
46.^ Jump up to: a b Harmetz, Aljean (August 20, 1987). "Apocalypse Now to Be Re-released". New York Times. Archived from the original on 16 December 2008. Retrieved 2008-11-24.
47.Jump up ^ Ebert, Roger (June 1, 1979). "Apocalypse Now". Chicago Sun-Times. Retrieved 008-11-24.
48.Jump up ^ Ebert, Roger (November 28, 1999). "Great Movies: Apocalypse Now". Chicago Sun-Times. Archived from the original on 16 December 2008. Retrieved 2008-11-24.
49.Jump up ^ Frank Rich (1979-08-27). "Cinema: The Making of a Quagmire by Frank Rich". Time. Retrieved 2010-03-06.
50.^ Jump up to: a b Frank Tomasulo (1990). The Politics of Ambivalence: Apocalypse Now as Prowar and Antiwar Film. Rutgers.
51.Jump up ^ Marilyn B. Young (October 2004). Now Playing:Vietnam. Organization of American Historians. OAH.
52.Jump up ^ Mark J. Lacy (Nov.-Dec. 2003). War, Cinema, and Moral Anxiety. JSTOR 40645126.
53.Jump up ^ "Apocalypse Now Review". Total Film. Archived from the original on 19 May 2011. Retrieved June 8, 2011.
54.Jump up ^ Apocalypse Now at Rotten Tomatoes
55.Jump up ^ "Apocalypse Now (Redux) (1979) (2001)". Archived from the original on 14 November 2010. Retrieved 2010-10-18.
56.Jump up ^ "Apocalypse Now (1979)". Retrieved 2010-10-18.
57.Jump up ^ "DVD Pick: Apocalypse Now - The Complete Dossier". Retrieved 2010-10-18.
58.Jump up ^ "How the directors and critics voted". Retrieved 2010-10-18.
59.Jump up ^ "Apocalypse Now (1979) by Roger Ebert". Chicago Sun-Times. Retrieved 2010-10-18.
60.Jump up ^ ""Napalm" Speech Tops Movie Poll". BBC News. 2004-01-02. Retrieved 2007-09-19.
61.Jump up ^ "10 Best Surfing Scenes". Entertainment Weekly. August 8, 2002. Retrieved 2009-04-24.
62.Jump up ^ The photography
63.Jump up ^ 'Napalm' speech tops movie poll, 2 January 2004, BBC News. Retrieved 18 February 2008.
64.Jump up ^ "War epic Apocalypse Now tops UK film critics poll". BBC. December 1, 2009. Archived from the original on 4 December 2009. Retrieved 2009-12-02.
65.Jump up ^ Hearts of Hot Shots! Part Deux - A Filmmaker's Apology Television show - Hearts of Hot Shots! Part Deux - A Filmmaker's Apology TV Show - Yahoo! TV
66.^ Jump up to: a b c d e f g h "The 52nd Academy Awards (1980) Nominees and Winners". oscars.org. Retrieved 2011-10-07.
67.Jump up ^ "Festival de Cannes: Apocalypse Now". festival-cannes.com. Retrieved 2009-05-23.
Further reading[edit]
Adair, Gilbert (1981) Vietnam on Film: From The Green Berets to Apocalypse Now. Proteus. ISBN 0-906071-86-0
Biskind, Peter (1999) Easy Riders, Raging Bulls: How the Sex, Drugs and Rock-'n'-Roll Generation Saved Hollywood. Simon and Schuster. ISBN 0-684-85708-1
Coppola, Eleanor (1979) Notes on the Making of Apocalypse Now. Simon & Schuster. ISBN 0-87910-150-4
Cowie, Peter (1990) Coppola. New York: Da Capo Press. ISBN 0-306-80598-7
Cowie, Peter (2001) "The Apocalypse Now Book. New York: Da Capo Press.ISBN 10-03068-104-68
Fraser, George MacDonald (1988) The Hollywood History of the World: from One Million Years B.C. to Apocalypse Now. Kobal Collection /Beech Tree Books. ISBN 0-688-07520-7
French, Karl (1999) Karl French on Apocalypse Now: A Bloomsbury Movie Guide. Bloomsbury. ISBN 1-58234-014-5
Milius, John & Coppola, Francis Ford (2001) Apocalypse Now Redux: An Original Screenplay. Talk Miramax Books/Hyperion. ISBN 0-7868-8745-1
Tosi, Umberto & Glaser, Milton. (1979) Apocalypse Now - Program distributed in connection with the opening of the film. United Artists
External links[edit]
 Wikiquote has a collection of quotations related to: Apocalypse Now
Apocalypse Now at the Internet Movie Database
Apocalypse Now at Rotten Tomatoes
Apocalypse Now at Metacritic
Apocalypse Now at AllRovi
Apocalypse Now at Box Office Mojo

[hide]
v·
 t·
 e
 
Apocalypse Now

 
Characters
Captain Benjamin L. Willard·
 Colonel Walter E. Kurtz·
 American Photojournalist
 
 
Related
Apocalypse Now Redux·
 Hearts of Darkness: A Filmmaker's Apocalypse·
 Heart of Darkness
 
 

[show]
v·
 t·
 e
 
Francis Ford Coppola

 





·
·
·
·
·

 


·
·
·

 


·
·
·
·
·
·
·

 


·
·
·

 


·

 

 

 

 


 

·
·

 

·
·
·
·
·
·
·
·
·
·
·
·

 

·
·
·

 

[show]
v·
 t·
 e
 
Films directed by John Milius

 
·
·
·
·
·
·
·

 

[show]
v·
 t·
 e
 
Works by Joseph Conrad

 


·
·
·
·
·
·
·
·
·
·
·
·
·
·
·
·
·
·
·
·

Joseph Conrad.PNG

 

·
·
·
·

 

·

 

·
·
·
·
·
·
·
·
·
·
·
·
·
·
·
·
·
·

 

[show]
v·
 t·
 e
 
Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness (1899)

 

·
·
·
·

 

·

 



 

·
·
·

 



 

·
·
·
·
·
·
·
·

 

[show]
­v·
 ­t·
 ­e
 
Palme d'Or winning films

 

­·
­·
­·
­·
­·
­·
­·
­·
­·
­·
­·
­·
­·
­·
­·
­·
­·
­·
­·
­·
­·
­·
­·
­

 

­·
­·
­·
­·
­·
­·
­·
­·
­·
­·
­·
­·
­·
­·
­·
­·
­·
­·
­·
­·
­·
­·
­·
­

 

­·
­·
­·
­·
­·
­·
­·
­·
­·
­·
­·
­·
­·
­·
­·
­·
­·
­·
­·
­·
­·
­·
­·
­

 

­·
­·
­·
­·
­·
­·
­·
­·
­·
­·
­·
­·
­·
­

 

 

Categories: 1979 films
English-language films
1970s war films
Adventure drama films
American films
American Zoetrope films
Apocalypse Now
Epic films
Films based on novels
Films based on works by Joseph Conrad
Films directed by Francis Ford Coppola
Films featuring a Best Supporting Actor Golden Globe winning performance
Films set in Cambodia
Films set in the 1960s
Films shot anamorphically
Films shot in the Philippines
Films that won the Best Sound Mixing Academy Award
Films whose cinematographer won the Best Cinematography Academy Award
Films whose director won the Best Director Golden Globe
Khmer-language films
Palme d'Or winners
Paramount Pictures films
United Artists films
United States National Film Registry films
Vietnam War films
Vietnamese-language films
Screenplays by Francis Ford Coppola




Navigation menu


Create account
Log in


Article
Talk



 

Read
Edit
View history




 Search 



Main page
Contents
Featured content
Current events
Random article
Donate to Wikipedia
Wikimedia Shop

Interaction
Help
About Wikipedia
Community portal
Recent changes
Contact page

Toolbox





Print/export



Languages
العربية
Aragonés
Български
Català
Česky
Cymraeg
Dansk
Deutsch
Español
Esperanto
Euskara
فارسی
Français
Galego
한국어
Հայերեն
Hrvatski
Ido
Íslenska
Italiano
עברית
Latviešu
Magyar
മലയാളം
मराठी
Bahasa Melayu
Nederlands
日本語
Norsk bokmål
Polski
Português
Română
Русский
Simple English
Slovenčina
Српски / srpski
Srpskohrvatski / српскохрватски
Suomi
Svenska
ไทย
Türkçe
Українська
Tiếng Việt
中文
Edit links
This page was last modified on 27 October 2013 at 20:45.
Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike License; additional terms may apply. By using this site, you agree to the Terms of Use and Privacy Policy.
 Wikipedia® is a registered trademark of the Wikimedia Foundation, Inc., a non-profit organization.
Privacy policy
About Wikipedia
Disclaimers
Contact Wikipedia
Developers
Mobile view
Wikimedia Foundation
Powered by MediaWiki
   


