Sorry to come in so late on the Apocalypse Now thread, but
I'd like to toss in some thoughts and random bits of
info.
Marlow turns out not to be very hard-boiled in saving Kurtz'
lady from the truth. He is an old style gentleman who
believes that the ladies are out of it, even while they are
necessary to the spiritual ideals of civilization. So he
tells her that Kurtz' last words were her name. Course if we
assume that "your name" also means "the horror,"
well...
I won't get into the "which is better" argument between Heart
and Apocalypse, except to say they are both masterpieces,
each in its own way. Conrad's short novel is more about a
moral awakening to darkness at the heart of Europe; Coppola
is focusing on something similar in the American effort,
though he's much more ambivalent, since the film both
endorses pyrotechnic destruction and questions its
purpose.
No one has mentioned that John Milius wrote the original
script, which was strongly action oriented. It opened with an
American soldier preparing to scalp a VC; it ended with
Willard joining Kurtz to fire at the copters which have come
to pick him up. Milius was thinking of Heart of Darkness, but
he spliced it with the Odyssey. The French Plantation
sequence was the Lotus Eaters; the second Playboy bunnies'
sequence was the Sirens; Do Lung Bridge, I guess, the
underworld visit.
Noir ironies?
>>Conrad was not mentioned as a writer in the
credits of the movie.
>>If "The Hollow Men" was one of Col. Kurtz' books,
he was reading about
>>Conrad's Kurtz; the epitaph of that poem is
"Mistah Kurtz, he dead."
>>Anyone thinking of Eliot and cats is probably
thinking of his many cat
>>poems, or maybe the musical based on the
poems--Cats.
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