The foreign distributors, who had partially financed the movie, urged Coppola to end the film with the aerial attack that would reduce Kurtz’s domain to pebbles. Coppola thought of a way to mollify the foreign distributors. It was not feasible to provide programs for the film when it went into wide general release in conventional 35 mm prints in most cities throughout the country. So he decided to attach the end credits to the regular 35 mm prints and to superimpose them over the infrared, phosphorescent footage of the explosions taken from the movie’s first ending, so that the movie ended with a violent finale. Most critics around the country who saw this ending assumed Willard called in the bombing raid that destroys Kurtz’s realm. When items began to appear in the trade press stating that the film had two endings, one for the 70 mm prints (without the air strike) and one for the 35 mm prints (showing the air strike), Coppola regretted reinstating the bombing of Kurtz’s kingdom in the 35 mm prints.
He responded to the press by declaring flatly that the infrared footage was not intended to change the film’s ending because it was “clearly background for the credits.” As he told Tony Chiu, “The explosions are purely a graphic device, not a story point.” Yet he subsequently reversed his position and admitted to Gene Siskel that the multiple explosions under the closing credits in the 35 mm prints quite understandably led most critics who saw it to believe that this footage did in fact portray the air strike ordered by Willard. Therefore, Coppola concludes, it was a mistake to attach the footage of the explosions to the 35 mm prints of the movie.56
He further states that he had become increasingly convinced, while editing the film, that it should not conclude with a warlike, apocalyptic finale portraying the volcanic eruption of the air assault on Kurtz’s temple compound in which Kurtz’s whole army perished. That is why he rejected the first ending he had concocted for the rough cut, which graphically portrayed the air strike. This decision was in keeping with his inclination to evade violence rather than exploit it in his films. Citing T. S. Eliot’s “Waste Land,” he told me, “I wanted the film to end, not with a bang but a whimper.” Indeed, he had the photojournalist recite this line from Eliot’s poem while talking to Willard.
Coppola now feels that the bombing attack was contrary to the essential meaning he ultimately wanted to express, which was that Willard was journeying toward a postwar world that would be at peace. Indeed, even Kilgore says, “Some day this war’s gonna end”—one of the last statements Kilgore makes in the movie and one that is later repeated by Willard. So it is that in the videocassette and DVD prints of the film the closing credits are superimposed on a neutral black background, without the explosions.
Nevertheless, although the aerial assault is not shown in the videocassette and DVD versions of the film, there are references to it. When Willard has started downriver in his PBR after killing Kurtz, GHQ contacts him on the shortwave radio and asks if he had any further instructions about the air strike. He switches off the radio, thereby refusing to cancel the order given earlier for the air assault. Furthermore, the last shot of Willard’s face in close-up at the end of the movie is accompanied by a helicopter flying across the screen, above a conflagration in the forest below. Since Willard did not call off the bombing, this image implicitly foreshadows the aerial attack on Kurtz’s kingdom. So we may assume—even without the bombing attack on Kurtz’s fortress actually being shown—that Willard let the bombing proceed. When I showed Coppola an earlier draft of this chapter, I asked him if that was a reasonable assumption, and he did not take issue with it. He is apparently content to allow the viewer to infer that the air strike took place “off-stage” if they choose.
After all, in Kurtz’s camp, chaos has long since replaced military professionalism as the order of the day. Torture and bloody executions are the main activities. They seem to occur randomly “and attest to the insanity of Kurtz’s army of mercenaries.”57 For Willard to order the air assault on the compound and rain down fire from heaven on Kurtz’s rebel band of crazed deserters and headhunters—who, after all, have already committed untold atrocities and continue to be a menace to the war effort—seems as morally justified as the assassination of Kurtz.
In the last analysis, the two endings (one with the air strike shown, the other with it implied) are not radically different. In any case, Howard Hampton contends that “it is difficult to accept an unambiguous resolution for the film,” and Coppola in interviews over the years has never been able to provide one.58
Ultimately, Coppola eliminated the explicit portrayal of the aerial assault because he was determined to end the film on a positive note, which is why he had originally planned to film Willard’s visit with Kurtz’s widow and son. At any rate, Coppola chose to focus at the end on Willard returning to the PBR, just as a cleansing rain washes over his body, and he sails downriver to salvation, a sadder but wiser man.