 

Benjamin L. Willard

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
 
Jump to: navigation, search

Question book-new.svg
 This article does not cite any references or sources. Please help improve this article by adding citations to reliable sources. Unsourced material may be challenged and removed. (August 2013) 

Benjamin L. Willard

Created by
John Milius
Francis Ford Coppola
Portrayed by
Martin Sheen
Information

Gender
Male
Occupation
U.S. Army, 173rd Airborne
Title
Captain
Spouse(s)
Divorced
Children
One
Captain Benjamin L. Willard, portrayed by Martin Sheen, is a fictional character and the protagonist of Francis Ford Coppola's 1979 film Apocalypse Now. His character is loosely based on the character Charles Marlow from Joseph Conrad's novella Heart of Darkness. He is a veteran U.S. Army special operations officer who is dispatched to kill the renegade Colonel Walter E. Kurtz.
Biography[edit]
Captain Willard is a U.S. Army officer who has been attached to MACV-SOG to carry out special operations missions, primarily as an assassin. He has already returned home once, but failed to integrate back into society and was divorced by his wife. Despite his desire to return to the United States, once he had gone back all he could think about was "getting back into the jungle". He has killed at least six people at close quarters, "close enough for them to breathe their last breath in my face," but never a fellow American.
Frustrated by his state of limbo in Saigon, where he is aimlessly stationed without a mission, he drinks heavily and ponders a return to the jungle. He is taken to a briefing in Nha Trang, where he is instructed to take a patrol boat upstream and kill renegade Colonel Walter E. Kurtz, who has gone insane. He accepts the mission, wondering "what the hell else was I gonna do?" Using a U.S. Navy Patrol Boat River, Willard travels up the Nung River to Cambodia, where Kurtz and his private army have a fortified base. He rarely converses with the boat's crew, preferring isolation.
He and his crew are transported to the river's mouth by a manic Air Cavalry commander, Lieutenant Colonel Kilgore, an eccentric whose values clash with Willard's. The trip upriver incorporates entertainment provided by Playboy models travelling with the United Service Organizations and a close encounter with a tiger while searching for mangoes with Chef. During the trip, Willard reads the dossier on Kurtz and starts to understand Kurtz's actions and become more disassociated from his superiors.
Willard learns that the previous man sent to kill Kurtz, Captain Richard Colby, has now joined Kurtz. The crew are attacked by Kurtz's Montagnards and Chef is killed. Willard no longer fears Kurtz but is overpowered by an urge to confront him. He is brought to Kurtz, and they discuss Willard's mission and philosophy. Willard stays at the camp for four days before finally completing his mission by killing Kurtz. He leaves in the PBR and heads back downriver.

[hide]
v·
 t·
 e
 
Apocalypse Now

 
Characters
Captain Benjamin L. Willard·
 Colonel Walter E. Kurtz·
 American Photojournalist
 
 
Related
Apocalypse Now Redux·
 Hearts of Darkness: A Filmmaker's Apocalypse·
 Heart of Darkness
 
 
Stub icon This article about a film character is a stub. You can help Wikipedia by expanding it.
·
·

 

Categories: Film character stubs
Apocalypse Now characters
Fictional captains
Fictional special forces personnel
Fictional characters from Ohio
Fictional murderers
Fictional United States Army personnel
Fictional Vietnam War veterans
Fictional characters introduced in 1979



Navigation menu


Create account
Log in


Article
Talk



 

Read
Edit
View history




 Search 



Main page
Contents
Featured content
Current events
Random article
Donate to Wikipedia
Wikimedia Shop

Interaction
Help
About Wikipedia
Community portal
Recent changes
Contact page

Toolbox





Print/export



Languages
Edit links
This page was last modified on 23 October 2013 at 03:19.
Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike License; additional terms may apply. By using this site, you agree to the Terms of Use and Privacy Policy.
 Wikipedia® is a registered trademark of the Wikimedia Foundation, Inc., a non-profit organization.
Privacy policy
About Wikipedia
Disclaimers
Contact Wikipedia
Developers
Mobile view
Wikimedia Foundation
Powered by MediaWiki
   


 

Colonel Kurtz

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
 
Jump to: navigation, search

Walter E. Kurtz

Created by
John Milius and Francis Ford Coppola
Portrayed by
Marlon Brando
Information

Gender
Male
Title
Colonel
Spouse(s)
Janet Kurtz
Children
1 son
Nationality
American
Colonel Walter E. Kurtz, portrayed by Marlon Brando, is a fictional character and the main antagonist of Francis Ford Coppola's 1979 film Apocalypse Now. Colonel Kurtz is based on the character of a nineteenth-century ivory trader, also called Kurtz, from the novella Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad.

Contents
  [hide] 1 Biography
2 Inspiration
3 Portrayal
4 Trivia
5 References
Biography[edit]
Walter Kurtz was an officer in the United States Army; he was a third-generation West Point graduate and had risen through the ranks and was seen to be destined for a top post within the Pentagon. In his first tour of Vietnam in 1964, he was sent by the Joint Chiefs of Staff to compile a report on the failings of the current military policies. His overtly critical report was not what was expected and was immediately restricted for the joint chiefs and President Lyndon B. Johnson only.
Not long after, Kurtz applied for the 5th Special Forces Group, which was denied to him out of hand because of his advanced age of 38 for the basic training. Kurtz continued with his ambition and even threatened to quit the armed forces, when finally his wish was granted and he was allowed to take the airborne course. Kurtz graduated in a class where he was nearly twice the age of the other trainees and was accepted into the 5th Special Forces Group.
Kurtz returned to Vietnam in 1966 with the Green Berets and was part of the hearts and minds campaign which also included fortifying hamlets. On his next tour, Kurtz was assigned to the Gamma Project, in which he was to raise an army of Montagnards in and around the Vietnamese–Cambodian border to strike at the Viet Cong and N.V.A. Kurtz located his army, including their wives and children, at a remote abandoned Cambodian temple which they fortified. From their base, Kurtz led attacks on the local V.C. and the regular N.V.A. in the region.
Kurtz employed barbaric methods not only to defeat his enemy but also to send fear. At first MACV didn't object to Kurtz's tactics, especially as they proved successful. This soon changed when Kurtz allowed photographs of his atrocities to be released to the world.
In late 1968, after Kurtz failed to respond to MACV's repeated orders to return to Da Nang and resign his command after he ordered the summary execution of four South Vietnamese intelligence agents whom he suspected of being double agents for the Viet Cong, the MACV sent a Green Beret Captain named Richard Colby to bring Kurtz back from Cambodia. Either because he was brainwashed or because he felt a sympathy towards Kurtz's cause, Colby joined up with Kurtz instead of bringing him back to Da Nang.
With Colby's failure, MACV then selected CPT Benjamin L. Willard, a paratrooper and Army intelligence officer, to journey up the Nung river and kill Kurtz. Willard succeeded in his mission only because Kurtz, himself broken mentally by the savage war he had waged, wanted Willard to kill him and release him from his own suffering. Kurtz also murdered Jay "Chef" Hicks by severing his head. Before Willard killed him, Kurtz asked Willard to find his (Kurtz's) wife and son and explain truthfully what he'd done in the war.
Inspiration[edit]
Colonel Kurtz is based on the character of a nineteenth-century ivory trader, also called Kurtz, from the novella Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad. However, the movie's Kurtz is widely believed to have been modeled after Tony Poe, a highly decorated and highly unorthodox Vietnam War-era paramilitary officer from the CIA's Special Activities Division.[1] Poe was known to drop severed heads into enemy-controlled villages as a form of psychological warfare and to use human ears to record the number of enemies his indigenous troops had killed. He would send these ears back to his superiors as proof of his efforts deep inside Laos.[2][3]
Coppola denies that Poe was a primary influence and instead says the character was loosely based on Special Forces Colonel Robert B. Rheault, whose 1969 arrest over the murder of a suspected double agent generated substantial news coverage.[4]
Portrayal[edit]
When Brando arrived for filming in the Philippines in September 1976, he claimed he was dissatisfied with the script; Brando didn't understand why Kurtz was meant to be very thin and bald, or why the character's name was Kurtz and not something like Leighley. He claimed, "American generals don't have those kinds of names. They have flowery names, from the South. I want to be 'Colonel Leighley'." And so, for a time the name was changed under his demand.
When Brando showed up for filming he had put on about 40 lbs and forced Coppola to shoot him from the waist up, making it appear that Kurtz was a 6-foot 6-inch giant.[citation needed] Many of Brando's speeches were ad-libbed and performed off the cuff, with Coppola filming hours of footage of these monologues and then cutting them down to the most interesting parts.
Filming was put on a week-long filming hiatus so that Brando and Coppola could resolve their creative disputes. It is claimed that someone left Conrad's source text, which Coppola had repeatedly referred to him but which he had never read, in the houseboat where Brando was staying in at the time. He returned to filming with his head shaved, wanting to be 'Kurtz' once again; claiming it was all clear to him now that he had read Conrad's novella.[5]
Still photographs of Brando in character as Major Penderton, in the 1967 film Reflections in a Golden Eye, were used later by the producers of Apocalypse Now, who needed photos of a younger Brando to appear in the service record of the younger Colonel Walter Kurtz.
Trivia[edit]
Brando was paid a fee of $3 million for his work on the film, plus $70,000 for an extra day's filming.[citation needed]
References[edit]
1.Jump up ^ Leary, William L. "Death of a Legend". Air America Archive. Retrieved on 2007-06-10.
2.Jump up ^ Warner, Roger (1996). Shooting at the Moon: The Story of America' Clandestine War in Laos. South Royalton: Steerforth Press. ISBN 1-883642-36-1.
3.Jump up ^ Ehrlich, Richard S. (2003-07-08). "CIA operative stood out in 'secret war' in Laos". Bangkok Post. http://web.archive.org/web/20090806040904/http://geocities.com/asia_correspondent/laos0307ciaposhepnybp.html. Retrieved on 10 June 2007.
4.Jump up ^ Isaacs, Matt (1999-11-17). "Agent Provocative". SF Weekly. Retrieved 2009-05-02.
5.Jump up ^ Ondaatje, Michael (2002). The Conversations: Walter Murch and the Art of Editing Film. London: Bloomsbury Publishing. pp. 68–69. ISBN 978-1-4088-0011-9.

