Eyes dazzled by romance’s shine, Hostage suitor of Cupid and you, A willing disciple of St Valentine, With pierced heart of rosiest hue.
Love is the next world’s currency, All wealth we must leave behind, Call it the discarnate treasury, A repository of delicacies dined.
Even if adoration sours on the lips, Or toxicity springs from intoxication, Nothing erases the first steps of bliss, Or can demolish memory’s foundation.
I’m looking forward to Christmas, As Nostradamus dreaded prophecy, In place of war, famine, apocalypse, I see spending, coveting and family.
Wandering through warm déjà vu, In new ways with usual-faced folk, Fat in an absent winter wonderland, Goodwill to all men as you go broke.
A fever dream or a deep turkey coma? St. Nicholas dripping presents around? An eviction notice to vacate sobriety, Consumerism and consumption unbound.
The grandest hearth cannot warm, Once grave chills touch the aged, The beggar donates his last coin, At a counting house of the well-waged.
The giant is meek and misunderstood, As the slighted short one grows fiery, Life’s spun gold pawned for pennies, The stricken strive to buy back entirely.
In old age, winter shadows lengthen, As babes on tiptoes crave growth, So-called leaders spit out patron’s lies, As a street madman roars his frank oath.
Opposing siblings they are, but needed, Fellow travellers orbit on a path seeded.
Happiness is but a harbour in a storm; Greater tempests lash far-off docks, Gauntlets to run to the last port of call, Never a permanent plateau of nirvana.
Life’s weather patterns pivot and feint, Everything beyond our fingertip reach, If we go off course with coins on our eyes, The rocks of avarice pace in ocean spray.
We set sail or get driven from our sanctuary, Shelter granted at the behest of strangers, Captains of our ship, La Mirage, wave dancing, Mates and blood as crew, fish and fowl companions.
Obelisk columns of a wintry afternoon, Bony fingers of nascent green in June, Pink snow clouds kissed by fading sun, Dark gold streets, hurry home as one.
Shared body heat tenderises life so tough, Fusion shelter from gales so rough, Windows scream, a voyeur’s peek inside, Lovers dismissed with wailing to chide.
Darkness claims stragglers of day, Wrestles all an eye sees, stealing it away, Sleep whispers drowsy promises in our ears, We two, melding – strangers from our fears.
I am the thief on the golden hill, Predator in sight, a hooded chill, Masked, armed and primed to strike, Prey pinned by the lake, as I like.
Tie them up on blankets, used, In time they’ll see it’s all a ruse, Pretend to leave, then come back, Back-slashed in a frenzied attack.
Left to die, their assailant gone, Darkness falls on two bleeding fawns, Stagger up the hill to try and get aid, Passing out as the lifeforce fades.
Flashlight in the eyes, back for the kill! Help arrives, shakily standing still, Message on his car, Zodiac was here, He lived, she passed, and then only fear.
Stop me carrying the burden alone, For I cannot bear the crushing weight, Put your arm around me as I reciprocate, Together, we will walk the needed steps.
If our shoulders shudder, we will steady, You will help me as I will help you, Together, as one, we shall go forward, One foot in front of the other.
When the strain grows too great, We will lay our mighty cross down, An altar coffin, and genuflecting, Rejoin the mourning congregation.
Enduring to be burned, bound, beaten, And to die by the sword if necessary; Verus and Priscus entered the arena, To stain Colosseum sand with blood.
Emperor Titus drained Nero’s lake, Built the vast Flavian Amphitheatre, Panacea to the idle citizens of Rome, Symbol of his beneficence and might.
Priscus, far from his Germanian home, Fighting within a symbol of Rome’s power, Which ravaged his life and fatherland, For them to decide if he is free or dies.
Verus, the hulking, bullish Murmillo; Trained to deliver heavy punishment, Priscus – lightly-armed, agile Thracian; Primed to avoid his rival’s huge blows.
Titus showed he was Nero’s antithesis; No hoarding of tracts of primo Roma, In a profligate orgy of narcissistic pride, Nor taking his own life to escape execution.
