The Forest Commandos

Back in 2017, I briefly mentioned the short film The Forest Commandos. TCM ran it some months back during the Saturday matinee block, which is how I got it on my DVR under its own title, and not tacked on to some feature movie to fill out a time slot. So I rewatched it to give it a bit more justice with a longer review rather than just a one-paragraph synopsis.

The opening titles mention that the short was filmed in Technicolor, but whether any color prints survived is an open question as the print that TCM ran was in black and white. It was filmed in 1945, right at the end of World War II, and obviously makes a lot of reference to the war. Northern Ontario has a lot of forest, and forestry products are a key element in the production of all sorts of goods. However, there's not a whole lot of transportation connections since the region is fairly sparsely populated, and the bush pilots are a key element in keeping the region connected; as such, the movie is dedicated to them.

Forests like that are also under threat both from invasive species and forest fires, and a good portion of this short is dedicated to those two, especially the latter since fire is cinematically more interesting than somebody looking through a microsope for moth larvae. One thing mentioned is the series of lookout towers that were used in those days, something very familiar to me living in the Catskill Mountains. A couple of the peaks here in the Catskills still have the fire towers on the top, not for the original use of having fire rangers look for fires and use ranging equipment and ham radio to speak ranges in other towers to determine the exact location of the fire, but now as a sort of museum to promote conservation.

As you might guess, we get the obligatory forest fire, with the second half of the short showing how the fire was fought in those days. The fire they cover also threatens a small village called Gogama, with footage of a possible evacuation filmed. Thankfully the rains come and help put out the fire.

The Forest Commandos is certainly an interesting idea, especially for audiences in the 1940s that wouldn't have had as much opportunity to see such stuff elsewhere. However, a good portion of this is presented almost in the way you'd expect a Pete Smith short to go, except not nearly as funny. It also doesn't help that there's a good deal of footage that's obviously stock footage from somewhere else, making you wonder just how much of the whole thing was staged. It's also a shame that the original color prints don't seem to be available, as the footage probably would have looked a lot more dramatic in color.

TCM's Star of the Month March 2026: George Brent

Kay Francis and George Brent in The Keyhole (Mar. 17, 11:00 PM)

We've finally gotten past 31 Days of Oscar, which means that we start getting back to regular features on TCM, such as the Star of the Month. There are still three Tuesdays to go in March, which means there's enough time to have a star for whom a fair amount of movies are available. This time, the star in question is George Brent, and his movies will be on TCM for the next three Tuesdays in prime time, as well as a good portion of the mornings on Wednesdays, including April 1.

As far as I can tell, there's not any particular guiding theme for each of the three nights of Brent's turn as Star of the Month. The first night includes at least one movie I haven't blogged about in The Keyhole, at 11:00 PM tonight. The synopsis sounds familiar, but it might be a different movie I'd seen since "private detective following a woman only to fall in love with here" isn't exactly unique.

George Brent and Bette Davis in Dark Victory (Mar. 31, 8:00 PM)

A search of the blog before today didn't yield much in the way of photos of Brent, which I suppose isn't surprising considering that Brent was disproprtionately in support of one of Warner Bros.' strong female leads, such as Bette Davis in films like Dark Victory, which kicks off the third and final night of Brent's films at 8:00 PM on March 31.

I had hoped that when I searched for pictures, I'd get one from each Tuesday night of movies airing as part of this tribute. That didn't quite work out, but as it turns out the two Brent movies sitting on my DVR that I hadn't blogged about before will both be airing on the second night of the salute. So you'll be getting one Brent post next week, while the other movie (In Person with Ginger Rogers) will have to wait for another time.