[hide]
v·
 t·
 e
 
Apocalypse Now

 
Characters
Captain Benjamin L. Willard·
 Colonel Walter E. Kurtz·
 American Photojournalist
 
 
Related
Apocalypse Now Redux·
 Hearts of Darkness: A Filmmaker's Apocalypse·
 Heart of Darkness
 

 

Categories: Apocalypse Now characters
Fictional characters introduced in 1979
Fictional Green Berets
Fictional Korean War veterans
Fictional United States Army personnel
Fictional murderers
Fictional Vietnam War veterans




Navigation menu


Create account
Log in


Article
Talk



 

Read
Edit
View history




 Search 



Main page
Contents
Featured content
Current events
Random article
Donate to Wikipedia
Wikimedia Shop

Interaction
Help
About Wikipedia
Community portal
Recent changes
Contact page

Toolbox





Print/export



Languages
Русский
Edit links
This page was last modified on 27 October 2013 at 13:16.
Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike License; additional terms may apply. By using this site, you agree to the Terms of Use and Privacy Policy.
 Wikipedia® is a registered trademark of the Wikimedia Foundation, Inc., a non-profit organization.
Privacy policy
About Wikipedia
Disclaimers
Contact Wikipedia
Developers
Mobile view
Wikimedia Foundation
Powered by MediaWiki
   


 

American Photojournalist

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
 
Jump to: navigation, search
For real-world usage, see Category:American photojournalists
American Photojournalist

First appearance
Apocalypse Now
Portrayed by
Dennis Hopper
Information

Gender
Male
The American Photojournalist, portrayed by Dennis Hopper, is a fictional character in Francis Ford Coppola's 1979 film Apocalypse Now.
The character of the American photojournalist in "Apocalypse Now" was first suggested by Chas Gerretsen[1] during a lunch with Francis Ford Coppola, regarding the scene where an American TV correspondent (played by Francis Ford Coppola) yells at some passing soldiers, "don't look at the camera," "...that if Francis wanted to mock TV correspondents, he should use a photojournalist because, "we were all crazy"."
A couple of days later, after the arrival of Dennis Hopper, Chas was asked by Jerry Ziesmer[2] to report to Francis: "on how to dress a combat photographer."
From that moment on the role of Dennis Hopper who had been cast to play Lieutenant Richard M. Colby,[3] changed to that of a photojournalist.
The character was inspired by a number of real-life American photojournalists who worked in Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos during the 1970s, including Sean Flynn.
The photojournalist is the film's equivalent of the "harlequin" or Russian sailor in Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness.

Contents
  [hide] 1 Biography
2 Deleted Scene
3 References
4 External links
Biography[edit]
The American Photojournalist is first seen in Colonel Kurtz's compound when Willard, Chef, and Lance arrive. Like the rest at the compound, the American Photojournalist is deeply affected by Kurtz' teachings and praises him, ranting about how his words change everything and how his legacy will stand once he is gone.
“ What are they gonna say when he dies? They gonna say he was a kind man? He was a wise man? He had plans? He has wisdom? BULLSHIT, MAN! ”
Despite his devotion, Kurtz has little respect for the American Photojournalist. In the final scene in which the American Photojournalist appears, he is talking with Willard while Kurtz reads T. S. Eliot's "The Hollow Men". Kurtz throws the book at him, and proceeds to call him a "mutt". To this, the American Photojournalist leaves, and is never seen again.
The American Photojournalist's name is never revealed, and it seems clear from his erratic behaviour, mood swings and forceful literal nature that he has gone insane.
Deleted Scene[edit]
The American Photojournalist features heavily in scenes deleted from the finished film. In the black market 'Rough Cut', he has a number of extra scenes as the length of the film set at Kurtz's compound rises to about an hour. In the 'Rough Cut', Willard tries unsuccessfully to ask him for his name, and he makes numerous other appearances including a scene where Willard is humiliated and taunted by the entire tribe while in a cage. His eventual fate is also revealed; as he prepares to finally leave the compound, he is gunned down by Colby because he had taken Colonel Kurtz's picture, something Kurtz had already threatened him over.
References[edit]
1.Jump up ^ "Chas Gerretsen, Stills & Special Photographer "Apocalypse Now"".
2.Jump up ^ "First Assistant Director, Apocalypse Now".
3.Jump up ^ "Lieutenant Richard M. Colby".
External links[edit]
American Photojournalist at the Internet Movie Database

[show]
v·
 t·
 e
 
Apocalypse Now

 

·
·

 

·
·

 

[show]
v·
 t·
 e
 
Vietnam War correspondents

 

·
·
·
·
·
·
·
·
·
·
·
·
·
·
·
·
·
·
·
·
·
·
·
·
·
·
·
·
·
·
·
·
·
·

 

·
·
·
·
·
·
·
·
·
·
·
·
·
·
·
·
·
·
·
·
·
·
·
·
·

 

·
·
·
·
·
·
·
·
·
·
·
·
·
·
·
·
·
·

 


Stub icon This article about a film character is a stub. You can help Wikipedia by expanding it.
·
·

 

Categories: Apocalypse Now characters
Fictional reporters
Fictional photographers
Fictional characters introduced in 1979
Film character stubs

Navigation menu


Create account
Log in


Article
Talk



 

Read
Edit
View history




 Search 



Main page
Contents
Featured content
Current events
Random article
Donate to Wikipedia
Wikimedia Shop

Interaction
Help
About Wikipedia
Community portal
Recent changes
Contact page

Toolbox





Print/export



Languages
Edit links
This page was last modified on 21 March 2013 at 09:48.
Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike License; additional terms may apply. By using this site, you agree to the Terms of Use and Privacy Policy.
 Wikipedia® is a registered trademark of the Wikimedia Foundation, Inc., a non-profit organization.
Privacy policy
About Wikipedia
Disclaimers
Contact Wikipedia
Developers
Mobile view
Wikimedia Foundation
Powered by MediaWiki
   


