MOVIES

...No doubt a bit frantic by this time, Coppola had the good fortune to bump into Martin Sheen, best known for the cult success Badlands, at the Los Angeles airport and promptly signed him for the role...

...He is holed up in Cambodia with a Montagnard army that considers him a deity and helps him fight the Viet Cong in a terrorist manner much too unorthodox for the namby-pamby types in the Pentagon to tolerate...

...This outburst notwithstanding, the film was considered good enough even in unfinished form to share the festival's prestigious Palme D'Or prize...

...That turned out to be a good question, and the director spent more than two years trying to come up with an acceptable answer...

...It was an impeccable idea in theory, but in practice Herr's narration turns out to be grating and portentous, constantly clashing with the nervy audacity that is the film's best quality...

...Francis told me one day, 'I've got to do this picture,' " John Milius has said...

...The film's most memorable sequence, a helicopter attack on a Vietnamese village adroitly choreographed to Wagner's "Ride of the Valkyries," is a purely visual experience and a shattering one...

...Even by the standards of an industry that regards the creation of expectation as an art in itself, this film is more than special...

...If I die making it, you'll take over...

...No wonder that as the end crawled into sight, weary production people took to wearing baseball caps inscribed "Apocalypse Now: Release With Honor," or that humorist Russell Baker was puckishly moved to write, "It was 1938 when I first heard that Francis Ford Coppola had begun working on Apocalypse Now...

...Coppola himself, who at times has shown unusual insight into the morass he created, summed up the problem best: "There were too many people involved in this," he said at Cannes...

...For one thing, Sheen soon suffered a heart attack — non-fatal — and for another, Typhoon Olga, the area's worst storm in thirty-two years, lashed the Philippines with forty inches of rain in six days, causing $1.8 million in damage to the film's sets and putting it into a hole from which it never quite managed to climb...

...If you die, George Lucas will take over.' " Energized though he was, Coppola was to have increasing difficulty getting actors to share in his excitement...

...Milius's idea, and it was a brilliant one, was to adapt Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness to the Vietnam war...

...filmed a cataclysmic ending showing Kurtz's compound being blown from here to eternity, but decided not to use it...

...Finally, Harvey Keitel signed on as Willard, but he had barely arrived on location before he quit...

...He had, at the usual enormous length and expense — remember those poor Ifugaos singing "Light My Fire...

...Marlon Brando did agree to play the enigmatic Kurtz, but Steve McQueen, whom Coppola wanted for the pivotal role of Willard, the officer who goes up the river in search of Kurtz, wanted $3 million to take the trip...

...It took seven-and-a-half weeks to shoot and it was worth every minute of the time...

...He had managed to shoot 1.1 million feet of film, eight times the norm for a feature and more than three times what even such an oversize film as Godfather II had used...

...About 1,200 gallons of gasoline were used to simulate a napalm attack that lasted all of ninety seconds...

...If the director thought his troubles were over when actual production began in March 1976, he soon learned differently...

...First conceived twelve years ago, it has been in active production since early 1976, a period that has seen its release date postponed no less than five times and its budget rise from $12 million to $30.5 million...

...He showed a variety of rough cuts in a variety of places, including one at Cannes last spring, where he took the opportunity to get back at what he considered an over-critical, over-snoopy press by calling American journalism "the most decadent, most unethical, most lying profession you can encounter...

...Half a dozen other imposing names, Redford, Pacino, Hackman, Caan, and more, understandably unenthusiastic about the film's extensive use of steamy Philippine jungle locations, excused themselves as well...

...Marlon Brando, menacing in his shaved head, glowers and mumbles a lot, but any real indication of what makes him so special is oddly absent, especially after such a long, complex buildup...

...Coppola had pasta flown in from Italy for his homesick crew...

...Unfortunately, the film's most painful weakness is also evident right from the start, and that is a voice-over narration spoken by Martin Sheen...

...Then he couldn't decide which of two equally ambiguous alternatives to put in its place...

...Much has been made of Coppola's uncertainty about the film's final two or three minutes...

...Many of these parts are marvelous, but they refuse to coalesce into a coherent whole...

...This madness is underlined by Willard's bizarre, surrealistic adventures as he passes through a kind of devil's three-ring circus on the way to Cambodia...

...How would he ever edit it all...

...What we have then is an N.F.L...

...He finally resolved for the thirty-five-millimeter version that most of America and the rest of the world will see (as opposed to the seventy-millimeter version exhibited in New York, Toronto, and Los Angeles) to hedge his bets by running the film's credits over a sizable napalm explosion...