Domitian, the brother of Titus, watched in envy, The emperor-in-waiting who favoured Verus, And the direct Murmillo style of fighting, Titus favoured Thracian counter-punching.
Aware of the patriarchal fraternity’s preferences, The gathering looked on in fascinated awe, As their champions of champions clashed, Deciding who was the greatest gladiator of all.
Titus had stated there would be no draw; One would win, and one would perish, A rudis freedom staff the survivor’s trophy, Out the Porta Sanavivaria – the Gate of Life.
One well aware of the other, combat began, Scared eyes locked behind helmeted grilles, Grunts and sweat behind shield and steel, Roars and gasps of the clustered chorus.
For hour after hour, they attacked and feinted, Using all their power, skill and technique, Nothing could keep them from a stalemate; The warriors watered and slightly rested.
The search for the coup de grâce went on, Until both men fell, in dusty exhaustion, Each raised a finger, in joint submission, Equals on death’s stage yielded in unison.
Titus faced a dilemma; mercy or consistency? Please the crowd, but make them aware, Of his Damoclean life-and-death sword, Over every Roman and slave in the empire.
Titus cleaved the Rudis into a dual solution; Unable to beat the other, both won and lived, Limping, scarred heroes of baying masses, None had ever seen a myth form before them.
It was Romulus fighting Remus in extremis, Herculean labours of a sticky, lethal afternoon, In the end, nothing could separate these brothers; Victors united as Castor and Pollux in Gemini.
For life and limb on Rome’s vast stage, Symbiotic compensation of adulation’s rage.
Stuart Richards, 5,001st in line to the British throne, A distant cousin of the king but hitherto unknown, He dreamt of the crown and his fair queen’s hand, But there was no baiting the hook unless he had a plan.
He chose to eliminate the competition, stood before him, Through a dark celebration, they’d never know what hit them, He sent out invitations to the 5, 000 heirs, Promising vast feasting, with music and fanfare
He built a fake house front with a door and a sign, That said: “Welcome to the party. Now, kindly form a line.” Behind the door, there awaited a cliff face and a fall, A master of deception, his warm smile greeted them all.
He stood at the front door with a charming bow, And, welcoming each guest, he said: “In you go now!” He watched them disappear as they stepped through the door, Counting steps to ascension, lemmings queued up for more.
Backslapping himself, inner cackling at his scheme, Imagining himself as king – glory rained down, it seemed, But his Machiavellian plotting had a monstrous flaw, One thing he’d forgotten that greedy eyes never saw.
The king was still alive, and he was not amused, He got wind of this plot and responded unconfused, He sent his guards to arrest him for sedition in a fury, They swept him off his feet, planting him before a jury.
Put on trial for treason – the verdict was most guilty, Execution set, he had the neck to beg for mercy, But the king was not budging and barked: “Off with his head!” An Axeman’s reverse coronation, he joined the fallen dead.
Halting 2,986th in line to the British throne, A distant cousin of the king, headless spirit flown, In jealous craving, dispossessed as ruler of the land, Crowned pride came before a fallen plan.
Harry found existence overrated, And its shadow, morality, so outdated, Scurrying rats down here in the sewer, Porcine gluttons in punished manure.
Grand aspirations from primordial slime, Lifting up the rock from time to time, Samson, destroying a temple of hypocrisy, And every pillar – hope, faith and charity,
They’d had him from baptism’s font, Trapped before wording his wants, A heel dipped in brackish liturgy, Silent collusion in mass duplicity.
For those who remained in smoky rubble? Rudely awakened from a cocoon bubble: An obelisk erected to grotesque finance, Charon’s fee for a Stygian dance.
Villicus Vadum: Soldier of Fortune by Stewart Stafford
I am the ghost of lupine Romulus, Founder of Rome, hear my tale, Of Villicus Vadum – young, driven, Steward to Senator Lucius Flavius.
Villicus wanted Flavia, the senator’s daughter, But she was betrothed to Marcus Brutus; A consul of noble and virtuous stock, Villicus conspired to take Flavia’s hand.