 

Apocalypse Now Redux

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
 
Jump to: navigation, search


 This article needs additional citations for verification. Please help improve this article by adding citations to reliable sources. Unsourced material may be challenged and removed. (February 2010)

Apocalypse Now Redux
Apocalypse Now Redux.jpg
UK DVD cover
 
Directed by
Francis Ford Coppola
Produced by
Francis Ford Coppola
 Kim Aubry (Redux only)
Written by
John Milius
Francis Ford Coppola
Michael Herr (narration)
 
Based on
Heart of Darkness
 by Joseph Conrad (uncredited)
Narrated by
Martin Sheen
Starring
Martin Sheen
Marlon Brando
Robert Duvall
Frederic Forrest
Albert Hall
Sam Bottoms
Laurence Fishburne
Dennis Hopper
Aurore Clément
Christian Marquand
Harrison Ford
Music by
Carmine Coppola
 Francis Ford Coppola
Cinematography
Vittorio Storaro
Editing by
Richard Marks
Walter Murch
Gerald B. Greenberg
Lisa Fruchtman
 
Studio
Zoetrope Studios
Distributed by
Miramax Films
Release date(s)
May 11, 2001 (Cannes)
August 3, 2001 (US)
 
Running time
202 minutes[1]
Country
United States
Language
English
 French
 Vietnamese
Central Khmer
Box office
$4,626,290 (US)[2]
 $7,916,979 (non US)[3]
 $12,543,269 (total)
Apocalypse Now Redux is a 2001 extended version of Francis Ford Coppola's epic war film Apocalypse Now, which was originally released in 1979. Coppola, along with editor/long-time collaborator Walter Murch, added 49 minutes of scenes that had been cut out of the original film. It represents a significant re-edit of the original version.

Contents
  [hide] 1 Production 1.1 Music
1.2 Cinematography
2 New scenes and alterations
3 Cast
4 Release 4.1 Critical reception
4.2 Box office
5 Soundtrack
6 References
7 External links
Production[edit]
Francis Ford Coppola began production on the new cut with working-partner Kim Aubry. Coppola then tried to get Murch, who was reluctant at first. He thought it would be extremely difficult recutting a film which had taken two years to edit originally. He later changed his mind (after working on the reconstruction of Orson Welles's Touch of Evil). Coppola and Murch then examined several of the rough prints and dailies for the film. It was decided early on the editing of the film would be like editing a new film altogether. One such example was the new French Plantation sequence. The scenes were greatly edited to fit into the movie originally, only to be cut out in the end. When working again on the film, instead of using the (heavily edited) version, Murch decided to work the scene all over again, editing it as if for the first time.
Much work was needed to be done to the new scenes. Due to the off-screen noises during the shoot, most of the dialogue was impossible to hear. During post-production of the film the actors were brought back to re-record their lines (known as ADR or dubbing). This was done for the scenes that made it into the original cut, but not for the deleted scenes. For the Redux version, Martin Sheen, Robert Duvall, Sam Bottoms, Albert Hall, Frederic Forrest, and Aurore Clément were brought back to record ADR for the new scenes.
Music[edit]
New music was composed and recorded for the remade film. For example, it was thought no music had been composed for Willard and Roxanne's romantic interlude in the French Plantation scene. To make matters worse, composer Carmine Coppola had died in 1991. However, the old recording and musical scores were checked and a track titled "Love Theme" was found. During scoring, Francis Coppola had told his father (Carmine) to write a theme for the scene before it was ultimately deleted. For the remake, the track was recorded by a group of synthesists.[citation needed]
Cinematography[edit]
Vittorio Storaro also returned from Italy to head the development of a new color balance of the film and new scenes. When Redux was being released, Storaro learned that a Technicolor dye-transfer process was being brought back. The dye-transfer is a three-strip process that makes the color highly saturated and has consistent black tone. Storaro wished to use this on Redux, but in order to do it, he needed to cut the original negative of Apocalypse Now, leaving Apocalypse Now Redux the only version available. Storaro decided to do it, when convinced by Coppola that this version would be the one that would be remembered.
New scenes and alterations[edit]
The film contains several newly added sequences and alterations to the original film:
In the original film, the PBR Street Gang crew members relax and play around, listening to The Rolling Stones's "(I Can't Get No) Satisfaction" while Willard first looks at the dossier. The scene plays right before the crew members meet Kilgore. In the Redux version, the scene is moved to later in the film, and Willard is shown reading the dossier without the surrounding activity and music.
In the original version, Willard first meets Kilgore when asking a fellow officer who simply replies, "He's over there, you can't miss him". In the Redux, the officer now says "There's the Colonel coming down". We later learn that Kilgore is arriving (via helicopter) to the scene. When he arrives, he tells an officer riding with him, "Lieutenant, bomb back that tree line 'bout a hundred yards, give me some room to breathe". He later asks another for his "Death Cards" (which he uses in the original version).
During the raid, Kilgore looks over some of the wounded and dead. He then walks away, simply replying "Damn".
After Kilgore has ordered an air strike, a Vietnamese mother, with her wounded child in hand, runs to Kilgore. Kilgore immediately takes the child and tells his men to rush the child to a hospital (mother as well) on his chopper.
After the helicopter carrying the wounded child leaves, Kilgore hands Lance a new pair of shorts to go surfing in (Note: Throughout the original cut, Lance is wearing them, but it is never explained how he got them).
After giving the famous "Napalm" speech, Kilgore soon learns that the napalm has changed the wind current, ruining the perfect waves. Willard immediately uses this as an excuse to leave. Before he and Lance run back to the boat, Willard steals Kilgore's surf board.
Before Willard and Chef go to search for mangoes, there's a scene where the crew is lying around in a river. Chef asks Chief if he can go get some mangoes and Willard goes with him. The Redux version contains a new scene before this, in which it is clear that the crew are hiding from Kilgore, who is trying to get back his surf board. A helicopter soon flies by, carrying a recording by Kilgore, asking Lance for the board back. Chief then changes the subject by asking how far they are going up the river. Willard says it's classified. Chief later asks Willard if he likes it like that, "hot and hairy" (to which Willard replies: "Fuck. You don't get a chance to know what the fuck you are in some factory in Ohio"). Chef later asks Chief if he can get some mangoes.
The day after the Playboy Playmates' USO show, we see the crewmembers talking about it. Chef is obsessed he was able to meet "Miss December". Clean then reminds Chef not to go crazy over his Playboy magazines, and proceeds to tell the story of an Army Sergeant who was so obsessed with his Playboys, he killed an ARVN Lieutenant who ruined his foldouts.
The "Satisfaction" scene comes immediately after the above scene. In the following scene, Willard reads a letter by Kurtz, criticizing the incompetent young soldiers sent to Vietnam, blaming them for their losing.
At one point during their travels, the crew stop at a destroyed Medevac. The area is completely wrecked, with no real commanding officer (much like the Do Lung Bridge sequence). Willard tries to find someone in charge, but later learns that the Playboy bunnies' helicopter has landed there. Willard is called over by the Bunnies' manager, who negotiates two barrels of fuel for 2 hours with the bunnies (along with the rest of the crew). Chef spends his time with his idol, Miss December (now Miss May), in the Playboy helicopter, and Lance spends his time with the Playmate of the Year in a Medevac tent. During their escapades, a large cooler is upended, revealing the corpse of a soldier who had died at the Medevac camp. Lance is so deeply engrossed in their encounter that he barely notices the dead man a few feet away. During these scenes, Clean constantly interrupts, trying to get his turn.
After the above scene, Chef learns that Clean is still a virgin. Chef makes fun of him for it, only to be stopped by Chief. The exchange is only partially heard in the original cut.
The longest addition to the film is a sequence that takes place after Clean's death. The crew find themselves in a French plantation in Cambodia. Willard tells the head of the plantation (Christian Marquand) that they lost one of their men. He tells Willard that they will bury him (to pay respects to the fallen of their allies). What later follows is a solemn funeral for Clean. Following the recital of a poem by one of the French children (played by Roman Coppola and watched by older brother Gian-Carlo), the crew then has dinner with the new arrivals. Willard, sitting with the family, asks when they are going back to France. The family soon get into a long argument over the First Indochina War and the Vietnam War. There is a dispute over "traitors at home" (e.g., the famous Henri Martin Affair) and most of the family leaves in anger. After they all leave, one, Roxanne (the only one not in the conversation, played by Aurore Clément), apologizes for her family's behavior. She and Willard talk, smoke opium, and she later explains the conflicts her deceased husband had faced with himself during the Indochina War. After she undresses and approaches Willard, she tells him, "There are two of you, can't you see? One that kills, and one that loves." We later see the crew back on the river continuing the mission.
After Chef's death, Willard is kept in a metal shipping container known as a "CONEX". Kurtz later sits outside the doors and reads Willard several Time Magazine articles detailing America's success in the war.
In the Do Lung Bridge sequence, after being asked where he's going, Willard now mentions wanting to get some fuel for the ship. In the original, it is only said when Willard returns to the PBR vessel.
Cast[edit]
This list only includes the cast members not present in the film's original cut.Christian Marquand as Hubert de Marais
Aurore Clément as Roxanne Sarrault
Roman Coppola as Francis de Marais
Gian-Carlo Coppola as Gilles de Marais
Michel Pitton as Philippe de Marais
Franck Villard as Gaston de Marais
David Olivier as Christian de Marais
Chrystel Le Pelletier as Claudine
Robert Julian as The Tutor
Yvon Le Saux as Sgt. Le Fevre
Henri Sadardiel as French soldier #1
Gilbert Renkens as French soldier #2
Pierre Segui (uncredited) as French soldier #3
Release[edit]
Apocalypse Now Redux originally premiered at the 2001 Cannes Film Festival in May.[4] The screening marked the anniversary of the famous Apocalypse Now screening as a work in progress, where it ended up winning the Palme d'Or. Coppola went to the festival, also with Murch, Storaro, production designer Dean Tavoularis, producer Kim Aubry and actors Sam Bottoms and Aurore Clément.
Critical reception[edit]
When it was released, the response from the critics was largely positive, holding a 93% rating on Rotten Tomatoes; the consensus states "The additional footage slows down the movie somewhat (some say the new cut is inferior to the original), but Apocalypse Now Redux is still a great piece of cinema."[5] Some critics thought highly of the additions, such as A. O. Scott of The New York Times, who wrote that it "grows richer and stranger with each viewing, and the restoration of scenes left in the cutting room two decades ago has only added to its sublimity."[6]
Some critics, however, thought the new scenes slowed the pacing, were too lengthy (notably the French plantation sequence), and added nothing overall to the film's impact. Owen Gleiberman wrote "Apocalypse Now Redux is the meandering, indulgent art project that [Francis Ford Coppola] was still enough of a craftsman, in 1979, to avoid."[citation needed] Despite this, other critics still gave it high ratings. Roger Ebert wrote: "Longer or shorter, redux or not, Apocalypse Now is one of the central events of my life as a filmgoer."[citation needed]
Box office[edit]
The film was given a limited release in the US on August 3, 2001, and was also released theatrically around the world in some 30 countries, generating a worldwide total of $12,543,269 ($4,626,290 in the US[2] plus $7,916,979 outside the US[3]) in box office revenue.
Soundtrack[edit]

