Godfather (33 page)

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 Association 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.

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.

There is also an added scene with the Playboy bunnies on a USO tour of the battlefront, who give a show for the troops in the original cut of the film. Richard Blake, among other film historians, erroneously assumed that the second scene with the bunnies was scripted but never shot—but it was indeed filmed and then deleted from the film at the editing table, and it is restored in
Redux
.

Actually, the exteriors for the second bunny scene were shot during the torrential rains that caused the production to be shut down in 1976. Willard and his crew encounter the bunnies, sometime after the USO show, at a Medevac Camp (a medical evacuation station) in a downpour. They are stranded in their grounded chopper because it has run out of gas. Willard offers to supply them with two drums of diesel fuel in exchange for their “servicing” his men, much to the disapproval of Chief (Albert Hall), the straight-arrow pilot of Willard's PBR. “You're giving away our fuel for this playmate of the month,” he chides Willard. “No, the playmate of the year!” Willard retorts with sardonic humor. On a more serious note, Coppola observes that the playmates, like Willard and his men, are in Vietnam on a mission that will degrade them, “except the girls are being exploited in sexual ways.”
⁶⁴

There is one additional scene with Kurtz: Willard is listening to Kurtz scoffing at a report from
Time
magazine about how well the war is supposedly going. It is the only time we see Kurtz in daylight—for once he is not hidden in darkness, and the sunlight exposes him as the raging demon that he is.

The most substantial addition to the film is the French plantation sequence. Milius had devoted eleven pages to this episode in his script, and Coppola had extended it to twice that length in his revised screenplay. It runs close to half an hour in
Redux
. As Sheen describes it in the documentary
Hearts of Darkness,
“Willard and his team come ashore at a French rubber plantation” that is guarded by French soldiers who emerge like ghosts from the fog.

At this fog-enshrouded outpost in the jungle Willard and his men find a fractious colonial French family. Hubert DeMarais (Christian Marquand) and Roxanne Sarrault (Aurore Clément), his widowed daughter-in-law, invite them for a formal dinner in their house, a relic of the French colonial past. “They had been fighting the Vietcong long before we did, and they weren't letting go,” says Sheen in the documentary.

The dinner scene, as included in the documentary, is accompanied by a voice-over that inexplicably is not in the scene as it appears in
Redux
. In his narration, Willard says, “It was like having dinner with a family of ghosts. They were trying to convince themselves that it was still 1950. They weren't French anymore; they would never be Vietnamese. They were floating loose in history without a country. They were hanging on by their fingernails, but so were we.”

The ethereal Roxanne seduces Willard with opium as she murmurs to him, “There are two of you, don't you see? One who kills and one who loves.” The bedroom scene is filmed in autumnal tones verging on sepia, and it dissolves to a misty dawn, when Willard and his crew must continue on their way.

That
Apocalypse Now Redux
is a unique film is borne out by the fact that only one major Hollywood film has since treated the French conflict with the Vietnamese: Phillip Noyce's
The Quiet American
(2002). Set in 1952, the movie depicts the final French defeat and withdrawal from Indochina. In the course of
The Quiet American,
Thomas Fowler, a British war correspondent, asks Alden Pyle, an American associated with the U.S. legation in Vietnam, why the United States continues to meddle in Southeast Asian affairs. Significantly, Fowler seems to be echoing Humbert DeMarais's words to Willard in Coppola's film: “Why don't you Americans learn from our mistakes?” Willard has no ready answer to offer DeMarais, just as Pyle cannot reply to Fowler in the later film.

Coppola was dissatisfied with this whole sequence when he shot it. In
Hearts of Darkness
he addresses the cast and crew on the set when the sequence is finished: “I was very unhappy with the scene on every count. Everybody forget that we ever shot it. It no longer exists.” He further comments
in the documentary that he was incensed because the sequence was time-consuming and costly to shoot, as Ziesmer mentions above. “I was angry at the French sequence, so I cut it out,” says Coppola. During postproduction he stuck to his decision because he was convinced that he could not afford to insert a sequence that added twenty-five minutes to the film's running time.