Barbara Stanwyck and George Brent in The Gay Sisters (Apr. 1, 6:45 AM)

One other movie worth mentioning is You Can't Escape Forever, which will be on TCM at 3:45 AM on April 1. I don't think I've seen this one specifically, but it's the third time Warner Bros. used this particular property about a reporter getting demoted and using a new position to go after a gangster: the original movie was Hi, Nellie starring Paul Muni, and the second time was Ronald Reagan's debut film, Love Is on the Air. The story would be used a fourth time at the end of the 1940s, in a movie called The House Across the Street.

Our Hospitality

I've got more silent movies that I need to get off of my DVR, so next up on that list is the early Buster Keaton feature Our Hospitality.

We don't see Buster for several minutes. Instead, the movie starts with a prologue, set in Kentucky in 1810, telling us about the feud between the "Canfields" and the "McKays", an obvious reference to the Hatfields and McCoys. The families have been feuding so long that they don't know any more why the feud started. In any case, the feud is about to reach a climax with John McKay and James Canfield getting into a shootout that leaves both of them dead. McKay left behind a young wife and infant son, while James had a brother who had three children. Mrs. McKay is so sick of the whole feud that she decides to take her kid and go back to her sister in New York, which as we see is surprisingly undeveloped for 1810.

Two decades pass, and Willie grows up (played as an adult by Buster Keaton) not having learned much about the feud because his now-decesed mother didn't want to tell him about it. Why bother your kid with stuff that's long-ago history? Adult Willie gets a letter which is from a lawyer telling him that the family left some property in Kentucky that's now his, and he's going to have to come to Kentucky to claim it. So he gets on the very new-fangled technology of the steam train to head off to Kentucky. (The first steam trains did start running right around this time, but there wasn't enough track to get the characters from New York to Kentucky.) This is the chance for Buster to use some of his train-based comedy which he seemed to like and would reach a peak in The General, as well as introducing us to the female lead, Virginia (Natalie Talmadge, Buster Keaton's real life wife).

The two meet and fall in love along the train journey, although it turns out that Virginia is in fact Virginia Canfield, the third sibling in the family in the prologue of the movie. Their father Joseph, who was not the one killed, had wanted the feud to end, and would before Willie's arrival probably have considered the feud as long-ago history as Willie's mom did. But Joseph's two sons are out for blood, and immediately look for ways to bump off Willie and get Willie's inheritance. Not that it's a particularly big inheritance, as Willie finds out to his surprise.

He's invited to the Canfield place for dinner, having met Virginia, and the brothers figure out this would be a good time to kill Willie. Dad, for his part, doesn't think this is morally right, as being a guest at the Canfield place requires the Canfields to show "our hospitality". So it's the next day after Willie leaves that the two sons can go after Willie in a climax that involves a literal cliff-hanger, trains and a river flowing over a waterfall.

To me Our Hospitality isn't quite as good as later silents, but to be fair to Buster Keaton he was learning and movie technology was consistently improving. Keaton had only made one feature before this, and that one, Three Ages was structured so it could be re-edited into two-reelers if it had been necessary. In any case, although Our Hospitality is a bit slow at times and some of the train gags don't quite work, it's still Buster Keaton and he's always worth watching.

The Young Lovers

Another of the movies that I got the chance to see thanks to its being available on demand on Tubi (granted with a few ad breaks) is an early directorial effort for Ida Lupino, Never Fear. Lupino also co-wrote the screenplay with her then husband Collier Young, and the two also produced it with their production company The Filmakers.

After an opening title card informing us that as much of the movie as possible was filmed at the real locations, we get into the action, such as it is. Guy Richards (Keefe Brasselle) is a dancer who is probably better as a choreographer, but in any case is supposed to be someone who can go a good ways in that field. As the movie opens, he's trying to break in to the big time together with his dance partner Carol Williams (Sally Forrest), who is also his girlfriend and soon to become fiancée, at least when Guy can finally bring in a little more money.