Apocalypse Now
 
Soundtrack album by Carmine Coppola and Francis Ford Coppola

A soundtrack was released on July 31, 2001 by Nonesuch. The soundtrack contains most of the original tracks (remastered), as well as some for the new scenes ("Clean's Funeral", "Love Theme"). The score was composed by Carmine and Francis Ford Coppola (with some tracks co-composed by Mickey Hart and Richard Hansen). The first track is an abridged version of The Doors's 11 minute long, epic "The End".
1."The End" – The Doors
2."The Delta" – Carmine Coppola, Francis Ford Coppola
3."Dossier" – Carmine Coppola, Francis Ford Coppola
4."Orange Light" – Carmine Coppola, Francis Ford Coppola
5."Ride of the Valkyries" – Richard Wagner
6."Suzie Q" (Dale Hawkins) – Flash Cadillac
7."Nung River" – Carmine Coppola, Francis Ford Coppola, Mickey Hart
8."Do Lung" – Carmine Coppola, Francis Ford Coppola, Richard Hansen
9."Clean's Death" – Carmine Coppola, Francis Ford Coppola, Mickey Hart
10."Clean's Funeral" – Carmine Coppola, Francis Ford Coppola
11."Love Theme" – Carmine Coppola, Francis Ford Coppola
12."Chief's Death" – Carmine Coppola, Francis Ford Coppola
13."Voyage" – Carmine Coppola, Francis Ford Coppola
14."Chef's Head" – Carmine Coppola, Francis Ford Coppola
15."Kurtz' Chorale" – Carmine Coppola, Francis Ford Coppola
16."Finale" – Carmine Coppola, Francis Ford Coppola
17."The Horror... The Horror" – Finale quote of Marlon Brando's character
References[edit]
1.Jump up ^ "Apocalypse Now Redux (15)". British Board of Film Classification. 2001-08-03. Retrieved 2012-03-29.
2.^ Jump up to: a b "Apocalypse Now Redux Domestic Gross". Box Office Mojo. Retrieved 2009-07-20.
3.^ Jump up to: a b Box Office Mojo: Apocalypse Now Redux, foreign total Retrieved 2012-11-06
4.Jump up ^ "Festival de Cannes: Apocalypse Now Redux". festival-cannes.com. Retrieved 2009-10-24.
5.Jump up ^ Apocalypse Now Redux at Rotten Tomatoes
6.Jump up ^ Scott, A. O. (2001-08-03). "Aching Heart of Darkness". New York Times. Retrieved 2009-07-20.
External links[edit]
Apocalypse Now Redux at the Internet Movie Database
Apocalypse Now Redux at AllRovi
Apocalypse Now Redux at Box Office Mojo
Apocalypse Now Redux at Rotten Tomatoes
Apocalypse Now Redux at Metacritic
Making Apocalypse Now Redux – An extensive look at the making of the new cut.

[show]
v·
 t·
 e
 
Apocalypse Now

 

·
·

 

·
·

 

[show]
v·
 t·
 e
 
Francis Ford Coppola

 





·
·
·
·
·

 


·
·
·

 


·
·
·
·
·
·
·

 


·
·
·

 


·

 

 

 

 


 

·
·

 

·
·
·
·
·
·
·
·
·
·
·
·

 

·
·
·

 

[show]
v·
 t·
 e
 
Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness (1899)

 

·
·
·
·

 

·

 



 

·
·
·

 



 

·
·
·
·
·
·
·
·


 

Categories: 2001 films
Apocalypse Now
2000s drama films
2000s war films
American films
American epic films
American war films
English-language films
French-language films
Vietnamese-language films
Khmer-language films
Films directed by Francis Ford Coppola
Films shot in the Philippines
Vietnam War films
War epic films
Miramax Films films
Alternate versions of films






Navigation menu


Create account
Log in


Article
Talk



 

Read
Edit
View history




 Search 



Main page
Contents
Featured content
Current events
Random article
Donate to Wikipedia
Wikimedia Shop

Interaction
Help
About Wikipedia
Community portal
Recent changes
Contact page

Toolbox





Print/export



Languages
Italiano
Edit links
This page was last modified on 1 October 2013 at 17:46.
Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike License; additional terms may apply. By using this site, you agree to the Terms of Use and Privacy Policy.
 Wikipedia® is a registered trademark of the Wikimedia Foundation, Inc., a non-profit organization.
Privacy policy
About Wikipedia
Disclaimers
Contact Wikipedia
Developers
Mobile view
Wikimedia Foundation
Powered by MediaWiki
 

 

 

Hearts of Darkness: A Filmmaker's Apocalypse

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
 
Jump to: navigation, search

Hearts of Darkness: A Filmmakers's Apocalypse
Hearts of Darkness, A Filmmaker's Apocalypse Poster.jpeg
Theatrical release poster
 
Directed by
Fax Bahr
George Hickenlooper
Eleanor Coppola
Produced by
Les Mayfield
 George Zaloom
Written by
Fax Bahr
 George Hickenlooper
Starring
Francis Ford Coppola
Marlon Brando
Eleanor Coppola
Sofia Coppola
Dennis Hopper
Robert Duvall
Martin Sheen
Laurence Fishburne
Harrison Ford
George Lucas
Sam Bottoms
Release date(s)
November 27, 1991
 