Apocalypse Now, as released in 1979, opens with a riveting scene, a hypnotic montage of a phantom helicopter flying through the jungle amid smoke and napalm flames, accompanied by the whirling of a chopper’s rotary blades. Jim Morrison and the Doors sing the phantasmagoric “The End” on the sound track, an ironic choice to have at the beginning of the film. The image dissolves to Willard, a burnt-out intelligence officer lying drunk and nearly naked on a rumpled, sweat-soaked bed in a Saigon hotel, while a ceiling fan slowly revolves above him. He is groggily awakening from a nightmare about the war, which was prompted by the thump of the ceiling fan sounding like a helicopter. A full-time Green Beret and a part-time CIA assassin, Willard is awaiting a secret assignment.
Captain Benjamin Willard is mandated by General Corman to penetrate into the interior of the jungle and track down Colonel Walter E. Kurtz, a renegade officer who has raised an army composed of deserters like himself and of native tribesmen in order to fight the war on his own terms. When he locates Kurtz, Willard is to “terminate his command with extreme prejudice,” which is military jargon meaning that Willard should assassinate Kurtz. Kurtz, it seems, has taken to employing brutal tactics to attain his military objectives. Indeed, some of his extreme measures have sickened the members of the Army intelligence staff who have succeeded in obtaining information about him. “Every man has got a breaking point— you have and I have,” Corman tells Willard. “Walt Kurtz has reached his. He has gone insane. He’s out there operating without any decent restraint, totally beyond the pale of acceptable human conduct, and he is still commanding troops in the field.”
Willard’s first reaction to his mission is that liquidating someone for killing people in wartime seems like “handing out speeding tickets at the Indianapolis 500.” Besides, even though Willard has been ordered to eliminate no less than six other “undesirables” in the recent past, this is the first time his target has been an American and an officer. He therefore decides to withhold judgment about Kurtz until he meets up with him personally.
Near the beginning of the trip Willard and the crew of his small craft witness an air assault in which an officer, who is aptly named Kilgore, systematically wipes out a strongly fortified enemy village from the air. (He is named Kharnage in Milius’s script.) His bravado and bombast recall the title character from the Coppola-scripted Patton. Like Patton, Kilgore sports pearl-handled revolvers (see chapter 1). Kilgore, all decked out with a Stetson and gold neckerchief, looks as if he should be leading a cavalry charge rather than a helicopter attack. He even has a bugler with an old-fashioned cavalry bugle to sound the call to arms like a cavalry charge. Kilgore’s fleet of helicopters is equipped with loudspeakers that blare forth Wagner’s thunderous “Ride of the Valkyries” as the choppers fly over the target area. “Wagner scares the hell out of them,” Kilgore tells Willard, who is observing the operation as a passenger in Kilgore’s copter. As a napalm strike wreaks havoc and destruction on the village below, Kilgore exults, “I love the smell of napalm in the morning. It has the smell of victory.”
Kilgore, a fanatic filled with delusions of grandeur who domina
tes his men and decimates an occupied coastal village with maniacal glee, prefigures Kurtz. “If that’s how Kilgore fought the war,” Willard muses, “I began to wonder what they had against Kurtz.” To give Milius his due, the Kilgore episode was incorporated into the shooting script just as he wrote it, including the stunning use of “The Ride of the Valkyries.”
As Willard chugs up the Mekong River into uncharted territory in search of Kurtz, his journey becomes a symbolic voyage backward in time toward the primitive roots of civilization. The air attack on a North Vietnamese village carried out by Kilgore utilizes all the facilities of modern mechanized warfare, from helicopters and rockets to radar-directed machine guns. By the time Willard’s boat reaches Kurtz’s compound in the heart of the dark jungle, the modern weaponry associated with the helicopter attack earlier in the movie has been replaced by the weapons of primitive man, as Kurtz’s native followers attack the small vessel with arrows and spears. In entering Kurtz’s godforsaken outpost in the wilderness, Willard has equivalently stepped back into a lawless, prehistoric age where barbarism holds sway.