But when he and Murch were putting together
Redux,
he wanted to include it because the journey upriver is “a journey going backward in time; and Willard and his men pass through the 1950s” at the French plantation before reaching “primordial, prehistoric times” at Kurtz's camp.
⁶⁵

Milius was gratified that both the “Medevac scene” with the bunnies and the French plantation sequence were rescued from the cutting room floor, since they both originated in his script. Unquestionably, the restored scenes in
Redux
add extra richness and complexity to the characterizations. Reviewers of
Redux
almost unanimously concur that, with the restored version of
Apocalypse Now,
Coppola had overhauled a movie that, by turns, was first thought of as Coppola's folly, then was dubbed an outstanding war movie. It now stands confirmed as a mind-blowing masterwork. Several critics included
Apocalypse Now Redux
on their year-end list of the best films of 2001, although
Apocalypse Now
was actually a 1979 release. They agreed that, by using Conrad's “Heart of Darkness” as the focus on the film, Coppola proved with
Apocalypse Now/Apocalypse Now Redux
that an auteur can, with his own personal vision, transform a literary source into a monumental motion picture.

After the excesses that marked the making of
Apocalypse Now
, Coppola, after finishing the film in 1979, said, “Sometimes I think, why don't I just make my wine” (he owns a vineyard near his Napa estate) “and do some dumbbell movie every two years?”
⁶⁶
But Coppola continued making movies that mattered to him. In between
Apocalypse Now
and
Apocalypse Now Redux
he made another film about the Vietnam War,
Gardens of Stone
. It has no stunning battle sequence, since it takes place stateside. In contrast to a king-sized war epic like
Apocalypse Now, Gardens of Stone
tells what Coppola calls a more intimate, personal story. While
Apocalypse Now
depicts the Vietnam War itself,
Gardens of Stone
, its companion piece, is concerned with the home front during the same period.

In the spring of 1985 Victor Kaufman, chief executive of Tri-Star Pictures, invited Coppola to a luncheon meeting at which he offered him the chance to direct
Gardens of Stone
,
which Ronald Bass had adapted from the novel by Nicholas Proffitt. The novelist had served three years in the Old Guard, the venerable army unit that oversees military burials at Arlington National Cemetery near Washington, D.C. Subsequently, he was a war correspondent for
Newsweek
in Vietnam. Proffitt's novel centers on the Old Guard, and Coppola was initially attracted to the project because he had been fascinated by the splendor of army ritual since his days at a military academy as a teenager. Furthermore, Coppola, whose recent movies had not been financially successful, frankly needed money.

The plot of the novel shows how a world-weary member of the Old Guard, Sergeant Clell Hazard, is rejuvenated by his relationship with a young, idealistic cadet, Jackie Willow. Although Proffitt's book is clearly an antiwar novel, it portrays both enlisted men and officers in a much more sympathetic light than did
Apocalypse Now
. Proffitt's stance toward the military, which Bass brought over into the script, appealed to Coppola. He liked the idea of depicting the army in a more positive light than he had in his previous Vietnam film. “The whole of the army as an old institution with lots of powerful traditions that are handed down, particularly in its code of honor—I liked that part of it, and I tried to depict it.”
⁶⁷

Gardens of Stone
presents the benign image of the army as a large family and shows how the elders in the family endeavor to give the younger members the benefit of their experience—only to lose some of them in battle. The message Coppola extracted from the story was that “we are sworn to protect our children” and yet we keep putting them in circumstances that make that impossible, so that “you end up burying them, all dressed up in military ritual.”
⁶⁸

Coppola, we remember, had had a falling out with the Pentagon over the script for
Apocalypse Now
, and he had therefore been denied the army's cooperation in making the movie. He ruefully remembers that, as a result, he was forced to rent helicopters and other military equipment from President Marcos's regime in the Philippines for exorbitant fees.
⁶⁹

In the present instance, Coppola literally could not afford to alienate the Pentagon a second time, since
Gardens of Stone
simply could not be made without access to Arlington National Cemetery and the military training base at Fort Myer that figures prominently in the story, not to mention the equipment and personnel that the army could make available.

Aware that the army had not liked
Apocalypse Now
, producer Michael Levy tactfully told a high-ranking general, “You know, Francis also wrote
Patton
.” The general responded, “That's one of my favorite pictures” and added that he was favorably impressed with the present film's scenario.
⁷⁰