Running time
96 minutes
Country
United States
Language
English
Not to be confused with Heart of Darkness (1993), a film version of the original novel that Apocalypse Now is based on'.'
Hearts of Darkness: A Filmmaker's Apocalypse is a 1991 documentary film about the production of Apocalypse Now''

Contents
  [hide] 1 Synopsis
2 Awards
3 Home video release
4 Cultural references
5 References
6 External links
Synopsis[edit]
The title is derived from the source material for Apocalypse Now, the Joseph Conrad novella Heart of Darkness. Using behind the scenes footage, and narrated by Eleanor Coppola, it chronicles how production problems including bad weather, actors' health and other issues delayed the film, increasing costs and nearly destroying the life and career of Francis Ford Coppola. In 1990, Eleanor Coppola turned her material over to two young filmmakers, George Hickenlooper and Fax Bahr (co-creator of MADtv), who then shot new interviews with the original cast and crew and intercut them with her existing material. After a year of editing, Hickenlooper, Bahr, and Coppola debuted their film at the 1991 Cannes Film Festival[1] to universal critical acclaim.
Awards[edit]
Originally aired on television in the United States, Hearts of Darkness won several awards: The National Board of Review, USA award for "Best Documentary", 1991, an American Cinema Editors award for "Best Edited Documentary", 1992, two Academy of Television Arts and Sciences awards for "Outstanding Individual Achievement – Informational Programming – Directing" and "Outstanding Individual Achievement – Informational Programming – Picture Editing", 1992, and the International Documentary Association award, 1992.
Home video release[edit]
Hearts of Darkness was released on DVD November 20, 2007.[2] The DVD version includes a commentary track from both Eleanor and Francis Coppola (although each was recorded separately) and a bonus documentary entitled Coda, about Coppola's film Youth Without Youth.
Cultural references[edit]
A sample from the Coppola interview shown at the beginning of the film, "We were in the jungle, there were too many of us, we had access to too much money, too much equipment, and little by little we went insane", is featured in UNKLE's song ""UNKLE (Main Title Theme)", and also in the Cabaret Voltaire song "Project80" (as part of a larger sample from that interview).
Hearts of Dartmouth: Life of a Trailer Park Girl is a documentary about the making of the TV series Trailer Park Boys. It was directed and narrated by Annemarie Cassidy, then-wife of Trailer Park Boys director Mike Clattenburg.
An Animaniacs cartoon entitled "Hearts of Twilight" was a parody of the documentary.
The television series Community paid homage to the documentary in the season 3 episode "Documentary Filmmaking: Redux", with Abed and guest star Luis Guzmán both recognizing the homage and stating that "Hearts of Darkness is way better than Apocalypse Now."
On the DVD commentary of Good Will Hunting, Matt Damon and Ben Affleck reveal that Casey Affleck's line "I swallowed a bug" is a reference to Marlon Brando. Similarly, in the Joss Whedon film Serenity, River Tam has the same line.
References[edit]
1.Jump up ^ "Festival de Cannes: Hearts of Darkness: A Filmmaker's Apocalypse". festival-cannes.com. Retrieved 2009-08-10.
2.Jump up ^ "Home Cinema @ The Digital Fix - Hearts of Darkness: A Filmmaker’s Apocalypse (R1) in November". Dvdtimes.co.uk. Retrieved 2011-07-08.
External links[edit]
Hearts of Darkness: A Filmmaker's Apocalypse at the Internet Movie Database

[show]
v·
 t·
 e
 
Films directed by George Hickenlooper

 



 

·
·
·
·
·
·
·
·
·

 

·
·
·
·
·
·
·

 

[show]
v·
 t·
 e
 
Apocalypse Now

 

·
·

 

·
·

 

[show]
v·
 t·
 e
 
Francis Ford Coppola

 





·
·
·
·
·

 


·
·
·

 


·
·
·
·
·
·
·

 


·
·
·

 


·

 

 

 

 


 

·
·

 

·
·
·
·
·
·
·
·
·
·
·
·

 

·
·
·

 

[show]
v·
 t·
 e
 
Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness (1899)

 

·
·
·
·

 

·

 



 

·
·
·

 



 

·
·
·
·
·
·
·
·


 

Categories: 1991 films
English-language films
American films
American documentary films
American Zoetrope films
Apocalypse Now
Documentary films about films
Films directed by George Hickenlooper
P.O.V. (TV series) films
Francis Ford Coppola


Navigation menu


Create account
Log in


Article
Talk



 

Read
Edit
View history




 Search 



Main page
Contents
Featured content
Current events
Random article
Donate to Wikipedia
Wikimedia Shop

Interaction
Help
About Wikipedia
Community portal
Recent changes
Contact page

Toolbox





Print/export



Languages
Italiano
Português
Русский
Edit links
This page was last modified on 27 October 2013 at 20:53.
Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike License; additional terms may apply. By using this site, you agree to the Terms of Use and Privacy Policy.
 Wikipedia® is a registered trademark of the Wikimedia Foundation, Inc., a non-profit organization.
Privacy policy
About Wikipedia
Disclaimers
Contact Wikipedia
Developers
Mobile view
Wikimedia Foundation
Powered by MediaWiki
   


 

Heart of Darkness

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
 
Jump to: navigation, search

For other uses, see Heart of Darkness (disambiguation).

 
[hide]This article has multiple issues. Please help improve it or discuss these issues on the talk page.


 This article needs additional citations for verification.  (November 2009)

 This article's plot summary may be too long or excessively detailed.  (December 2012)

 

Heart of Darkness
Blackwood's Magazine - 1899 cover.jpg
'Heart of Darkness' first was published as a three-part serial story in Blackwood’s Magazine.
 
Author
Joseph Conrad
Country
United Kingdom
Language
English
Genre
Frame story, Novella
Publisher
Blackwood's Magazine
Publication date
February 1899
Media type
Print (serial)
ISBN
N/A
Followed by
Lord Jim (1900)
Heart of Darkness is a short novel written by Joseph Conrad, written as a frame narrative, about Charles Marlow’s life as an ivory transporter down an unnamed river in Central Africa. The river is “a mighty big river, that you could see on the map, resembling an immense snake uncoiled, with its head in the sea, its body at rest curving afar over a vast country, and its tail lost in the depths of the land.” In the course of his travel in central Africa, Marlow becomes obsessed with Mr. Kurtz.
The story is a complex exploration of the attitudes people hold on what constitutes a barbarian versus a civilized society and the attitudes on colonialism and racism that were part and parcel of European imperialism. Originally published as a three-part serial story, in Blackwood's Magazine, the novella Heart of Darkness has been variously published and translated into many languages. In 1998, the Modern Library ranked Heart of Darkness as the sixty-seventh of the hundred best novels in English of the twentieth century.[1]

Contents
  [hide] 1 Author Background
2 Publication
3 Plot summary
4 Reception
5 Adaptations
6 Notes
7 References
8 External links
Author Background[edit]
Joseph Conrad, about eight and a half years before writing the Heart of Darkness, was appointed by a Belgian trading company to serve as the captain of a steamer on the Congo River. Upon arrival at his station he found that the steamer he was to command was in need of repair. Upon reflection Conrad decided to head up-river on a different steamer. When the captain became ill Conrad assumed command of the boat and guided the ship to the trading company's innermost station. At this station Georges-Antoine Klein boarded for the return trip. On the return trip Klein died and Conrad himself became very sick. Conrad returned to Europe before serving out the full three-year term of his contract to the trading company.
Publication[edit]
The tale was first published as a three-part serial, February, March, and April 1899, in Blackwood's Magazine (February 1899 was the magazine's 1000th issue: special edition). Then later, in 1902, Heart of Darkness was included in the book Youth: a Narrative, and Two Other Stories (published November 13, 1902, by William Blackwood). In Conrad's own words, Heart of Darkness[2] is:
"A wild story of a journalist who becomes manager of a station in the (African) interior and makes himself worshipped by a tribe of savages. Thus described, the subject seems comic, but it isn't."[3]:p. 406 (English: page 407)
The volume consisted of Youth: a Narrative, Heart of Darkness, and The End of the Tether in that order, to loosely illustrate the three stages of life. For future editions of the book, in 1917 Conrad wrote an "Author's Note" where he discusses each of the three stories, and makes light commentary on the character Marlow—the narrator of the tales within the first two stories. He also mentions how Youth marks the first appearance of Marlow.
On May 31, 1902, in a letter to William Blackwood, Conrad remarked;
"I call your own kind self to witness [...] the last pages of Heart of Darkness where the interview of the man and the girl locks in—as it were—the whole 30000 words of narrative description into one suggestive view of a whole phase of life and makes of that story something quite on another plane than an anecdote of a man who went mad in the Centre of Africa."[3]:p. 417
Plot summary[edit]
Aboard the Nellie, anchored in the River Thames near Gravesend, England, Charles Marlow tells his fellow sailors about the events that led to his appointment as captain of a river-steamboat for an ivory trading company. He describes his passage on ships to the wilderness to the Company's station, which strikes Marlow as a scene of devastation: disorganized, machinery parts here and there, periodic demolition explosions, weakened native black men who have been demoralized, in chains, literally being worked to death, and strolling behind them a white Company man in a uniform carrying a rifle. At this station Marlow meets the Company's chief accountant who tells him of a Mr. Kurtz, and explains that Kurtz is a first-class agent.