The two get some successful reviews at the nightclub where they're performing, but as Guy is devising the next routine, Carol starts to feel a fever coming on that's ultimately enough for her to collapse. Guy takes Carol to the best doctor he can afford, and the diagnosis isn't a pleasant one: polio, which of course was still a thing when the movie was made in late 1949. Guy wants to do the best he can for Carol, and fortunately, Carol has a father who seems to have a bit of money too, so they can afford to put her in the private Kabat-Kaiser Institute (a real place that ultimately became part of what is now Kaiser Permanente) and get her a single room.

Carol thankfully has the use of her arms but sadly not her legs, and worries she'll never walk again. Her days are filled with physical therapy and socializing with the other patients, especially Len Randall (Hugh O'Brian), who you wonder whether he's trying to put the moves on her because he consistently seems a little too friendly, even though he certainly must know about Guy's presence in her life. Then again, Carol seems more than willing to dump Guy now that she can't walk any more, and doesn't want anyone else in her life either, choosing instead to feel sorry for herself and a miserable person to be around.

Guy, on the other hand, is a saint, and is even willing to put dancing aside to take on a job selling new tract housing to make ends meet, not that he's any good at that. He wants to stand by Carol -- even though they're not married, he's already taking the "in sickness and in health" part of the marriage vows seriously. But at the same time, he gets to the point where he just wants to shake some sense into his girlfriend.

Lupino would go on to better things behind the camera, but Never Fear is decidedly uneven. Now, part of that is down to the screenplay, which makes Sally Forrest have to play an unsympathetic character for much of the running time. The screenplay is also strictly by-the-numbers. There's also the presence of Keefe Brasselle, who was never much of an actor. On the other hand, Lupino already shows some good camera work, notably when she directs a wheelchair square dance (apparently the polio victims really did such square dancing on wheels), which is the most interesting part of the movie.

Briefs for March 15-16, 2026

Oh yeah, the Academy Awards are going to be handed out tonight. As is normally the case, I haven't seen any of the nominated films. I don't know how many of them got shown at the local dump of a sixtyplex we have around here. And as someone whose normal work shift is 6-2:30, I'm generally more up for a matinee, which takes the local independent theaters right out. Well, that and the in-your-face tedious politics.

As I understand it, the main competition this year is whether the Academy will vote for the movie that allows them to virtue signal their politics on immigration, or to virtue signal ticking off the demographic check box. Except everybody's talking about the Shakespearean-era period piece for Best Actress, and, I'd guess, the technical categories like Costume Design.

In any case, tonight being the awards presentation also means it's the final night of 31 Days of Oscar on TCM, which means they're getting back to "regular" programming and the various spotlights. There's actually going to be a Star of the Month, which I'll get to later in the week when that comes up.

I mentioned the 1930s version of Last of the Mohicans last week as the movie that TCM was going to be running during the time change to Daylight Savings Time. Sure enough, when I checked my DVR, it turned out that the recording of Last of the Mohicans was only 45 minutes when it should have been in a 1:45 slot. It's still available on the Watch TCM app until the end of the month, so hopefully I should get around to watching it.

Also, as always, I've got a backload of posts, and then sometimes after writing a post I see the advanced TCM schedule has a movie I've posted about coming up that I haven't scheduled yet so I have to juggle the scheduling of movies around to put up a post in conjunction with the upcoming airing. So whenever I put up a post that says a movie is running that night or the next day, check the listings.

It Started With Eve

A few months back, I mentioned having recorded a double-feature of Deanna Durbin movies that aired on TCM. One of the movies, It Started With Eve, is one that I had watched many years back but never actually done a review on. So I watched it again in order to be able to do this review on it.

We don't meet Deanna Durbin for several minutes. Instead, we see Jonathan "Johnny" Reynolds, Jr. (Robert Cummings). He's the son of wealthy businessman Jonathan Sr. (Charles Laughton). Except that Dad is on his deathbed, and Junior is returning home to see Dad for what is probably the final time, with some newspaper types keeping a vigil outside the family mansion and wondering whether Johnny is going to make it back in time before Dad dies. Tragically, this means that Dad isn't going to make it to his son's wedding: Johnny has only recently gotten engaged while on the sort of vacation to a place where all the rich people go. With that in mind, Dad tells his son that his dying wish is to meet his son's fiancée, Gloria Pennington.

