Francis Ford Coppola's
Apocalypse Now (1979; 153 mins.) and
Apocalypse Now Redux (2001; 202 mins.)

PRINCIPAL CAST
actor	role
Marlon Brando	Col. Kurtz
Robert Duvall	Lt. Col. Kilgore
Martin Sheen	Captain Willard
Frederic Forrest	Chef
Albert Hall	Chief
Sam Bottoms	Lance
Larry Fishburne	Clean
Dennis Hopper	Photojournalist
G.D. Spradlin	General
Harrison Ford	Colonel
Colleen Camp	Playmate
Cynthia Wood	Playmate of the Year
Scott Glenn	Colby
Principal actors whose performances were restored in Apocalypse Now Redux:
Christian Marquad	Hubert de Marais
Aurore Clément	Roxanne Sarrault
Michel Pitton	Philippe de Marais
David Oliver	Christian de Marais
Chrystel Le Pelletier	Claudine

PRODUCTION CREDITS
Producer & Director	Francis Ford Coppola
Screenwriters	John Milius, Francis Ford Coppola
Narration	Written by Michaerl Herr
Cinematographer	Vittori Storaro
Production Designer	Dean Tavoularis
Supervising Editor	Richard Marks
Editors	Walter Murch, Gerald Greenberg, Lisa Fruchtman
Music	Carmine Coppola, Francis Ford Coppola
Sound Montage and Design	Walter Murch
Art Director	Angelo Graham
Set Director	George R. Nelson
Costumes	Charles James

DIRECTOR

Francis Ford Coppola was born in Detroit, Michigan, in 1939, and grew up in New York. His father was a composer and musician; his mother had been an actress. Coppola received a degree in drama from Hofstra University, then did graduate work at UCLA in filmmaking. With filmmaker Roger Corman he served as soundman, dialogue director, associate producer, and, eventually, director of Dementia 13 (1963), Coppola's first feature film. His subsequent directorial credits include The Rain People (1969), the "Godfather" trilogy— The Godfather (1972), The Godfather Part II (1974), and The Godfather Part III (1990)—The Conversation (1974), Apocalypse Now (1979), One From the Heart (1982), Rumble Fish (1983), The Cotton Club (1984), Peggy Sue Got Married (1986), Tucker: The Man and His Dream (1988), and Bram Stoker's Dracula (1992). He cowrote the script for Patton (Franklin J. Shaffner, dir., 1970), wrote the screenplay for The Great Gatsby (Jack Clayton, dir., 1974), and has produced numerous films, including Mishima (Paul Schrader, dir., 1985), the 1981 restoration of Napoléon (Abel Gance, dir., 1927), and Kagemusha (Akira Kursosawa, dir., 1980). He has won five Academy Awards (reflecting these three areas of his achievement) out of a total of fourteen nominations, and he has won two Cannes Film Festival Palme d'Or Awards. For the past twenty years, he has primarily produced films and wines.

TWO VERSIONS

Apocalypse Now was originally released in 1979, at 153 minutes. The budget was $12 million, but owing to Coppola's filming of 370 hours of footage, which he initially assembled into a rough cut of some five hours, the final cost was approximately $30.5 million. It grossed more than $100 million worldwide (not including video rentals, television rights, and other revenues), but does not qualify as one of the top-ranking box-office hits of all time, a ranking that generally requires a $200 million gross. At the 1980 Academy Awards ceremony, it received nominations for Best Picture, Director, Screenwriting (based on another medium), Supporting Actor (Robert Duvall), Art Direction, Cinematography, Editing, and Sound. It won many other awards, including the Palme d'Or at the 1979 Cannes Film Festival in France.

In 2001, the American Zoetrope Corporation (Coppola's production company) released Apocalypse Now Redux,[1] which runs 202 minutes, 49 minutes longer than the original. Both this "restored" version and the original are available on DVD. Apocalypse Now Redux has been generally hailed by critics as a valuable, if overly long, contribution to our understanding of Coppola's complex and often confusing vision of the Vietnam War. Among other things, it has been called a "tantalizing recut," an "expanded version," and a "director's cut," and the 2001 DVD package calls it the "re-edited," "re-mastered," "definitive version" of the movie. The first release was composed of nineteen sections; the second, thirty-five. Of the sixteen restorations, the most significant, in terms of narrative, are the sequence set at a French plantation house (completely removed from the original), more time on the boat heading upriver toward Kurtz, more of Kurtz, and the reappearance of the Playboy "Bunnies" whom we originally saw airlifted away from a performance for soldiers.