...Difficult as it is to believe now, when John Milius began the film's screenplay in 1967, it was to be a bargain-basement $1.5 million project shot in sixteen-millimeter...

...We had access to too much money, and little by little we went insane...

...A brilliant career Army man, a third-generation West Pointer "with about a thousand decorations," Kurtz has, to all appearances, gone off the deep end...

...Still, Coppola's problems continued...

...Kurtz, the ivory trader who set himself up as a god in the African jungle, was to become Colonel Kurtz, a renegade Green Beret officer who found, as did Kenneth Turan reviews films regularly for The Progressive...

...it is only a symptom of the underlying problem...

...As the shooting, which eventually lasted 238 days strung out over fourteen months, ground on and on, the stories coming out of the area became more and more fantastic...

...In screenwriter Milius's original conception, Apocalypse Now centered on 'Little by little we went insane' the idea of adventure, on the simple notion of one man going up a river to find and possibly kill another...

...I consider it the most important picture I will ever make...

...Yet no matter how startling the moral and physical grotesque-ries he encounters, the audience is continually led to believe they are as nothing compared to what Willard will come across when he finally tangles with the inscrutable Kurtz...

...Half a million dollars went toward a fiberglass replica of a Buddhist temple, and $50,000 toward a radio-controlled, pneumatically movable human dummy, full of realistic looking entrails...

...Coppola had retained 264 Ifugao Philippine aborigine tribesmen and had them phonetically taught to sing The Doors' "Light My Fire...

...In fact, the conflict with Kurtz, which fills the film's final twenty minutes, is woefully anticlimactic from both a visual and a dramatic standpoint...

...Apocalypse's greatest strength is in its visual evocation of Vietnam, which is masterfully evident from its opening shot, when a green, shimmering, otherworldly jungle suddenly erupts in dancing napalm flames at once dazzling and horrifying...

...Coppola had hired a full-time snake man who showed up every morning with a sack full of pythons...

...Apparently concerned by Apocalypse's lack of coherence, Coppola late in the day commissioned Michael Herr, author of the splendid Dispatches, to write something to tie all the loose ends together...

...As Coppola's involvement increased, he concentrated on the metaphysical aspects, trying for what he grandly called "a theatrical-film-myth dealing with the theme of moral ambiguity...

...As Sheen's Captain Willard travels further and further up the river, we learn more and more about Colonel Kurtz, the man he has been ordered to "terminate with extreme prejudice...

...He wanted, he has since written, "to create a film experience that would give its audience a sense of the horror, the madness, the sen-suousness, and the moral dilemma of the Vietnam war,'' and he thought of it as a personal and professional milestone...

...These two notions interact throughout the film, sometimes strengthening each other but sometimes, especially in the finale, conflicting so badly they cancel each other out, leaving a great big zero in their place...

...Instead of being awed and horrified by the man, we end up being puzzled and faintly annoyed...

...This confusion about the last seconds of a two-and-a-half-hour movie is not what's wrong with Apocalypse Now...

...If so much was true, and it was, even stories that turned out to be false — that the director was dressing his set with disinterred corpses — seemed plausible...

...The bricks are all there, but the mortar to join them into something of value is unhappily missing...

...his namesake, that civilization was a puny thing compared to the dark savagery lurking in the human heart...

...The $1.5 million film never materialized, and nothing really happened to the project until 1975, when Coppola suddenly decided to devote all his energies to it...

...And then there was money, which Coppola spent as few directors had even dreamed of spending it before...

...Now that Apocalypse Now is available for domestic consumption, the most surprising thing about it is how few surprises it contains...

...Highlights of a movie, filled with individual sequences too good to leave out but not really related to each other...

...For all its potential for transcendent greatness, this film got out of hand like a gifted but unruly child with no one around to administer the most basic discipline...

...An entire rubber plantation mansion, complete down to the furniture, was built for scenes that never even made it into the film...

...Unfortunately, this is just not the case...

...We were all stunned, not only because of the incredible scope of the conception, but because Francis Ford Coppola hadn't been born yet...

...The more Willard learns about Kurtz as he reads his extensive dossier, the more he comes to admire him, to feel that his madness is possibly the only sane reaction to the greater madness of the war...

...It has all the strengths one would expect from a film by the man who must still be considered America's premier director, as well as the weaknesses its unprecedentedly chaotic background made inevitable...