Treachery and deception were his tools, Knavish peacock of Rome’s epic stage, Sought to take Flavia from Marcus Brutus, To snatch and cage his treasured gem.
Bribed a false soothsayer to trap her, Believing her beloved began with V, Flavia agreed to elope with him to Gaul, With Brutus vowing deadly vengeance.
Fleeing to the bosom of Rome’s enemy – Vercingetorix, at war with Julius Caesar, Villicus offered to spy on the Senate, While plotting to seize Gaul’s throne.
Queen Verica also caught his eye, Villicus was captured by Mark Antony, Taken to Caesar’s camp as a traitor; Brutus challenged him to a duel.
Brutus slashed him but spared his life, They dragged Villicus to Rome in chains, To try him for his now infamous crimes; Cicero in defence, Cato as prosecutor.
Cicero argued Villicus acted out of love, And that his ambition merited mercy, Cato wanted death for his wicked threat, Julius Caesar pondered a final verdict.
Villicus – pardoned but banished from Rome, Immediate death if he returned to Flavia, Villicus kissed the emperor’s foot for naught, Flavia refused to join him in fallen exile.
Now learn from this outcast’s example, friends, That I, Romulus, warn you to avoid at your peril, Villicus Vadum, the wrath of the gods upon him, Until time ceases, sole spectre of night’s edge.
(Spoiler Alert: This review contains spoilers. If you haven’t seen Oppenheimer yet, you might want to do so and then come back and read this review.)
“I must be cruel, only to be kind:
Thus bad begins and worse remains behind.”
William Shakespeare, Hamlet, Act III, Scene IV
J. Robert Oppenheimer and America faced a dilemma in the early 1940s. The Japanese had brought the United States into the Second World War with the surprise attack on Pearl Harbour in Hawaii on December 7th, 1941. They had jealousy witnessed the Nazis’ astonishing gains in their invasion of Soviet Russia, and their eyes turned across the Pacific to the American behemoth, the biggest kid in the playground that bullies always want to challenge and dominate.
They were fanatics who viewed surrender as shameful and would rather give their lives in kamikaze suicide flights for their country and Emperor. This refusal to surrender meant America had to engage in fierce hand-to-hand combat to capture each island as they got closer and closer to Japan. Resistance would be even stiffer in the Japanese homeland and they estimated that America would sustain a million casualties in any attempt to take it. The atomic bomb could avoid all that, a shortcut to bring the Japanese to their knees and unconditional surrender.
Christopher Nolan’s Oppenheimer is easily the best version of this story of the development of the atomic bomb yet made, and I’ve seen them all. Done wrong, the story of the Manhattan Project can be slow, talky, full of jargon and boring. Nolan’s film has a ton of information to impart, some of it highly technical, but it’s probably the fastest three-hour movie you’ll ever watch. The crisp writing and editing break each scene down into digestible bite-sized nuggets of foreshadowing and exposition before moving briskly on. Nothing and no one overstays their welcome.
Nolan has already made a World War II movie, Dunkirk. I thought his script there was undercooked and not as good as it could have been or got made out to be. His Oppenheimer script is a vast improvement and will almost certainly win him an Oscar for Best Adapted Screenplay.
At the end of shooting Tenet, Robert Pattinson gifted Christopher Nolan a book of Oppenheimer’s speeches, which undoubtedly came in handy as background direct from the horse’s mouth.
Based on the Pulitzer Prize-winning book American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer, Martin J. Sherwin did deep, gold dust research in 1980 by interviewing as many people who knew Oppenheimer and/or worked at Los Alamos as he could find, most of whom were still alive. Strangely, he procrastinated, sat on the research and never wrote the book! It became a running joke in his family. Fast-forward to 1995, when Sherwin resurrected his book deal with the same publisher and a new co-writer, Kai Bird and that incredible wealth of research finally was put to great use.