What does this additional footage add to the movie's narrative, character development, and meaning? Primarily, it strengthens the theme of colonialism and its corrupting power, as seen in the handful of French settlers who have lost their stake in Vietnam, refuse to leave their plantation under any circumstances, and, even as they treat the Americans to a lavish French dinner, insult them for waging what they anticipate will be another losing war. Nonetheless, they have already joined the Americans in conducting a very moving funeral for the young soldier Clean (Larry Fishburne). This section not only deepens our understanding of Willard but also introduces Roxanne (Aurore Clément), a young French widow with whom he spends a drug- and pleasure-filled night, and thus opens up the 1979 depiction of a virtually all-male world.

Ultimately, Coppola's film has been hailed as "one of a handful of works of art as famous for the process of its creation as for its finished form."[2] An invaluable companion to the film is Fax Bahr, George Hickenlooper, and Eleanor Coppola's Hearts of Darkness: A Filmmaker's Odyssey (1991), a remarkable nonfiction film that incorporates footage shot by Francis Ford Coppola's wife and an account written by her while living and working alongside her husband during the movie's production. In it, we see the director, cast, and crew at work and hear Eleanor Coppola commenting candidly on what they are doing at the moment. Rich in insights into the director's methods and his madness, the film should be seen by anyone interested in how a film is made.

NARRATIVE

Script

Francis Ford Coppola's ambitious historical vision places Apocalypse Now in the same category as D. W. Griffith's Intolerance (1916), Erich von Stroheim's Greed (1925), Abel Gance's Napoléon (1927), David Lean's The Bridge on the River Kwai (1957), and Werner Herzog's Aguirre: The Wrath of God (Aguirre, der Zorn Gottes, 1972). Indeed, Coppola said that "Aguirre inspired me a lot" and that initially he wanted to advertise his movie like Lean's, as "a high quality action-adventure spectacle."[3] While its meanings are widely debated, its story is quite simple. An American special forces officer, Captain Willard (Martin Sheen)—who is also the narrator of the movie—is ordered to seek out the renegade Colonel Kurtz (Marlon Brando). The mysterious and intelligent Kurtz, a third-generation West Point graduate, plays warlord in a strongly held Cambodian compound, surrounded by loyal natives. Willard finds Kurtz, and they confront one another before Willard kills him.

Coppola wrote this synopsis:

Apocalypse Nowis a retelling of Joseph Conrad's short classic Heart of Darkness [1902]. Set in Vietnam during war in 1968.

It is the intention of the film-maker to create a broad, spectacular film of epic action-adventure scale, that however is rich in theme and philosophic inquiry into the mythology of war; and the human condition.

. . . As our protagonist travels through the insanities and absurdities of the American involvement in the war, he is more and more drawn to the jungle itself, its primeval mystique and immense power. It becomes clear that the American war "to bring civilization to the ignorant millions" is merely the extension of mercantile colonialism and that the horror and savagery lie not in the jungle, but in the American culture itself, with its powerless technology and pop culture.

. . . The story is metaphorical: Willard's journey up the river is also a journey into himself, and the strange and savage man he finds at the end is also an aspect of himself.

Clearly, although the film is certainly "anti-war," its focus is not on recent politics. The intention is to make a film that is of a much broader scope; and provide the audience with an exhilerated [sic] journey into the nature of man, and his relationship to the Creation.

It is the hope of the film-makers to tell this story using the unique imagery of the recent Vietnamese War; its helicopters, disposable weaponry; as well as the Rock music, the drugs and psychedelic sensibilities.[4]

Coppola was not the first or last director to adapt Heart of Darkness to the screen. Indeed, a number of others in Coppola's crowd wanted to bring Heart of Darkness to the screen in the late 1960s and early '70s, including Carroll Ballard. John Milius, another member of this crowd, eventually wrote the script with Coppola.[5] Some forty years earlier, Conrad's novel had had a similar influence on Orson Welles, who adapted it for radio and intended to make it as his first film. Various problems—logistical, financial, and political (i.e., opposition to its racial themes)—forced Welles to shelve the project and make Citizen Kane instead. Both Welles and Coppola were attracted to Conrad's use of contrasts: civilization versus the jungle, freedom versus slavery, colonialism versus independence, society versus isolation, seeing (insightful observation) versus blindness (not seeing or knowing what one is doing), truth versus lies, light versus darkness, justice versus unfairness. They were also drawn to Conrad's fascination with the mysteries that pervade existence, his reliance on Kurtz's last words ("The horror, the horror") to help define the man, and his method of imbuing the text with multiple, ambiguous meanings. Eventually, Nicholas Roeg made a movie based on Heart of Darkness (1994) with Tim Roth as Marlow and John Malkovich as Kurtz.