Johnny dropped the Penningtons off at the hotel, not realizing that Dad would want to meet them; to be fair one can think that bringing the fiancée's family to an occasion like this might be too much for the old man. But it means he has to go back to the hotel room and pick them up, and who knows whether they'll make it back in time before Dad dies? Worse, when Johnny gets to the hotel, he finds that Gloria (Margaret Tallichet) and her mom have gone out late in the evening to get a custom fitting for clothes for the funeral, which again seems like a bit of a plot hole considering that stores would likely not be open at this hour of the evening.

On his way out the lobby, Johnny runs into hat-check girl Anne Terry (Deanna Durbin), who is hoping to get back to her family in Ohio. Johnny, being desperate, offers this woman he's never met before a proposition. Would she be willing to play the part of his fiancée for an hour or two until Dad dies? Johnny will pay her good money, and since Dad will never see her again, is there really any harm in this little white lie? Anne could use the money, and it won't keep her from catching her train, so she decides to accept.

Except that this is a Hollywood movie and we're only ten or fifteen minutes in, so you know fully well that this isn't all that's going to happen and that there are going to be serious complications. Dad does not in fact die. Not only that, but it looks like he's going to start getting better and eventually even make a reasonable recovery. Johnny has to go back to Anne's apartment and bring her back to the house, which she's not particularly excited about at first. And then there's the real Gloria and her mother, who are understandably displeased about not being able to meet their future in-law until Johnny can come up with some sort of explanation as to what's going on. Even worse is that Dad really likes Anne. Finally, as you might guess, as the movie goes on it's going to become more and more apparent that Johnny and Anne are the ones who are right for each other, even if they don't yet realize it.

It Started With Eve is one of those movies that has a premise where you know exactly where it's going to go and that it's going to get to a happy ending, but the fun is seeing how it gets there. And with a cast like Deanna Durbin, Robert Cummings, and Charles Laughton, it's a fairly fun ride getting to the obvious destination. Charles Laughton did not get to play comedy as often in his career as he probably should have been given the chance to do. He's clearly enjoying himself here in the sort of mischievous older father role you could easily see Charles Coburn do, and his enthusiasm really makes the film a lot of fun. Durbin and Cummings are more than adequate. There's a bit of odd miscasting with Guy Kibbee as an Episcopal (I think) bishop; Kibbee just doesn't look the part although it's not as if he does anything wrong with his smallish role.

Bang the Drum Slowly

Tonight's prime-time lineup on TCM is baseball movies that were nominated for at least one Oscar. Wouldn't you know it, but one of the movies in the lineup has been sitting on my DVR. That movie is Bang the Drum Slowly, tonight at midnight. So as is always the case, I watched it in order to be able to do this review on it.

Michael Moriarty stars as Henry Wiggen, star pitcher for the New York Monarchs baseball team. Some pitchers, especially left-handed starters and knuckleballers, seem to wind up with "personal" catchers in that the combination of the two players works better than putting the pitcher with the nominally "better" catcher. Henry has a catcher who also happens to be his best friend, Bruce Pearson (Robert De Niro). However, as the movie opens, we learn that Henry is picking Bruce up from the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, MN: Bruce is terminally ill with Hodgkin's disease. Henry takes Bruce back to Bruce's family home in the South, although it's not to die, just to meet Bruce's family and introduce us to a made-up card game some of the ballplayers like to play that's really just an excuse to find a mark to take that guy's money from.

