Apocalypse Now (1979)

11.00pm, Saturday, BBC Two ‘’I love the smell of napalm in the morning’’

Francis Ford Coppola’s nightmarish adaptation of Joseph Conrad’s

Heart of Darkness is one of the most brilliant lms ever made about the Vietnam experience and one of the most logistically harrowing. The stories surrounding this one are legendary, and well chronicled in the excellent documentary, Hearts of Darkness: A Filmmaker’s Apocalypse, compiled by the director’s wife, Eleanor. The planned six-week shoot in the Philippines turned into sixteen months. In an early drunken sequence, Martin Sheen was genuinely under the in uence and required stitches when he inadvertently smashed a mirror with his hand. The actor would later su er a heart attack during lming. To add insult to his lead actor’s injury, much of Coppola’s set was razed to the ground by Hurricane Olga, and Ferdinand Marcos was apt to withdraw his on-loan helicopters at will in order to deal with his own logistical problems (one day he commandeered all 24). Marlon Brando, meanwhile, was typically unprepared for action, but Coppola knew all about the big man from his Godfather days and rightly presumed that the actor (who was being paid one million dollars of an ever-increasing budget) would be ne once the cameras started rolling. For Coppola, the shoot was also a personal nightmare, lled with health problems that were undoubtedly exacerbated by the fact that he was forced to invest millions of his own money into the production. Yet despite (and maybe because of) these travails, Apocalypse Now is a haunting lm experience. Brando is a mesmeric Colonel Kurtz (‘‘I’ve seen the horrors, horrors that you’ve see; but you have no right to judge me’’); Martin Sheen is convincing as the army captain sent to track this renegade o cer, while Robert Duvall is brilliant as the gung-ho Colonel Kilgore (‘’Charlie don’t surf!’’).