Conrad's novel is, in part, about the brutal Belgian colonization of the Congo in the nineteenth century and how Kurtz, who manages a station established to export ivory, is transformed into a brute by his years of isolation and power in the jungle. In both of these aspects, the colonial and the personal, Coppola found parallels to the American presence in Vietnam. Coppola's attempt to tell two stories in one film prompted some critics to separate the two strands of storytelling. Frances Fitzgerald, whose Fire in the Lake: The Vietnamese and the Americans in Vietnam (1972) ranks high among the many distinguished works of journalism to come out of the conflict, writes that the movie "seems to be two different films spliced together with an editing machine. One of them, unfortunately the shorter of the two, is a daring and stylish satire on the American army in Vietnam; the other is Coppola's misguided attempt to translate Conrad's novel into film."[6]

Despite its perceived narrative weakness, Coppola's film remains the one by which all other Vietnam War films are measured, including (among others) John Milius's Big Wednesday (1978); Michael Cimino's The Deer Hunter (1978); Hal Ashby's Coming Home (1978); Ted Kotcheff's First Blood (1982); George B. Cosmatos's Rambo: First Blood Part II (1985); three films by Oliver Stone—Platoon (1986); Born on the Fourth of July (1989); and Heaven and Earth (1993)—Clint Eastwood's Heartbreak Ridge (1986); Tony Scott's Top Gun (1986); Renny Harlin's Born American (1986); Coppola's Gardens of Stone (1987); Barry Levinson's Good Morning, Vietnam (1987); Stanley Kubrick's Full Metal Jacket (1987); John Irvin's Hamburger Hill (1987); Peter MacDonald's Rambo III (1988); Christopher Crowe's Off Limits (1988); Brian DePalma's Casualties of War (1989); and Terrence Malick's The Thin Red Line (1998).

Although he based much of his film on Conrad's masterpiece, Coppola was also inspired by the work of other modernist writers, especially Anglo-American poet T. S. Eliot. Eliot's poem "The Hollow Men" (1925) quotes Conrad as one of its epigraphs—"Mistah Kurtz—he dead."—and creates the image of the modern human being whose life "ends / Not with a bang, but a whimper." The movie also contains significant allusions to the Bible, Virgil's Aeneid, Homer's Odyssey, and Richard Wagner's "Ring" cycle, and we see among Kurtz's books the Bible, works by Eliot and Goethe, and studies of mythology by Jessie L. Weston and Sir James Frazer.

Meaning

In balancing his two objectives, Coppola develops several key themes, both overtly and covertly. The first is the U.S. presence in Vietnam: the ironic uselessness of its powerful technology against the strategy of the cunning guerrillas, the brutality of its imperialist attitudes toward the "ignorant millions" among the Vietnamese people, its devastation of the country's land and its resources, the harm done to its soldiers (and, by extension, to the United States itself) by drugs, and the inevitability of its failure in Southeast Asia. In this way, Apocalypse Now provides a wide-ranging cultural analysis of the United States at a major turning point in its history.

Another theme—literally, metaphorically, and structurally—is the quest , Willard's voyage up the river. On one hand, it employs the somewhat overused notion that a journey is more important than an arrival, because what Willard goes through in getting to Kurtz yields more substance than the actual encounter. On the other hand, their actual encounter reveals to Willard similarities between himself and Kurtz that, in turn, confirm "the horror, the horror" not only of Kurtz's demented behavior among the natives but also of the futile American war. Willard's quest has two goals: killing Kurtz "with extreme prejudice" and discovering himself—what he is doing in Vietnam, why he came close to a complete breakdown at the beginning of the movie, and why he sees aspects of himself in Kurtz.

