Apocalypse Now - All the Versions

A brief intro: this film uses a story much like Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness to examine what happens to people when they move beyond the morality they understand, adopting that of a culture they perceive as more powerful in certain ways, but whose moral center eludes them. A “civilized” man “goes native” and, becoming a savage, loses who he knew himself to be. It’s also a scathing indictment of military thinking, and the insanity of war. I’ve seen all 3 versions of Francis Ford Coppola’s Vietnam epic Apocalypse Now: the original cut (1979) twice, then Apocalypse Now Redux, his second cut (2001) also twice, and recently, the “Final Cut” version (2019), which film buffs will recognize as a misnomer. 

This film cost Coppola and his cast and crew more than its blown out budget, more than the notoriety of making it – it cost Coppola his sense of proportion. At some point, an artist has to let the work alone – it’s out, it’s done, move on. “Final” cut? Probably not – Coppola has long been obsessed with this film. The epic took so much out of its participants that maybe he feels he owes it to all that footage to include it. I disagree. If Werner Herzog can brilliantly winnow 200 hours of Timothy Treadwell ranting about the US Forest Service while he treats grizzly bears as humans in bear suits (and pays with his life for that illusion), down to the 2-hour Grizzly Man, I think Coppola could have let well enough alone. 

I appreciated aspects of the Redux version: giving Marlon Brando more time on screen, bringing the movie resolution. I didn’t need the Bill Graham/ Playboy Bunnies USO show – it was OK, but did the story need it? Debatable. The section in which Capt. Willard (Martin Sheen) encounters a French plantation and its armed and determined family who declare Vietnam to be their home, for which they will fight and die and kill Vietnamese intruders, seems to be stretching a point. Is the purpose to teach us about Dien Bien Phu? To remind us that long before the US sent “advisers” to the country in the late 1950s, the French had established a colonial state there, which they were unwilling to cede to its natives? I found this section, first appearing in Redux, to be a distraction, even more so in the much longer Final Cut version where Willard shares an opium pipe with a Frenchwoman (Aurore Clement) and has an idyllic night – I thought of McCabe and Mrs. Miller and was disappointed by Coppola’s borrowing. 

Colonel Kilgore (Robert Duvall) in Final Cut gets much more screentime for his surfing obsession, cocky sense of command, and the annihilation of villages. The point was well made in the original – I didn’t need more of his bluster and arrogance, nor even more footage of rows of palm trees going up in flames, Hueys swarming, nor the ridiculous pursuit of Willard on the patrol boat to retrieve Kilgore’s stolen surfboard. I really didn’t need that. 

The extended jungle scene of Final Cut in which Willard and Chef (Frederic Forrest) go looking for mangoes, was good – I really got a feel for these Americans in a totally alien environment, afraid all the time. The glimpse of an unexpected peril underscored the absurdity of the entire American misadventure in Southeast Asia. 

In the original, Brando’s screentime was brief – as the reason for Willard’s journey it needed more weight, and in Redux Brando received his due. But the Final Cut version beat a dead horse: I didn’t need Willard’s drawn-out imprisonment in a bamboo cage, being lectured by madman Dennis Hopper (in the role he was born to play) – in Redux we got all we needed of Kurtz’s camp, the ubiquitous dangling corpses and disembodied heads. I didn’t need more more more of that. The end was the same – Willard terminates Kurtz with extreme prejudice. Taking the hand of LB Johnson, the still-childlike surfer, to lead him back to the now crewless patrol boat, was enough. 

Here’s my compromise, Mr. Coppola: You can keep the USO show in the movie, but ditch the French plantation, and keep Kilgore and Brando to their Redux footage. That makes the film shorter than the Redux version (OK with me!!). Final Cut felt like piling on – the points had already been powerfully made. Shoving them at us repeatedly dulled their impact.

This Sporting Life - film review

Lindsay Anderson is best known for 2 movies, 1969's  If..., about a student rebellion at a boarding school, which brought fame to Malcolm MacDowell, and 1973's O Lucky Man, in which MacDowell cements his reputation as a young man with a curled lip who bears watching.
But before that, in 1963 Anderson made the film This Sporting Life, which is in its own way a more powerful story about the disaffected.

Richard Harris stars as Frankie Machin, a working class brawler who pushes himself to be selected for the local professional rugby team. One fragment of story at a time, we come to understand his living situation - he rooms with a widow, Margaret Hammond (Rachel Roberts), and her two young children. Eventually we learn that her husband died in an accident at the factory owned by Gerald Weaver (Alan Badell), the man who casts the deciding vote to pay Machin what he asks to join the rugby team.

A semi-articulate brute, Machin swaggers with the status his rugby prowess gives him, but he's attracted to Margaret, in whom he senses another broken soul. She smiles only a few times in the entire film, emotionally ravaged by her husband's death (she polishes his work-boots every evening), unwilling to open her heart again.

Machin, a child himself in some ways, is good to her children, but Hammond is wary of his brutish nature - he hits her a couple of times, and once nearly rapes her.  Still, you think they could work it out, until the evening he takes her out in a new fur coat to a fancy restaurant popular with the team's owners. There his boorish behavior embarrasses her, while those his rudeness targets simply ignore him in that chilly English manner which epitomizes class division.

The film has a gritty look: black and white, with the sound of bodies - no helmets, no padding - crunching, blood and mud smearing the players' white shorts and shirts. The camera lingers on Harris' flat forehead and hawk nose, the pensive strained beauty of Rachel Roberts, the hemmed-in landscape of rain-glazed narrow streets or a skyline of roofs studded with chimney-pots against a steely sky.

One of the difficulties of adapting for the screen is the mismatch between the complexity of a novel and the 90 to 120 minutes allotted a movie. Novelist David Storey's screenplay, as too often happens, pursues multiple story-lines to the detriment of the film: Machin's relationship with an older man, "Dad" Johnson (William Hartnell), who supports his ambition, provides a strong thread - until Johnson fades out of the story. Likewise, we see the greed and bloodthirstiness of the team's owners who live vicariously through the brutal sport, and for a while it seems Machin will turn his rough strength on them. But that potential we sense in Machin to defy the circumstances of his life and class, doesn't materialize. He loves Hammond, and perhaps she loves him, but unable to cope with his untamable behavior, she suffers a brain hemorrhage and dies.

Any of these threads could have made a strong story: Machin relying on then finally rejecting Johnson; Machin turning his toughness on Weaver and the other owners; Machin and Hammond trying and failing to connect through love. By pursuing all three, Storey and Anderson leave us dissatisfied.
Still, two powerful performances make this flawed film worth watching: Richard Harris, a cross between Paul Newman's Hud and Marlon Brando's Stanley Kowalski (or perhaps Johnny in The Wild Ones), plays a feral man who punches his team captain during a scrum while pretending the assault was by an opposing player, yet cavorts happily with Hammond's young children; and Rachel Roberts, a blunt-spoken woman wounded by loss, who puts up a harsh facade to protect herself and her family. These two could heal each other, if the world would leave them alone long enough. But they are trapped in the town where their past looms, and the gossip and contempt of neighbors curdles their intimacy. You want them to break free together, but their entrapment is the essence of their working class lives.