Henry is in a contract dispute with his team, so he gives his manager, Dutch Schnell (Vincent Gardenia), an ultimatum: I want my best friend Bruce to be signed to the team along with me, and I want the contracts to be structured in such a way that if you get rid of him or send him to the minors, you have to do the same with me. Now, this presents a serious problem in that at this point of the movie Bruce isn't really presented as Henry's personal catcher in the sense that Bruce could play every fifth day when Henry starts, allowing the regular catcher to take a breather since catcher is one of the more demanding positions physically. Bruce, in fact, is the sort of ballplayer who in a normal world would have topped out in the minors, and rarely gets to start.

And then never mind the fact that Bruce is dying, and that neither Henry nor Bruce are about to tell the team this. Also never mind the fact that the intake physical that certainly every player gets before being signed doesn't seem to have found anything wrong with Bruce. Indeed, Bruce is terrified that the team is going to find out he's terminally ill, since one of the symptoms is going to be some sort of attack reminiscent what poor Bette Davis got in Dark Victory, although not one attack like that. Cancer doesn't work that way. In any case, Bruce does get one of these episodes in the hotel room, and Henry has to call for a doctor, at which point it becomes pretty damn clear that there's something wrong with Bruce although the few people who do figure out something is seriously off are going to keep it a secret as much as they can.

The season goes on, and Bruce still doesn't seem to be getting that much worse, although the movie has a bizarre ending in that Bruce goes missing (well, back home) for the postseason, asking Henry to send him a box score. Wouldn't Bruce stay with the team? If they make the playoffs, wouldn't the contracts require Bruce to be on the playoff roster as well as Henry?

But, then, Bang the Drum Slowly isn't really about baseball per se. Instead, it's one of those movies that uses baseball as a backdrop to be more of a character study of the relationship between Henry and Bruce. Reviewers who can focus on that have generally tended to find Bang the Drum Slowly quite a good movie. I'm sorry to say I don't quite agree with that, as the movie is interminably slow and for me rather full of plot holes. Still, enough people like it that this is one you're definitely going to want to watch and judge for yourself.

If you liked Son of Lassie

Another movie that I watched off my DVR before it expired is Gallant Bess. Having watched it, now I can do the obligatory post on it here.

Marshall Thompson, who was being groomed for stardom by MGM but never quite achieved it, plays Tex Barton. Tex runs a horse ranch in California, although he seems rather young to do it since it's implied later in the movie that he's 16 going on 17 and an orphan. He's got one particular horse, Bess, that he absolutely loves, since that horse more than any other is a link to his late father. So when Bess gets knocked up he's aboslutely thrilled and goes to the nearest "town" to the ag supply place to get stuff for a pregnant mare.

While he's at the store talking with proprietor Smitty (Clem Bevans), a couple of navy recruiters show up needing one more person to fill their recruitment quota. Why, I don't know, since World War II already seems to be on and you'd think they'd just draft people. And Tex should be exempt anyway since he's all alone on that ranch and involved in agriculture. He's more important to the war effort on the home front. Yet Tex rather stupidly signs on even though it's going to mean leaving that pregnant foal that he loves behind, leaving Smitty to run the ranch.

Tex goes to a naval base where he's going to learn to become a Seabee, and becomes friends with Lug (George Tobias). One day, however, he gets a letter from Smitty informing him that Bess is sick with pneumonia. So Tex utterly stupidly tries everything he can to get leave, literally busting in to the CO's office, and then trying to go AWOL when he can't get leave. He's put in the brig, until he's informed that his unit is shipping out so everyone in the unit gets 24 hours liberty. This enables him to go home just in time for Bess to die and Tex to bury her. At this point, the audience should have lived happily ever after, but that's not what happens in the movie.

Tex has an illogical resentment towards his commander, Lt. Bridgman (Donald Curtis), to the point that he makes life difficult for everyone around him, with only Lug trying to keep Tex from doing something that will really get him court-martialled. On the island where they're building an airstrip as part of the island hopping campaign in the Pacific, Tex starts having dreams about Bess and waking up in the middle of the night, although he's also waking up everybody else in the tent so they all absolutely despise him, and with good reason. And then he thinks he hears a horse and disturbs everyone else's peace even more.