Related to the quest is the theme of the king. A medieval legend tells the story of King Arthur's knights' quest to find the Holy Grail, the sacred cup used by Jesus at the Last Supper. The cup is guarded by the "fisher king," who, because he is a sinner, was struck mute when he touched the Grail. Kurtz, of course, is a king of his own making, and the many great books in his compound include Jamie L. Weston's From Future to Romance (1920), a seminal and still influential study of the Christian and other roots of the Grail legend. His endless, perhaps meaningless rambling might be seen as a paradoxical kind of muteness.

Finally, the movie raises the theme of redemption or salvation. By beginning and ending Apocalypse Now with the Doors' "The End," Coppola signals that the narrative has functioned cyclically. Willard has passed through the darkness, the apocalypse, and returned to—what? light? life? "In the destructive element immerse!" advises a character in Conrad's Lord Jim (1900), another novel about colonialism, also narrated by Marlow. In other words, you must confront the darkness and evil before you can know the right path.

SOUND DESIGN

Sound designer Walter Murch studied in the USC film program (with John Milius and George Lucas) at about the same time that Coppola was studying at the UCLA film school. He played four related but very different roles in the making of Apocalypse Now—sound designer, sound editor, editor, and writer—and he shared the Academy Award for Best Sound with the three others. He had previously worked on the sound for Lucas's THX 1138 (1971; he also cowrote the script) and American Graffitti (1973) and Coppola's The Rain People (1969), The Conversation (1974, Oscar nomination; also coeditor), and The Godfather Part II (1974). Murch has also edited Coppola's The Godfather Part III (1990), Fred Zinnemann's Julia (1977, Oscar nomination), Jerry Zucker's Ghost (1990, Oscar nomination), and he did both sound and editing for Anthony Minghella's The English Patient (1996), winning an unprecedented two Oscars for his work. In 1998, working from Orson Welles's notes, he reconstructed a "director's cut" of Orson Welles's Touch of Evil (1958). He has written numerous articles on film editing and sound, as well as a book, In the Blink of an Eye: A Perspective on Film Editing

(1995).[7]

When he was starting out in sound, Murch dreamed of "setting up a situation where the sound of a film was under as unified a control as the picture. Just as there is a Director of Photography who is practically and theoretically responsible for the look of the film's photography, we didn't see any reason why there couldn't be . . . the same situation as regards sound."[8] He therefore coined the term sound design (see "Sound Production" in chapter 7). Murch urges us to think of "a spectrum of sounds as you would think of a spectrum in a rainbow," with dialogue (blue) at one end, music (red) at the other, and sound effects (yellow) in the middle. From this concept, he extrapolates "an almost endless ability to create a sandwich of sound" (153). He often works in what he calls this "quintaphonic" sound: there are five channels of full-range information, with three soundtracks coming from behind the screen, two in the back of the theater, and one channel of low-frequency sound to bring the other channels together and reinforce them. The danger is "that when you have a large number of sounds and you play them all together, they simply collapse . . . into one new thing which is a bunch of noise" (157), heightening the importance of carefully modulating and mixing the sounds. Of course, quintaphonic sound can achieve its full effect only in theaters that are properly equipped to reproduce it for the audience.

According to Murch, Coppola specified three particulars about the sound design of Apocalypse Now. He wanted it to be quintaphonic, to be authentic, and to reflect the "psychedelic haze in which the war had been fought . . . [a] far-out juxtaposition of imagery and sound" (158–59). Almost all the sound in Apocalypse Now was created during postproduction. There were two reasons for this reliance in the recording studio: the crew was shooting on location in a foreign country, not on a set, and out in the open they were completely at the mercy of nature and its sounds; equally important, Coppola was constantly giving direction to actors while the cameras were running, as you can see throughout the documentary Hearts of Darkness. For Apocalypse Now, Murch created, edited, and mixed all the basic types of sounds: vocal sounds (dialogue and narration), environmental sounds (ambient sound, sound effects, and Foley sounds), music, and silence. Mixing these sounds for the premiere at Cannes (where, though shown in an unfinished form, the film won the Palme d'Or) took three months; further editing and mixing took another six months.