 

 Old Belgian river station on the Congo River, 1889
Marlow leaves with a caravan to travel on foot some two hundred miles deeper into the wilderness to the Central Station, where the steamboat that he is to captain is based. Marlow is shocked to learn that his steamboat had been wrecked two days before his arrival. The manager explains that they needed to take the steamboat up-river because of rumours that an important station was in jeopardy and that its chief, Mr. Kurtz, was ill. Marlow describes the Company men at this station as lazy back-biting "pilgrims", fraught with envy and jealousy, all trying to gain a higher status within the Company, which in turn, would provide more personal profit; however, they sought these goals in a meaningless, ineffective and lazy manner, mixed with a sense that they were all merely waiting, while trying to stay out of harm's way. After fishing his boat out of the river, Marlow is frustrated by the months spent on repairs. During this time, he learns that Kurtz is far from admired, but is more or less resented (mostly by the manager). Not only is Kurtz's position at the Inner Station a highly envied position, but sentiment seems to be that Kurtz is undeserving of it, as he received the appointment only by his European connections.

 

 The Roi des Belges ("King of the Belgians"—French), the Belgian riverboat Conrad commanded on the upper Congo, 1889
Once underway, the journey up-river to the Inner Station, Kurtz's station, takes two months to the day. On board are the manager, three or four "pilgrims" and some twenty "cannibals" enlisted as crew.
They come to rest for the night about eight miles below the Inner Station. In the morning they awake to find that they are enveloped by a thick, white fog. From the riverbank they hear a very loud cry, followed by a discordant clamour. A few hours later, as safe navigation becomes increasingly difficult, the steamboat is hit with a barrage of sticks—small arrows—from the wilderness. The pilgrims open fire into the bush with their Winchester rifles. The native serving as helmsman gives up steering to pick up a rifle and fire it. Marlow grabs the wheel to avoid snags in the river. The helmsman is impaled by a spear and falls at Marlow's feet. Marlow sounds the steam whistle repeatedly, causing the shower of arrows to cease. Marlow and a pilgrim watch the helmsman die, and Marlow forces the pilgrim to take the wheel so that he can fling his blood-soaked shoes overboard. Marlow presumes (wrongly) that Kurtz is dead. Marlow notes that the International Society for the Suppression of Savage Customs commissioned Kurtz to write a report, which he did eloquently. A footnote in the report, written much later, states "Exterminate all the brutes!" (Later, Kurtz entreats Marlow to take good care of the pamphlet.) Marlow does not believe Kurtz was worth the lives that were lost in trying to find him. After putting on a pair of slippers, Marlow returns to the wheel-house and resumes steering. By this time the manager is there, and expresses a strong desire to turn back. At that moment the Inner Station comes into view.
At Kurtz's station Marlow sees a man on the riverbank waving his arm, urging them to land. Because of his expressions and gestures, and all the colourful patches on his clothing, the man reminds Marlow of a harlequin. The pilgrims, heavily armed, escort the manager to retrieve Mr. Kurtz. The harlequin-like man, who turns out to be a Russian, boards the steamboat. The Russian is a wanderer who happened to stray into Kurtz's camp. Through conversation Marlow discovers just how wanton Kurtz could be, how the natives worshipped him, and how very ill he had been of late. The Russian admires Kurtz for his intellect and his insights into love, life, and justice. The Russian seems to admire Kurtz even for his power—and for his willingness to use it. Marlow suggests that Kurtz has gone mad.
From the steamboat, through a telescope, Marlow can observe the station in detail and is surprised to see near the station house a row of posts topped with disembodied heads of natives. Around the corner of the house, the manager appears with the pilgrims, bearing Kurtz on an improvised stretcher. The area fills with natives, apparently ready for battle. Marlow can see Kurtz shouting on the stretcher. The pilgrims carry Kurtz to the steamer and lay him in one of the cabins. A beautiful native woman walks in measured steps along the shore and stops next to the steamer. She raises her arms above her head and then walks back into the bushes. The Russian informs Marlow that Kurtz had ordered the attack on the steamer. The Russian refers to a canoe waiting for him and notes how delightful it was to hear Kurtz recite poetry. Marlow and the Russian then part ways.
After midnight, Marlow discovers that Kurtz has left his cabin on the steamer and returned to shore. Marlow goes ashore and finds a very weak Kurtz making his way back to his station—although not too weak to call to the natives. Marlow appreciates his serious situation, and when Kurtz begins in a threatening tone, Marlow interjects that his "success in Europe is assured in any case"; at this, Kurtz allows Marlow to help him back to the steamer. The next day they prepare for their departure. The natives, including the native woman, once again assemble on shore and begin to shout. Marlow, seeing the pilgrims readying their rifles, sounds the steam whistle repeatedly to scatter the crowd on shore. Only the woman remains unmoved, with outstretched arms. The pilgrims open fire. The current carries them swiftly downstream.
Kurtz's health worsens, and Marlow himself becomes increasingly ill. The steamboat having broken down and being under repair, Kurtz gives Marlow a packet of papers with a photograph. As Kurtz dies, Marlow hears him weakly whisper: “The horror! The horror!”
Marlow blows out the candle and tries to act as though nothing has happened when he joins the other pilgrims, who are eating in the mess-room with the manager. In a short while, the "manager's boy" appears and announces in a scathing tone: "Mistah Kurtz—he dead." Next day Marlow pays little attention to the pilgrims as they bury "something" in a muddy hole. Marlow falls very sick, himself near death.
Upon his return to Europe, Marlow is embittered. He distributes the bundle of papers Kurtz had entrusted to him: Marlow gives the paper entitled "Suppression of Savage Customs" (with the postscriptum torn off) to a clean-shaven man with an official manner. To another man, who claims to be Kurtz's cousin, Marlow gives family letters and memoranda of no importance. To a journalist he gives a Report for publication, if the journalist sees fit. Finally Marlow is left with some personal letters and the photograph of a girl's portrait—Kurtz's fiancée, whom Kurtz referred to as “My Intended”. When Marlow visits her, she is dressed in black and still deep in mourning, although it is more than a year since Kurtz's death. She presses Marlow for information, asking him to repeat Kurtz's final words. Uncomfortable, Marlow lies and tells her that Kurtz's final word was her name.
Reception[edit]
Main article: Themes of Heart of Darkness
In a post-colonial reading, the Nigerian writer Chinua Achebe, author of Things Fall Apart, famously criticized Heart of Darkness in his 1975 lecture An Image of Africa: Racism in Conrad's "Heart of Darkness", saying the novella de-humanized Africans, denied them language and culture and reduced them to a metaphorical extension of the dark and dangerous jungle into which the Europeans venture. Achebe's lecture prompted a lively debate, reactions at the time ranged from dismay and outrage—Achebe recounted a Professor Emeritus from the University of Massachusetts saying to Achebe after the lecture, "How dare you upset everything we have taught, everything we teach? Heart of Darkness is the most widely taught text in the university in this country. So how dare you say it's different?"[4]—to support for Achebe's view—"I now realize that I had never really read Heart of Darkness although I have taught it for years,"[5] one professor told Achebe. Other critiques include Hugh Curtler's Achebe on Conrad: Racism and Greatness in Heart of Darkness (1997).[6]
In King Leopold's Ghost (1998), Adam Hochschild argues that literary scholars have made too much of the psychological aspects of Heart of Darkness while scanting the horror of Conrad's accurate recounting of the methods and effects of colonialism. He quotes Conrad as saying, "Heart of Darkness is experience ... pushed a little (and only very little) beyond the actual facts of the case."[7]
Adaptations[edit]
A radio adaptation starring Orson Welles aired in the USA on November 6, 1938, as part of his Mercury Theatre on the Air program. The episode also adapted Clarence Day's Life with Father.[8]
The CBS television anthology Playhouse 90 aired a 90-minute loose adaptation in 1958. This version, written by Stewart Stern, uses the encounter between Marlow (Roddy McDowall) and Kurtz (Boris Karloff) as its final act, and adds a backstory in which Marlow had been Kurtz's adopted son. The cast includes Inga Swenson and Eartha Kitt.[9]
The most famous adaptation is Francis Ford Coppola's 1979 motion picture Apocalypse Now, which moves the story from the Congo to Vietnam and Cambodia during the Vietnam War.[10] In Apocalypse Now, Martin Sheen plays Captain Benjamin L. Willard, a US Army officer charged with "terminating" the command of Colonel Walter E. Kurtz. Marlon Brando played Kurtz, in one of his most famous roles. A production documentary of the film, titled Hearts of Darkness: A Filmmaker's Apocalypse, exposed some of the major difficulties which director Coppola faced in seeing the movie through to completion. The difficulties that Coppola and his crew faced often mirrored some of the themes of the book.
In 1991, Australian author and playwright Larry Buttrose wrote and staged a theatrical production of Kurtz (based on Heart of Darkness) with the Crossroads Theatre Company, Sydney.[11] The play was announced to be broadcast as a radio play to Australian radio audiences in August 2011 by the Vision Australia Radio Network,[12] and also by the RPH - Radio Print Handicapped Network across Australia.
On March 13, 1993, TNT aired a new version of the story directed by Nicolas Roeg, starring Tim Roth as Marlow and John Malkovich as Kurtz.[13]
The video game Far Cry 2, released on 21 October 2008, is a loose, modernized adaptation of Heart of Darkness. The player assumes the role of a mercenary operating in Africa whose task it is to kill an arms dealer, the elusive "Jackal". The last area of the game is called 'The Heart of Darkness'.[14][15][16]
In 2011, an operatic adaptation by composer Tarik O'Regan and librettist Tom Phillips was premiered at the Linbury Theatre of the Royal Opera House in London.[17] A suite for orchestra and narrator was subsequently extrapolated from it.[18]
The video game Spec Ops: The Line, released on 26 June 2012, is a loose, modernized adaptation of Heart of Darkness. The character John Konrad, who replaces the character Kurtz, is a reference to the author of the novella.[19]
Notes[edit]
1.Jump up ^ 100 Best, Modern Library's website. Retrieved 12 January 2010.
2.Jump up ^ In a letter, in French, dated April 10, 1902, to Henry-Durand Darvay (1873–1944), who spent his life presenting English literature to France and French literature to England, translating the works of Kipling, H.G. Wells, and Meredith among others.
3.^ Jump up to: a b The Collected Letters of Joseph Conrad - Volume 2: 1898–1902 (Editors: Frederick R. Karl and Laurence Davies)
4.Jump up ^ "Chinua Achebe: The Failure interview". Failure Magazine. Retrieved 2013-04-12.
5.Jump up ^ Achebe (1989), p. x.
6.Jump up ^ Curtler, Hugh (March 1997). "Achebe on Conrad: Racism and Greatness in Heart of Darkness". Conradiana 29 (1): 30–40.
7.Jump up ^ Hochschild 1999, p. 143
8.Jump up ^ The Mercury Theatre on the Air
9.Jump up ^ Cast and credits are available at "The Internet Movie Database". Retrieved 2 December 2010. A full recording of the show can be viewed onsite by members of the public upon request at The Paley Center for Media (formerly the Museum of Television & Radio) in New York City and Los Angeles.
10.Jump up ^ Scott, A. O. (2001-08-03). "Aching Heart Of Darkness". The New York Times. Retrieved 2008-09-29.
11.Jump up ^ The Playwrights Database: Larry Buttrose
12.Jump up ^ Vision Australia Radio - Services - Vision Australia Website
13.Jump up ^ Tucker, Ken. "Heart of Darkness". EW.com, March 11, 1994. Accessed April 4, 2010.
14.Jump up ^ [1]
15.Jump up ^ [2]
16.Jump up ^ [3]
17.Jump up ^ Royal Opera House Page for Heart of Darkness by Tarik O'Regan and Tom Phillips
18.Jump up ^ Suite from Heart of Darkness first London performance, Cadogan Hall
19.Jump up ^ [4]
References[edit]
Karl, Frederick R., ed. (1986). The Collected Letters of Joseph Conrad - Volume 2: 1898 - 1902. Cambridge University Press. ISBN 0-521-25748-4.
Conrad, Joseph (1990). Heart of Darkness Unabridged. Dover Publications, Inc. New York. ISBN 0-486-26464-5.
Conrad, Joseph (1998-01-05). Heart of Darkness & Other Stories. Wordsworth Editions Ltd. ISBN 1-85326-240-4.
Farn, Regelind (2004, Dissertation). Colonial and Postcolonial Rewritings of "Heart of Darkness" – A Century of Dialogue with Joseph Conrad
Hochschild, Adam (October 1999). "Chapter 9: Meeting Mr. Kurtz". King Leopold's Ghost. Mariner Books. pp. 140–149. ISBN 0-618-00190-5.
Murfin, Ross C. (ed.) (1989). Joseph Conrad: Heart of Darkness. A Case Study in Contemporary Criticism. St. Martin's Press. ISBN 0-312-00761-2.
Sherry, Norman (1980-06-30). Conrad's Western World. Cambridge University Press. ISBN 0-521-29808-3.
External links[edit]
 Wikiquote has a collection of quotations related to: Heart of Darkness
 Wikisource has original text related to this article:
Heart of Darkness