In fact, the severed heads that lie scattered about the grounds mutely testify to the depths of pagan savagery to which Kurtz has sunk during his sojourn in the jungle. Furthermore, it is painfully clear to Willard that, despite the fact that Kurtz’s native followers revere him as a god-man, Kurtz is incurably insane.
Willard also discovers, when he at last meets Kurtz, that Kurtz is slowly dying of malaria. Hence his physical illness is symbolic of his moral sickness. When Kurtz takes Willard into custody, he is aware of the object of Willard’s mission. “You are an errand boy,” Kurtz scoffs, “sent by grocery clerks to collect the bill.”
Malaria-ridden and delirious, Kurtz spends hours haranguing Willard about his theories of war and politics, which he maintains lie behind his becoming a rebel chieftain. Kurtz does this because he wants a brother officer to hear his side of the story. He desires to pass on to Willard the baton of his beliefs. Moreover, Kurtz ultimately wants Willard to explain to his son his father’s reasons for acting as he has. Significantly, even in the depths of his madness, Kurtz has not lost sight of the preciousness of family attachments—a reflection of Coppala’s perennial theme of the importance of family.
By contrast, Willard is aware in the opening scene that his wife is divorcing him and that he has lost his family. The loss of home and family, “of conventional belonging and attachment, is the context for Willard’s drunken danse macabre in the opening scene.”59 Willard regrets the loss of family. Captain Colby, one of the deserters who has joined Kurtz, totally repudiates his family—he sends a bulletin to his wife, “Sell the house! Sell the car! Sell the kids! I’m never coming back!”
In Kurtz’s own mind, the ruthless tactics he has employed to prosecute the war represent, in essence, his unshakable conviction that the only way to conquer a cruel and inhuman enemy is to become as cruel and inhuman as the enemy and to crush him by his own hideous methods.
By now Willard has definitely made up his mind to carry out his orders to kill Kurtz, and Kurtz, who has sensed from the beginning the reason Willard was sent to find him, makes no effort to stop him. As Willard reflects in his voice-over commentary on the sound track, Kurtz wants to die bravely, like a soldier, at the hands of another soldier and not to be igno-miniously butchered as a wretched renegade. Indeed, in order to die like a soldier, Kurtz dons his Green Beret uniform while he is waiting for Willard to come and assassinate him.
Coppola adapted Willard’s ritual slaying of Kurtz from what he calls “the classic myth of the murderer who goes up the river, kills the king, and then himself becomes the king,” according to the old adage, “the king is dead; long live the king.” The director unearthed this “granddaddy of all myths” in James Frazer’s study of primitive tribes, The Golden Bough: A Study of Magic and Religion (1922), an edition of which is visible in Kurtz’s quarters in the film. According to Frazer, certain primitive peoples believed that the mystic tribal leader must be killed by his successor when he becomes too feeble to continue to rule.60
Willard accordingly enters Kurtz’s smoky lair and assassinates him with a scimitar. At the suggestion of Vittorio Storaro, who viewed the rough cut, Willard’s killing of Kurtz is intercut with shots of the Cambodian tribe that is part of Kurtz’s army slaughtering a sacrificial water buffalo, a scene that suggests that Willard implicitly sees his “execution” of the diabolical Kurtz for his hideous war crimes as a kind of ritual slaying.
After Willard has slain Kurtz, he pauses at Kurtz’s desk and notices a typescript lying on it. We see in close-up that scrawled in red across one page is the statement, “Drop the Bomb. Exterminate them all!” This is Kurtz’s manner of indicating his way of ending the Vietnam War: he would like to have seen all of the North Vietnamese soldiers and non-combatants alike destroyed from the air. Kurtz’s cold-blooded statement recalls a similar passage in the novella in which Marlow peruses a report that Kurtz had prepared for the International Society for the Suppression of Savage Customs. The report ends with a postscript, presumably added much later: “Exterminate the brutes.”61 As mentioned, there remains in the film the lingering implication that Willard turns Kurtz’s declaration against Kurtz’s own savage army and has the bombers destroy “the brutes,” although the aerial bombing is never shown.