Except this time, when he goes out into the jungle, he finds that there actually is a horse, and tends to the horse, which is something that saves his life when a Japanese air raid hits the tent in which he would have been sleeping. The horse beomes the unit's mascot and even saves Tex's life when Tex gets injured in another Japanese attack. Will Tex be separated from the horse again?

Gallant Bess, at least the second half of the story set on the Pacific island, is based on a true story, although the man who wound up with the horse was a career Navy man who was in his 40s by the time of World War II. The part before the character gets sent to war is wholly made up, and frankly to the detriment of the movie since it makes the main character terribly unsympathetic. When he started waking everybody else up talking in his sleep I really wanted them to beat the crap out of him. Instead, we get all the syrup MGM could bring to a project like this.

Well, not quite all the syrup. MGM for whatever reason didn't film this in Technicolor, but instead in Cinecolor. The result is the print TCM ran does the movie no favors either as the colors are both flat and inconsistent. When the horses are crossing either green pastures or reddish dusty ground, the tone of the red or green changes from one second to the next, and not because the camera is panning ground that's changing color -- many of these are medium-to-long shots.

Gallant Bess had potential, but I don't think it quite lives up to that potential.

A fool is thanked

It wasn't uncommon for producers in the UK in the 1950s and 1960s to want to bring over an American star to make it easier to get one of the American studios to distribute the movie in the US. The latest such film I watched is I Thank a Fool.

The American star in question was Susan Hayward. She's playing Christine Allison, a Canadian who moved to the UK in part to become a doctor, and in part to follow her boyfriend. Said boyfriend is, as the movie opens, terminally ill in hospital, and Dr. Allison hastens his entrance into the next world by giving him an overdose of something when the duty nurse could easily have given him the proper dose and let him die "naturally". Even though it's a mercy killing, it's still technically medical malpractice, which means that a trial is necessary. Stephen Dane (Peter Finch) prosecutes the trial, with Allison being found guilty of manslaughter, sentenced to prison, and stricken from the doctors' register.

Fast forward 18 months. Christine is released from prison, but in need of a job, since she can't legally go back to being a doctor. But wouldn't you know it, there's somebody who could use a person with a physician's skills, and that person just happens to be... Stephen Dane! He's got a wife who might be suffering from a mental illness, and he needs somebody with medical skills to be a companion for the wife. Why am I thinking of The Chalk Garden here?

In any case, Christine takes the job and meets Stephen's wife Liane (Diane Cilento), who certainly seems to have some problems. One of those problems involves anything that spins like a circle, which is played up at several points during the movie. Liane's mental problems started back in her native Ireland, when she and her father, Capt. Ferris, were in a car accident in which her father died. Dane rescued her, at least metaphorically, and brought her over to the north of England to live. But she has those apparent mental problems, and Stephen doesn't want to have her committed to an asylum, which is also where Christine is convenient. A regular doctor would have the power to have Liane committed -- but of course Christine is no longer legally a doctor.

Christine quickly gets the impression that things are not quite what they seem, in no small part because Stephen seems to be terribly controlling and doesn't want Liane to go out on her own. All sorts of little things happen, and there's also the impression that one of the workers in the stables, Roscoe (Kieron Moore), might be trying to get involved with Liane. But things really take a turn when a man shows up claiming to be... Capt. Ferris (Cyril Cusack)! Now Christine really believes that Stephen has sinister motives, to the point that she's willing to help Liane run away to Ireland to see her father. This isn't quite the reunion you might thing, and Stephen is close behind, leading to shocking complications.

I Thank a Fool is a melodrama that starts off with the interesting premise of euthanasia, which would have been an even more controversial topic back in the early 1960s than it is today. But it devolves into something that at times is ridiculous and implausible. I'm guessing Susan Hayward took the role in part for the chance to take a working vacation in Ireland (the Ireland-set scenes were filmed at least in part in Ireland). She does the best she can with the material, and she's not bad. Peter Finch is reasonbaly good as the morally ambiguous man, and Cusack is professional too. But the script. Oh boy are the plot twists a mess.

