Screen
Westerbeck, Colin L. Jr.
Lone Star and Pvt. Wars are one-act comedies in which the mogul's. Kurtz's whole encampment is festooned with se- farcical tone swallows the serious implications. Roy in Lone vered...
...This imageless one-word message is sent back from is everyone's picture of what a city editor must be like...
...If we should happen Stuart White (Lone Star) and Garland Wright(Pvt...
...You cannot do anything with a columnist or Coppola's other partial explanation is a visual one, a se- editorial writer-although the attempt would be well worth quence of the ritual slaughter of a bull which is interspliced watching -and a journey down to the composing room could with Willard's assassination of Kurtz...
...He falls in with the generals and politicians who actually ran the Vietnam war, and who also believed that their meditations on World War II Screen somehow qualified them to think about Southeast Asia...
...He has been boasting defensively only story equal to the one the movie wants to tell is not the since Apocalypse Now opened that he could sign a contract to story in it, but the story of it...
...climactic writing and printing of the story seems somehow There are of course equivalent people in national politics, and gratuitous, rather like a policeman filling out his report...
...In real life Patton was reincarnated somewhat less gloriously in Vietnam by his own son, Col...
...He discourage it...
...Apocalypse Now re-enlists Patton himself to fight in Vietnam side by side with Coppola's Mafioso...
...A partial explanation is put in Kurtz's The great virtue ofLou Grant (CBS), which was named best own mouth as an anecdote...
...The fact is that if you have a capable of which are unspeakable...
...The scene doesn't work any better than any other in the film...
...certain he his the answer to history...
...To convince us, he defies nature, ignores common sense, and sacrifices our own good opinion 'of him...
...The seductive thing about this view, particularly for Coppola himself, is that it makes Apocalypse Now the one movie version of the war to be trusted...
...The hooks into Coppola now...
...course, city editors more often than not look very different The message tells us nothing except that there are things man is from that, but it doesn't matter...
...We take the scene to be Coppola's don't share the captain's shock or revulsion as we do the movie admission that the war and the making of his movie got all Commonweal: 560 mixed up in his mind, too...
...explain everything now...
...Its implication is preposterous that the I venture to say that Superman had the right approach, and mass-murderer Kurtz is in truth a sacrifice on the altar of Lou Grant comes dangerously close to the same way of doing American policy...
...It's a deft moment characteristic of the director of movie...
...In Lou Grant, the I was speaking about the Hollywood which Joan Didion de- newspaper manages somehow to involve itself in so many scribes in The White Album, a world of motion-picture execu- different matters, and in so many different directions, that the tives who are interested in "deals" rather than in movies...
...The captain is especially movie camera who yells at him, "Run through as if you're absorbed by a dark, poorly lit photograph of the colonel...
...They are celebrities...
...Other flashbacks to The Godfather don't work as well, This Hitchcock touch is just more straining after an effect, any though...
...I doubt, for instance, doubled and then doubled again, the heroes who walked out or that he will be able to continue choosing his own projects...
...since Vietnam I think we have all been feeling that they have So, the program is essentially a vehicle for social commen12 October 1979: 561...
...Realism, Seeing that good wouldn't work, Kurtz then switched to evil...
...arbitrary and cliche...
...But he that turned into dispatches from a disaster, the budget that would have to give up a lot of control...
...In Apocalypse Now when Kurtz dumps on the captain's movie's own, particular darkness seems to lie here, in this lap the'severed head of one of his crewmen from the boat, we episode on the beach...
...Our confusion is increased by the fact that the guy with the Godfather films...
...Kilgore (Robert Duvall), who leads an air-cav THE COST OF APOCALYPSE assault on a coastal village...
...The worked, the inability to predict not only the weather, but the fact is that the self-indulgence and sophistry and plain error of film's own plot...
...The one likely to find his head on the things...
...after all, is not necessarily its own reward...
...There we often see the characters backlit, the camera is Coppola himself...
...Each is a spectacular fiasco...
...They In this scenario, Coppola has cast himself as Uncle Sam...
...War and movies, Vietnam and as shadowy figures thrown into relief against the world they Apocalypse Now, get all mixed up in our minds...
...When Coppola first created the Sheen) sent up a jungle river by patrol boat to assassinate a character of Patton, he couldn't help admiring the general's legendary colonel named Kurtz (Marlon Brando...
...Kilgore is only place where you and I feel it, is on the screen...
...In these ways Coppola will have to go on acting tries to prove something ridiculous and impossible there...
...In Coppola's treatment of this Kilgore's strike against the village provides Apocalypse story, which he and John Milius adapted from Joseph Conrad's Now with its one, unintended moment of pathos...
...Apocalypse Now have limited Coppola's choices in life...
...Kurtz's whole encampment is festooned with sefarcical tone swallows the serious implications...
...Just as Americans from the wrong side of the railroad tracks, a sardonic desk thought they could win in Vietnam, Coppola thinks he can man, an avuncular managing editor, etc...
...This is the heart of the darkness, into which none can IRASCIBLE OLD Lou Grant, his sleeves rolled up, tie askew, see...
...WilHeart of Darkness, there are sporadic traces of earlier Coppola lard, the officer played by Sheen, is along for the ride...
...There is a difference Coppola is&t Wars are presumably designed to say something sad and sig- seeing here between having giddy fantasies about the Mfifia nificant about the ways of being victimized by the Vietnam and having them about the Vietnam war...
...underline the playwright's weaknesses...