This epic, so complex and layered with meaning, depends heavily on sound (as well as Vittorio Storaro's ravishing cinematography). Let's consider (and listen to) how Coppola's use of sound contributes to this in four memorable parts of the film (the numbers and titles refer to the chapters in the DVD of Apocalypse Now Redux): (1) "Waiting in Saigon," (8) "Helicopter Attack," (22 and 23) "Do Lung Bridge" and "Mr. Clean's Death," and (24) "The French Plantation."

Waiting in Saigon

Moments after Apocalypse Now opens in darkness, we hear one of the movie's key sound effects: the whump-whump-whump of helicopter

rotors.[9] From the dark screen, there is a fade-in to a widescreen image of the jungle; the helicopter sound continues until we hear the Doors performing "The End," first the instruments, then Jim Morrison's vocal. This vocal ends on a hard cut to an image of an explosion in the jungle, under which we hear only the instruments, not the explosion itself—an example of offscreen, nondiegetic sound that does not match its image. From this widescreen view of the exterior, the camera reframes to medium shots and close-ups. In this second part—consisting mainly of superimposed images and circular camera movements inside Willard's room—the sounds (driven by the narration) include helicopters rising above the music as well as realistic, diegetic sounds in the background and from Willard's memory. After this surrealistic section (featuring superimposed, upside-down images of Willard and his surroundings), the scene becomes realistic, as signified by a normal camera angle and attention to Willard's narration and ambient sounds. Willard peers through the blinds of his hotel room and speaks: "Saigon. Shi-i-i-t!" He is alone, restless, smoking and drinking, fondling photographs as he mentions his divorce. Soon, we learn that he is waiting for some kind of "mission," and we realize that for Willard, who would rather be in combat in the jungle, the hotel room is a prison. He becomes distraught: wearing only briefs, he performs karate movements and suddenly plunges his fist into a mirror; his hand bleeds profusely. In the third part of this opening sequence, which takes place the following morning, two army officers arrive, inform Willard that he has been assigned a mission, and escort him to an intelligence compound to be briefed. After the officers enter the room, the sound becomes wholly realistic and diegetic. There are several effective sound bridges here: helicopters bridge the sound of a ceiling fan and, at another point, of the drums in the rock band; and the sound of Jim Morrison's voice bridges Captain Willard's voice.

Overall, this opening scene is intended to establish place, mood, character, and key ideas. The place, Vietnam (not identified until Willard's first comment), establishes motifs that are used throughout the film: according to Coppola, " The film is made of four basic units or elements: FIRE (night bombing), WATER (the beach and the river), AIR (wind of helicopter + monsoon), and EARTH (mud, holes, bomb crater, green foliage)."[10] The dominant mood is listlessness and anguish. We don't know where we are, at first we don't see anyone but Willard, yet the helicopters that constantly move across the screen, from right to left, and left to right, somehow control everything we see and hear. The sequence also establishes Willard's position professionally, personally, and psychologically; "in terms of both the picture and the sound," Murch explains, " we were trying to get into this person's head" (160). Finally, the sound helps establish certain ideas: primarily Willard's sense of mission, confusion, and temporary dementia, as well as the omnipresent violence (his gun rests on a table next to letters from home), war, and death. These elements are all reinforced by the quasi-mystical words of "The End," which thus also function prophetically in suggesting that this war will be the end, an apocalypse now.

If this were an opera rather than a movie, this sequence would be the overture, laying out the principal themes and motifs and tantalizing us before the curtain goes up. All the basic types of movie sound are used here by the filmmakers: vocal sounds, environmental sounds, music, and silence. Silence, of course, opens the sequence. The vocal sound consists of Willard's offscreen, diegetic voice narrating the film. The environmental sounds are of three types: ambient sounds (helicopters, ceiling fan, voices and cars outside the hotel room), sound effects (birds and insects when Willard is talking of home), and Foley sounds (the smashing of the mirror, weapons, karate noises, the footsteps of the officers as they go up the stairs to Willard's room). Murch was particularly proud of the Foley sounds, especially of Vietnam-era weapons, which had not yet been archived in a library of recordings.[11]

Helicopter Attack

Of the helicopter raid on a Vietnamese village, led by Lieutenant Colonel Kilgore (Robert Duvall), Murch says:

Visually you are seeing the same thing over and over, but what you will hear on the soundtrack is one layer after the other which in the end all come together and, in an almost geological sense, give you the sound landscape of this particular scene. I broke it down this way because this was the way I was working, partly because I was simply overwhelmed with the amount of sound that I was dealing with, but it's not a bad way to work because it's the equivalent of having to paint a mural. The problem that confronts you is that you are overwhelmed by the imbalance in scale of painting something that's sixty feet by forty feet, and looking at your own height which is somewhere between five and six feet. (153–54)

We should remember, as Murch urges us, that "nothing of what you are hearing was recorded at the time. It was all done later" (155). The sounds include wind, footsteps, gunfire, explosions, airplanes, helicopters, crowd noise, shouting, dialogue, and the "Ride of the Valkyries" from Wagner's Die Walküre (1870). In German and Norse mythology, the Valkyries were warrior-maidens who rode through the air in brilliant armor, directed battles, distributed death lots among the warriors, and conducted the souls of slain heroes to Valhalla, the great hall where the souls of heroes killed in battle spend eternity.

Wagner's four-part epic is opera at its grandest, and this music gives unity, even a kind of dignity, to this fast-moving, violent, and complex sequence of cross-cutting. It ties the disparate images together, gives them weight, and makes them whole, an assertion you should test by turning off the sound and watching how the sequence falls apart in silence. At the same time, the juxtaposition of imagery and music creates a surreal effect. Wagner was Hitler's favorite composer, and Kilgore plays his music because "it scares the shit out of the slopes [a derogatory term for Asians]." Thus the "Ride of the Valkyries" adds irony, bringing one of the most soaring themes of all Wagner's operas—collectively a major achievement of Western civilization, but one whose cultural baggage cannot be ignored—to a scene of harrowing destruction. Another irony is that the Valyries are doomed. Wagner's cycle of four operas—The Ring of the Nibelungs (Der Ring des Nibelungen), which includes Die Walküre—recounts the story of the fall of the existing order. Finally, because Valkyries are associated with performing heroic deeds and shielding heroic soldiers, Kilgore's choice of this music suggests that even though he does not appear to be afraid of anything, he relies almost completely on his helicopters (like Valkyries) to protect his men, deliver the wounded to the hospital, and gather up the dead. Thus, the musical allusion prefigures the fall of the American troops.

Do Lung Bridge and Mr. Clean's Death

Here, in two successive scenes, Murch fulfills Coppola's request for sound that would evoke a "psychedelic haze." "Do Lung Bridge" begins at dusk, which quickly becomes night; the sound is a boat's motor, not a chopper. As Willard's boat approaches Do Lung Bridge, the gateway to the final stage of his voyage to find Kurtz—garlanded with electric lights—the night sky is brilliantly lit by flares. Debarking to find the commanding officer, Willard is accompanied by Lance (Sam Bottoms), who is on an acid trip, has painted his face green, and carries a puppy inside his shirt. They pass through a surreal landscape of mysterious lights and eerie, synthesized sounds, an example of the "far-out juxtaposition of imagery and sound" that Coppola requested to reflect the drug culture of the war. They stop inside a sandbagged fortification, where the African American soldiers talk of dropping acid. Jimi Hendrix's drug-related "Purple Haze" is playing on a soldier's radio. A soldier named Roach (Herb Rice) is firing at a wounded Viet Cong soldier trapped against a barbed-wire fence. At this point, Murch begins to use silence:

There is a point when all of the sound you have been hearing—which is of a choatic battle going on off-screen—item-by-item disappears until all you are hearing is the voice of this wounded Vietcong calling out into the jungle. The dramatic reason for this is that a character called Roach has been called upon to kill this straggler who is taunting the soldiers from the barbed wire. Roach is a kind of human bat in that he doesn't need to see anything, he can echo—locate very precisely. At least for this brief period in the film, you are hearing the world the way Roach hears it, which is focussing in with a sublime subjectivity on just what he needs to hear. (161–62)

Here, the silence only emphasizes that everything seems out of control: Roach kills with glee, Lance is on acid, and Willard concludes that there is no commanding officer anywhere near the Do Lung Bridge. Slowly, the sound resumes as the voyage continues up river.

