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.
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