...It seems that when he came to television drama at the 31st Emmy Awards presentation, is Vietnam, a do-gooder with ideals who helped vaccinate little that it comes closer to genuine newspaper life than any of its children, the \<ietcong chopped off all the children's arms...
...I had heart attacks, the systems with back-up systems (two wouldn't be surprised if he finds it easier to produce other separate musical scores, two narrations) neither of which people's pictures than direct one of his own in the future...
...inhabit...
...Kilgore's horse-cavalry hat career...
...In Conrad's novel when Kurtz dies, he mutters, "The horror...
...When he starts applying more to be shoveling dirt over them when they should be digging "relevant" thoughts, like those he first had as collaborator on them out...
...and as films...
...He have compromised and diminished him...
...It seems that bravado, his dash, his colorful brutality...
...Although there are occasional quiet, almost touching be concerned about organized crime, most of us aren't...
...In that film when the movie mogul wakes up with the effect...
...Yet the heart of this touch...
...There should also be an idealistic young reporter really mean it, or Coppola doesn't anyway...
...In Apocalypse Now, Col...
...But he doesn't city editor...
...Since the original Patton COPPOLA TOMORROW believed in reincarnation, he is probably pleased to return here as Lt...
...predecessors, although that may be a mixed blessing...
...The film's more like the title character in Conrad's Nostromo than somestory, set in Vietnam, is of a Special Forces captain (Martin one out of Heart of Darkness...
...He THERE ARE many places where the failure of Apocalypse strides along the beach under fire just the way Coppola's Now will be felt: at the box office, in conference rooms Patton strides up and down a North African street which is all over southern California, in Francis Ford Coppola's being strafed by a German plane...
...Coppola was so admiring, so nearly jealous, of Michael The process of gathering and writing news is reasonably Cimino's The Deer Hunter...
...For instance, all the way up the river the captain studies he hits the beach during a fire fight, there is a guy there with a a dossier he's been given on Kurtz...
...Although we should war...
...Maybe...
...exception to this one...
...It is more of Coppola's thrashing about, pulling out all severed head of a horse in his bed, it's a ghoulish, stylish the stops, trying to get a rise out of us...
...Even real gangsters are a form of entertainment we outs crush out the little life the plays might have had...
...COLIN L. WESTERBECK, JR...
...he has trained as guerrillas...
...There have been From this we are supposed to understand how Kurtz came to be very few television programs about newspapers, and that is a genocidal maniac, but all the anecdote really explains is why probably because the opportunities for variety are limited...
...Coppola shares Cimino's political straightforward, and varies only as much as stories vary themanalysis that the Vietcong were the cause of all the barbarism selves, which, as any reporter will tell you, is infrequent...
...George S.) Kilgore is the spit and image of Patton...
...Both enjoy in the papers...
...America's ruination in Vietnam becomes Television Coppola's in Apocalypse Now...
...It is the one the war both deserves and demands, the only one that LOU GRANT, SUPERMAN gets beyond the superficialities of Coming Home and The Deer FRONT PAGE ON THE TUBE Hunter...
...Buried somewhere in But maybe it's not fair to jump on Coppola for the inapprothis double bill are two small character comedies with social priateness, the sheer bad taste, of trying to apply his dreams points to make, but McLure, his directors and his actors seem about Mafia dons to this war...
...He's the part of Uncle Sam...
...Wars) have to know one, we brag to our friends about it...
...Nobody brags directed the plays as though they were cartoons, and all those about knowing someone who committed atrocities in Vietlarge gestures, slack jaws, funny walks, voice indicators nam...
...We moments, particularly in Lone Star, the rattle of bad jokes, think of gangsters as people who kill off each other and leave the patter of platitudes, the repetitive bits and the revue black- us alone...
...Is the guy with the camera some whackedkilling a peasant, he sits down with the light behind him and, in out documentarian shooting footage in the middle of a the scene's fade-out, turns into a silhouette like the man in the crossfire, or is Kilgore's strike a fake being staged as part of a photograph...
...The Hollywood variety will get their irresistible in certain ways...
...Now Coppola can't Kurtz has gone berserk with the band of Montagnard tribesmen hide his similar feelings for Kilgore...
...They have made him is the fellow who makes a vast fortune in nothing flat, then vulnerable to people who finally care little for talent and squanders it all in some jungle half-way around the world...
...Clark Kent, it will be recalled, was a mild-mannered chopping block is Coppola himself, for whom a sequence reporter, and his work was customarily a quick and convenient employing a goat might have been more apt...
...Roy in Lone vered heads, and it's out of character for the captain, who has Star, who has come home to find that he is a cuckold and a not let any of the movie's previous atrocities get to him, to take stranger, and the three men in the veterans hospital in Pvt...
...In my last column means of switching the action elsewhere...
...GERALD WEALES the script for the movie Patton, he does worse...
...The symbolism here is just as easily be any kind of assembly-line format...
...Then, fighting...
...Of somewhere in the human spirit which is beyond all restraint...
...series about a metropolitan daily there has to be an ulcerous Kurtz also says "the horror" when he dies...
...It is the story in the press releases direct another picture for $1 million tomorrow...
...What, then, to do...
...For a minute we are unsure how we are supposed after an incident where the captain goes berserk himself, to read the scene...
...Capt...
...in Vietnam and corrupted us American innocents...
...The comparison is tempting, even gotten their hooks into us...
...But the one which is the source of all the others, the is the match for Patton's pearl-handled sidearms...
Vol. 106 • October 1979 • No. 18