In contrast to this nighttime scene, the next scene, "Mr. Clean's Death," begins as a sunlit interlude. As the boat moves lazily upriver, the men read mail from home, and Clean, who has received a tape from his mother, listens to her voice on his tape recorder. Lance lights a purple smoke canister and says "Purple Haze" as he dances about, still obviously on drugs. As the beautiful colored smoke fills the air, the Viet Cong, hidden in the jungle, open fire on the boat, killing Mr. Clean. His comrades return the fire, but as they realize that Clean has been killed, they begin to scream and weep, as we continue to hear the voiceover from his mother's tape: "Do the right thing. Stay out of the way of the bullets. Bring your heinie home in one piece." We have come to love Clean, whose youth, niceness, and wide-eyed sense of adventure so far from home are underscored by the poignant sound of his mother's voice. French comments: "The oblique reference to Hendrix instantly calls to mind the image of a young black hero who would die before his time, so perhaps foreshadowing the fate of Clean."[12] The boat moves quickly through the purple haze into drifting white fog as it reaches the French rubber plantation.

The French Plantation

This sequence begins with Clean's military funeral; we are moved by its precision, by his being buried with his tape recorder, and by the lone bugler's playing at the conclusion. The French then treat the Americans to a lavish dinner. At first, we think this is going to be an idyllic, civilized interlude of food, wine, and conversation in the midst of a brutal war. But soon the patriarch, Hubert de Marais (Christian Marquand), begins raging about the role of the French and the Americans in Vietnam. Other Frenchmen join in. Only Willard remains silent, nodding his head but looking uncomfortable all the same. In addition to a few strains of accordion music and singing, and the ambient sounds of the jungle and the dinner table, the principal sounds of the scene are loud, angry voices.

 

FOR FURTHER READING

Chaillet, Jean-Paul, and Elizabeth Vincent. Francis Ford Coppola. Trans. Denise Raab Jacobs. New York: St. Martin's Press, 1985.

Cowie, Peter. Coppola. New York: Scribner, 1990.

Johnson, Robert K. Francis Ford Coppola. Boston: Twayne, 1977.

Lewis, Jon. Whom God Wishes to Destroy . . . : Francis Coppola and the New Hollywood. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1995.

Milius, John, and Francis Ford Coppola. Apocalypse Now Redux: An Original Screenplay. New York: Talk Miramax Books/Hyperion, 2000.

Zuker, Joel Stewart. Francis Ford Coppola: A Guide to References and Resources. Boston: G. K. Hall, 1984.

BACK TO TOP

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[1] Redux (pronounced "re-ducks") means "brought back" or "restored." On its answering machine, a New York video rental store that publicized the arrival of the DVD of Apocalypse Now Redux pronounced the word "re-do," which is true to the spirit if not the letter of the word.

[2] French, Apocalypse Now, 1.

[3] Coppola, qtd. in Cowie, The Apocalypse Now Book, 118, 113.

[4] Coppola, qt. in Cowie, The "Apocalypse Now" Book, 35–36.

[5] As Cowie writes in The "Apocalypse Now" Book, chaps. 1 and 4, Milius and Coppola disagreed as to who contributed what and over the final credits for the screenplay (reminiscent of Orson Welles's squabble with Herman L. Mankiewicz, coauthor of the screenplay for Citizen Kane); eventually they shared the credit (as did Welles and Mankiewicz), and Michael Herr received credit for writing the narration. The need for narration (originally written by Milius but omitted) did not even arise until the editing process, when Walter Murch realized that it had to be restored (Cowie, The "Apocalypse Now" Book, 100).

[6] Frances FitzGerald, "Apocalypse Now," in Past Imperfect: History According to the Movies, ed. Mark C. Carnes (New York: Henry Holt, 1995), 284.

[7] For a recent bibliography of his articles, see Sven E. Carlson, "Walter Murch Articles," <www.filmsound.org/murch.htm> (accessed September 2002).

[8] Walter Murch, "Designing Sound for Apocalypse Now," in Projections 6: Film-Makers on Film-Making, ed. John Boorman and Walter Donohue (London: Faber and Faber, 1996), 152. This essay is hereafter cited parenthetically in the text.

[9] Various people hear this sound differently; French hears it as "thup, thup, thup" (Apocalypse Now, 61), Anthony Lane as "thugga-thugga" ("Darkness Revisited," New Yorker, 6th August 2001, 81), and FitzGerald as "snick-snick-snick" ("Apocalypse Now," 284).

[10] Coppola, qtd. in Cowie, The "Apocalypse Now" Book, 38.

[11] See French, Apocalypse Now, 236–37.

[12] French, Apocalypse Now, 190.