The Spectator’s 50 Essential Films: Part Two

Peter Hoskin and Matthew d'Ancona

4 July 2009

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Peter Hoskin and Matthew d’Ancona count down the final 25 of The Spectator’s 50 Essential Films

2.
Apocalypse Now
(Francis Ford Coppola, 1979)

Such a strong contender for the top slot and for so many reasons. Yes, we all know the famous lines (‘Charlie don’t surf’, ‘I love the smell of napalm in the morning’, ‘The horror… the horror’, ‘The crew were mostly kids. Rock’n’rollers with one foot in their grave’, ‘Buddha Time!’ — to name but a few) and the stunning and often visionary cinematic setpieces: the opening to the Doors’ ‘The End’, the attack on the village to the strains of Wagner, the Playboy Bunnies dancing for the troops, Willard’s first meeting with Kurtz in his malarial lair, and so on, and so on.

But this film is so much more, frighteningly so. Coppola’s claim that his movie ‘is Vietnam’ was not mere bombast — just watch Hearts of Darkness, his wife’s account of her husband’s descent into Kurtzian madness as he made the film. Never has a director so clearly succumbed to the ‘temptation to be God’ that afflicts the Green Beret colonel. Only Apocalypse Now would feature a lead actor (Martin Sheen) who suffered a heart attack during filming — and came back to complete shooting.

The film sprawls and snakes like the river that is its heart. And yet there is method in the madness: not only an unlikely retelling and updating of Conrad’s novella Heart of Darkness, in the setting of the south-east Asian conflict, but a richness of literary reference that is appreciated only by those sufficiently addicted to use the freeze-frame button. How many American film directors, in a big budget movie, would deploy not only T.S. Eliot but show on screen Jessie L. Weston’s From Ritual to Romance, the book that inspired ‘The Waste Land’ — not to mention Sir James Frazer’s The Golden Bough, a nod to the pagan rituals with which Kurtz surrounds himself in his Hadean compound?

Most of all, the film has survived both the historical era it describes and the period of its creation to tell a series of dark truths about war and the darkness of man’s heart. Who can see the pictures from Abu Ghraib or Guantanamo and say that we were not warned? Md’A