Published in 2005, the book won the Pulitzer. Nolan consulted with Bird and Sherwin, with Bird advising Nolan to frame the story around Oppenheimer’s later security clearance problems. He took the advice, and it works beautifully as a kind of Godfather II flash-forward and flashback mechanism to interrupt, rejoin, reexamine and reinterpret. Like The Godfather films, Oppenheimer is a tremendous lesson on the uses of power – nuclear, man-made and human-wielded on the battlefield, in relationships and in private backstabbing plotting.
The film starts with Oppenheimer as a young student being humiliated by a professor in front of his peers. In a controversial scene, Oppenheimer’s grandson has cast doubt on, he attempts to take revenge by injecting an apple with Potassium Cyanide, leaving it on his tutor’s desk before changing his mind. He makes a frantic dash to dispose of the apple. We see Oppenheimer doesn’t yet possess the killer instinct.
The apple is interesting, as it symbolises the forbidden fruit of nuclear fusion that Oppenheimer will become a deadly practitioner of later in the film and in his life. Scaled up, the spherical, “killer” apple becomes the Uranium Little Boy bomb dropped on Hiroshima on August 6th, 1945. It’s also a visual reminder of another World War II genius who helped end the conflict sooner by cracking the German Enigma code – Alan Turing. Like Oppenheimer, his key war efforts later turned to suspicion and banishment by the powers that be. (Unlike Oppenheimer, Turing never became a public darling because his war activities were classified under Britain’s Official Secrets Act and remained unknown by the public until after his death.) Convicted of then-illegal “homosexual activities,” Alan Turing was given a choice – jail or be experimented upon like a lab rat. He chose the latter, was pumped full of female hormones, grew breasts, and they suspect he took his own life with a poisoned apple. The world lost the genius credited with being the father of modern computers and the internet aged 41. (Benedict Cumberbatch played Turing in The Imitation Game.)
Alan Turing
Cillian Murphy
There are career-best performances from Cillian Murphy as Oppenheimer and Emily Blunt, in a subtle supporting role as his long-suffering alcoholic wife until she shows her true steeliness under cross-examination in an outstanding scene near the end. Oppenheimer was an odd man who stepped on toes, made a host of enemies and seemed to cheat relentlessly with any woman (usually married) who would have him. Statues were pulled down in recent years of people once thought heroic, and this film shows our hero has feet of clay. He is a deeply flawed and complex human being. The general consensus is that Oppenheimer was also the only person capable of fusing the disparate elements of The Manhattan Project and delivering the bomb to the US in time. It also examines that old chestnut: “Be careful what you wish for: you may get it.” Whenever people are involved in acts of heroism and are branded heroes by the media, they always shy away from the accolade as they wisely know it’s an impossible ideal to live up to that will haunt them later. There’s haunted, and then there’s Oppenheimer.
Robert Downey Jr (left) portraying the real Lewis Strauss (right)
Robert Downey Jr. is also noteworthy as Oppenheimer’s slimy nemesis Lewis Strauss, probably turning in his best performance since he played Charlie Chaplin back in 1992, although he did a good turn in David Fincher’s Zodiac (2007) too. He will almost certainly get a Best Supporting Oscar nomination and will probably win due to his four-decade-long movie career.
I wondered what Rami Malek was doing in it as a silent extra in two early scenes until he gets a showy speech revealing Downey’s Strauss villainy in full.
Josh Hartnett goes under the radar in probably his best work since his early years.
Nolan wrote the Oppenheimer script in the first-person and from his point of view. Matt Damon said he’d never read a script like that before, even the stage directions were “I” instead of “We see…” That carries over into the finale. Every other telling of the Oppenheimer story shows the dramatic-as-hell dropping of the atomic bomb on the Japanese city of Hiroshima and its people. Nolan’s Oppenheimer doesn’t show it, as, from the protagonist’s point of view, it was a distant, unseen anticlimax. Screenwriting guru Robert McKee would no doubt praise the almost “Oriental discipline” of Nolan in not showing the victorious, phallic mushroom cloud as he had with Tarantino’s Reservoir Dogs. (A heist movie that doesn’t show the heist, just the aftermath of the botched getaway and the hideout from it. Brave cinematic moves that are faithful to the viewpoints of their characters and that trust the audience to keep up with them and understand them).