As Willard leaves Kurtz’s quarters, Kurtz’s worshipful tribesmen submissively lay their weapons on the ground before him as he passes among them. Clearly, they believe that the mantle of authority has passed from their deceased leader to the man he allowed to slay him. But Willard has no desire to become Kurtz’s successor. Willard, his mission accomplished, walks out of the compound and proceeds to the riverbank, where his patrol boat awaits him. As the boat pulls away from the shore, Willard hears the voice of Kurtz uttering the same phrase he had spoken just before he met his Maker: “The horror, the horror.” At the end Kurtz was apparently vouchsafed a moment of lucidity in which he realized what a depraved brute he had become. To Willard the phrase represents his own revulsion at the vicious inclination to evil he had seen revealed in Kurtz—a tendency that Kurtz had allowed to overpower his better nature and render him more savage by far than the enemy he was so intent on exterminating.
Hence the theme of the movie is the same as that of Conrad’s novella. “In Apocalypse Now just as in ‘Heart of Darkness,’ the central journey is both a literal and a metaphoric one,” writes Joy Boyum. It is fundamentally “a voyage of discovery into the dark heart of man, and an encounter with his capacity for evil.”62 In harmony with this observation, Coppola tells me that he too “sees Willard’s journey upriver as a metaphor for the voyage of life, during the course of which each of us must choose between good and evil.”
Although some critics found those scenes in which Kurtz theorizes about the motivation for his unspeakable behavior wordy and overlong, most agreed that the movie contains some of the most extraordinary combat footage ever filmed. Spectacular scenes like Kilgore’s helicopter attack have prompted some commentators to declare that Apocalypse Now towers above any war picture ever made.
Many critics show great appreciation for the cinematography. Indeed, Coppola worked out with Storaro an effective visual scheme for the movie. The scenes of the PBR going upriver, en route to Kurtz’s compound, demonstrate that color photography need not be a postcardlike mimicking of natural, realistic color. The pale yellow light of a dawn or the dusky blue of a twilight represent pure visual poetry. The images have an allure all their own, and the tribal rites in Kurtz’s temple compound achieve an off-kilter sort of beauty. Indeed, Storaro states in his 2003 memoir, Writing with Light, that he had an almost intuitive understanding of the dramatic interplay between light and dark in the film.
Besides the Grand Prize at Cannes, the picture won two Academy Awards: Vittorio Storaro won an Oscar for cinematography, and Walter Murch won for sound design. Coppola himself won a Golden Globe Award from the International Press Ass
ociation in Hollywood and a British Academy Award as best director. Robert Duvall likewise won a Golden Globe and a British Academy Award as best supporting actor. Furthermore, by the late 1990s the movie had grossed nearly $200 million worldwide, exclusive of its theatrical release in an expanded version, Apocalypse Now Redux, in 2001.
Apocalypse Now Redux (2001)
Coppola explains in his “Director’s Statement,” issued when Apocalypse Now Redux was released, that he limited Apocalypse Now to two and a half hours for its original release in 1979 because he feared that the movie would otherwise be “too long and too strange” for the mass audience. “[W]e shaped the film that we thought would work for a mainstream audience of its day, making it as much a genre ‘war’ film as possible.”63
In the intervening years since its original release Apocalypse Now had become an established American classic. When the American Film Institute picked the best one hundred American films made during the first century of cinema, Apocalypse Now was among them, along with The Godfather and The Godfather Part II. In releasing an expanded version of Apocalypse Now, Coppola banked on the fact that audiences would welcome an extended version of a picture that had enjoyed such enormous critical and popular success over the years. So Coppola and Walter Murch resurrected fifty-three minutes of original footage that had been cut from the film the first time around and dispersed it throughout Apocalypse Now Redux, which was appropriately unveiled at Cannes in May 2001. Although the film was not in competition this time, it was still generally regarded as one of the best films on display at the festival that year.
In Redux there is more of Kilgore, the obsessed martinet, since the battle scenes in which he figures are expanded in this new version. Ziesmer explains why Coppola included a shot of a Catholic chaplain celebrating Mass on a makeshift altar near a bombed-out chapel in the midst of one of the battle sequences, while helicopters are flying overhead. Coppola, recalls Ziesmer, was inspired by an image in Fellini’s La Dolce Vita (1960) in which a chopper flies over the churches of Rome.
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