So watch I Thank a Fool for some acting performances, or for the location shooting. But don't expect the best of plots.

TCM's Robert Duvall tribute

Robert Duvall died last month, and TCM altered its schedule slightly to include three of Duvall's Oscar-nominated roles tonight. Those films are:
8:00 PM Tender Mercies, in which Duvall plays an alcoholic country singer; (the night's original lineup was movies with alcoholics)
10:00 PM The Great Santini, with Duvall as a martinet of a father in an Air Force family; and
12:15 AM Apocalypse Now, which saw Duvall pick up a Supporting Actor nomination.

As I happened to have Apocalypse Now on my DVR, I decided that I was going to watch this one to put up the post on it in conjunction with the tribute, instead of doing it fairly quickly after the announcement of Duvall's death as had been my original intention.

Duvall having picked up a Supporting Actor nomination, the star of the movie is actually Martin Sheen. He plays Ben Willard, a captain in the US Army who, as the movie opens, is in Saigon in late 1969/early 1970 during the Vietnam War where he's spending leave drinking heavily in his hotel room and trying to forget nightmares. Voiceover has Willard speaking after the fact, but the action on screen is actually the beginning. His sojourn in Saigon is interrupted by a couple of men who have orders to take Willard to see Lt. Gen. Corman (G.D. Spradlin). Spradlin tells Willard about a colonel named Kurtz (Marlon Brando). Kurtz had a rising career in the army, but it seems that in about 1964 he did an intelligence mission to Vietnam that soured him on the whole thing. He went to Fort Benning and paratroopers' school, returned to Vietnam, and then went native, basically deserting to fight his own war, or at least that's what the official US channels think. Kurtz is a danger to them, and somewhere in the jungle in the borderland between South Vietnam and Cambodia, and it's Willard's mission to find Kurtz, and terminate him with extreme prejudice. It's a top secret mission, and nobody is actually supposed to know why Willard is headed where he is.

Willard heads out to the river system where a small patrol boat is going to take him as close as they can safely get to where Kurtz is suspected to be. For part of the journey, they're supposed to have air support, commanded by Lt. Col. Kilgore (that's Duvall). The boat on which Willard is traveling has a motley crew of men who seem to have been deeply affected by their experiences in the war, although they're not all going to show the effects at the same rate. It's obvious, however, when they intercept a Vietnamese boat carrying goods to a farmers' market.

Willard sees more and more surreal things on his way up to the edge of where the US has any control, such as a USO-type show with Playboy playmates, but eventually gets to people who know where Kurtz are. Along the way, he's been reading up on Kurtz from the classified material the general gave him, and begins to gain some sympathy. He also learns that his is not the first mission to try to assassinate Kurtz. The other guy, Colby (Scott Glenn), is officially MIA, but the classified information suggests he may have joined Kurtz. There's also a photojournalist (Dennis Hopper) who has also turned to Kurtz' side.

As I said, they do eventually find Kurtz, but as to what happens when they do, you're going to have to watch the movie yourself for that.

Surprisingly, I'd never actually seen Apocalypse Now in its entirety before this. I think that's a lot to do with my not being of the generation to be terribly interested in the Vietnam War and movies about it. I'm much too young for the 1960s protest era, and by the time I got old enough to appreciate classic cinema, there would be other Vietnam movies like Platoon that were the big ones.

I have to say that for me, Apocalypse Now is another of those movies that's very well made, albeit a difficult watch. However, I think I'd put it with movies like Raging Bull, Lawrence of Arabia, or Au hasard Balthasar where I see why they're good, but for me not good enough to put all the way at the top of all-time great film lists the way a lot of critics do.