Oppenheimer is the best movie I’ve seen in years. It isn’t a sequel, an unnecessary remake, or a dayglo kiddie videogame, toy or comic book experience. It’s the kind of movie Hollywood excelled at in the 1970s – dark, complex, fiercely intelligent and downbeat movies for adults. A movie ABOUT something. Remember those? Welcome back.
Don’t fall meekly off Life’s precipice, With Death stamping on weak fingers, Cling on, scream, fight the inevitable, For gravity’s jury’s karmic reprieve.
Souls crash in the surf beneath, The perennial tide of plankton orbs, In effervescent flows above the bluff, Doves flying back when the flood’s over.
If beyond salvation, down you plunge, Assuage yourself with lifetime efforts, All is pardoned, wiped clean in death, A phoenix risen from bodily constraints.
Man – the only creature that knows it dies, Creates structures to measure its demise. To poke and prod with hows and whys; Hours, seconds, melted candles of surprise.
From booming birth; to bankrupt death, From nascent looks; to the last breath, The torch is passed to generations yet. To carry forth in a cycle reset.
The ticking clock of heartbeats ends, As we say goodbye to family and friends, To return to wherever we first transcend, Time’s ever-flowing river never bends.
Stefan and Elyse came home by rote, To find a stranger’s chilling note, “I’m going to kill you” scrawled in red, Pranks locked out with nothing said.
Then the hall window smashed, In a firework’s screaming flash, They threw it out before it burned, Danger had not passed, they learned.
A ticking device left behind, Elyse kicked it away just in time, A garden explosion’s massive bang, Their ears and windows loudly rang.
They wondered what psycho did this deed, And how they’d crossed this evil breed, Then they heard them bomb their neighbours who thought Stefan and Elyse were perpetrators.
Then another blast three doors down, Stefan ran to help with a worried frown, Concerned to see who else got hit, Seeing their attacker was still at it.
A bomber in a ski mask did a backflip, To dodge their lunging, angry grip, He swung on ropes and vaulted high, An acrobat mocking with a stylish eye.
The bomber fled in his getaway car, A neighbour leapt on before he got far, He held on tight but got dragged along, Rolled to the kerb, he couldn’t hold on.
The Night Bomber of Sheila’s Cabin On the loose, an explosive phantom, Stalking without any reason or pity, His laughter echoed across the city.
They call me The Poe Toaster, A sixty-year mourner, no boaster, With roses and cognac, I paid homage, To gothic Quarles’ eternal foggage.
Some call me ghoul, stalker, graver, Obsessed fan, tombstone trader, Let him sleep unbroken, still his ghost, Tomahawk, overdue a tribute toast.
Three roses; in-law, Eddy and wife, Cognac, exorbitant luxury in life, Relax, for I was kind, my friend, Pouring amontillado until the end.
Why I stopped, if I’m woman or man, Are mysteries for C. Auguste Dupin, Shipwrecked on Night’s Plutonian shore, Allied with the silken darkness of yore.
A Winter’s tale of horrors profound, The haunted hotel’s dark tapestry, Supreme isolation’s moonscape snowbound, A father gripped by homicidal history.
He sought to write, heal, absolve sins, Overlooked the hotel’s Redrum plans, Vomiting up daymares of phantom twins, His mind possessed by unseen hands.
Room Two Three Seven, malevolent, Forbidden to enter its dark hole, Where ageless ladies bathed decadent, Luring caretakers to an adulterer’s role.
His wife and son sensed the danger, A bloody elevator with nowhere to run, A father’s warpath with axe and anger, He became the monster, the devil’s son.
It might horrify 42 ways from Sunday, Only his shining son grasped the fact, May as well be across the galaxy, As in a labyrinth with that maniac.
He failed to kill, he froze, met his fate, The hotel consumed his spirit as its own, Purgatorial torture in damnation’s bait, He smiled in the photo, eternally alone.