Book Drum illustrated profile of Heart of Darkness
Heart of Darkness on In Our Time at the BBC. (listen now)
Heart of Darkness at Project Gutenberg
Downloadable audio book of Heart of Darkness by LoudLit.org
'Heart of Darkness' and late-Victorian fascination with the primitive and the double - novel by Joseph Conrad

[show]
v·
 t·
 e
 
Works by Joseph Conrad

 


·
·
·
·
·
·
·
·
·
·
·
·
·
·
·
·
·
·
·
·

Joseph Conrad.PNG

 

·
·
·
·

 

·

 

·
·
·
·
·
·
·
·
·
·
·
·
·
·
·
·
·
·

 

[show]
v·
 t·
 e
 
Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness (1899)

 

·
·
·
·

 

·

 



 

·
·
·

 



 

·
·
·
·
·
·
·
·


 

Categories: 1902 novels
Existentialist novels
Novellas
Novels by Joseph Conrad
Roman à clef novels
Novels first published in serial form
Fiction with unreliable narrators
Frame stories
Works originally published in Blackwood's Magazine
Victorian novels
Novels set in the Democratic Republic of the Congo
Novels set in Colonial Africa
Novels about colonialism
Novels about imperialism
Novels adapted into films
Human trophy collecting
Congo Free State





Navigation menu


Create account
Log in


Article
Talk



 

Read
Edit
View history




 Search 



Main page
Contents
Featured content
Current events
Random article
Donate to Wikipedia
Wikimedia Shop

Interaction
Help
About Wikipedia
Community portal
Recent changes
Contact page

Tools





Print/export



Languages
العربية
Català
Česky
Dansk
Deutsch
Español
Euskara
فارسی
Français
Galego
Italiano
עברית
Magyar
Македонски
Nederlands
日本語
Norsk bokmål
Norsk nynorsk
ਪੰਜਾਬੀ
Polski
Português
Русский
Српски / srpski
Srpskohrvatski / српскохрватски
Suomi
Svenska
Українська
中文
Edit links
This page was last modified on 1 November 2013 at 10:40.
Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike License; additional terms may apply. By using this site, you agree to the Terms of Use and Privacy Policy.
 Wikipedia® is a registered trademark of the Wikimedia Foundation, Inc., a non-profit organization.
Privacy policy
About Wikipedia
Disclaimers
Contact Wikipedia
Developers
Mobile view
Wikimedia Foundation
Powered by MediaWiki