‘We were in the jungle,’ Coppola went on. By Vietnam he didn’t mean the country in South-East Asia, he meant what ‘Vietnam’ nearly always means in post-1970s American English: the historical moment when Americans met themselves in a foreign mirror and were frightened by what they saw. Introducing the film at Cannes in May 1979, Coppola said it wasn’t about Vietnam: it was Vietnam. Apocalypse Now is a great film, but a great film that gets lost, and the reasons for its getting lost are part of the film. ![]() The confused ending weighs on the film but doesn’t wreck it, so we don’t need to hush up the confusion or pretend it isn’t confusion at all. Of course the film gets bewildered too, and takes off on an extraordinary literary ramble from which it never returns and in which Francis Coppola and his team seem to have decided to do The Golden Bough as their Christmas pantomime. The actors, even the toughest, look frail and haunted, and the voice-over matches them: hard-boiled and shaky, as if the narrator of Double Indemnity had been bewildered by the jungle. ![]() Individual shots are full of things to look at, large and small you can feel the patient care behind every set-up. ![]() The lighting is wonderful, the editing precise and inventive. You have only to watch a few frames of Apocalypse Now, in either version, to realise you have caught a high point of American filmmaking.
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