(Spoiler Alert: If you have never seen Apocalypse Now, this review contains spoilers and you may want to come back after you have seen it and read it then.)
Francis Ford Coppola’s Apocalypse Now is a very loose reinterpretation of Joseph Conrad’s 1899 novella Heart of Darkness. It lifts the book’s basic premise of a boat trip up a river to confront a character named Kurtz whom the natives are in awe of. The novella’s African setting becomes a commentary on colonialism, and Kurtz is an ivory trader. The film transposes the scenario to the Vietnam War and is a scathing commentary on American involvement. Kurtz is now a renegade Special Forces Colonel who must be executed “with extreme prejudice.”
So you have the Conrad material at the root of the film. Over that comes screenwriter John Milius’s take on the material as an updated version of The Odyssey from Greek mythology, with the Playboy bunnies in the jungle as the sirens and Kilgore as the outwitted Cyclops (the stealing of his surfboard in a different cut of the film), etc.
There are also references to the American mindset remaining stuck in Frontier Wars with Native Americans; Robert Duvall wears a Stetson, and his unit is the Air Cavalry with helicopters instead of horses. One of the Playboy dancers is dressed as a cowgirl, with Stetson, white cowboy boots and a pair of six-shooters. (That analogy has become ever more overt in recent years with America’s use of Apache helicopters, Tomahawk missiles and even using the codename “Geronimo” for Osama bin Laden.)
On top of that, you get Milius’s take on the Vietnam conflict, with Coppola adding his viewpoint on the power structure and how it had changed from his Oscar-winning script of America’s World War II triumph in Patton (1970). The icing on the cake is Michael Herr’s brilliant written narration. (Herr, a Vietnam War correspondent for Esquire, published a book in 1977 called Dispatches which was called the best book written about the Vietnam War by The New York Times Book Review. Herr was brought in by Stanley Kubrick to co-write the screenplay for Full Metal Jacket in 1987.)
Martin Sheen’s character Willard says very little in the movie. His voiceover is a valuable insight into his internal monologue and his character’s confusion, frustration and cynicism with himself, the war, and his complicit participation in it with America. I would go so far as to say that it is the best voiceover narration I have ever heard in a movie. Like The Godfather, so many lines from Apocalypse have entered popular consciousness, especially the narration with its one-liners with their deep, biting aftertaste. The first-person voiceover is a narrative technique punted over from novels. It was also a staple of film noir where it could assist the writer in imparting dense exposition from the labyrinthine plot the detective was investigating. Here, Sheen’s Willard is as morally beaten up and jaded as any Bogart or Jack Nicholson gumshoe back in the States.
The character of Williard is a burnt-out assassin who has lost his raison d’être.
Oddly, with its synthesised score, narration, stunning visuals and the many different cuts of the film released over the years, Apocalypse Now reminds me of another movie with one of the worst voiceovers ever – Blade Runner.
A young George Lucas planned to direct Apocalypse Now at one stage in a black-and-white, handheld, 16mm, Cinéma vérité -style in Vietnam with the war still raging. When Star Wars skyrocketed, and Lucas found himself owning and running companies he had founded, like Industrial Light and Magic and THX Sound, on top of preparing to make the Star Wars sequels, he no longer had time to do Apocalypse. Coppola stepped in to save the film.
He went in a completely opposite direction from Lucas’s vision and made a David Lean-style Bridge on the River Kwai/ Lawrence of Arabia epic out of it.
Italian cinematographer Vittorio Storaro was an inspired choice by Coppola. His lush, vast photography is mesmerizing in the epic, earlier scenes and grows steadily more surreal as the characters near the deranged Kurtz’s hiding place. Storaro deservedly won an Oscar for his outstanding efforts.
Robert Duvall reunites with Francis Ford Coppola from The Godfather Parts I and II. Here though, he is not like Tom, the soft-spoken family lawyer. Duvall has a field day playing against type as Lieutenant Colonel William “Bill” Kilgore – a loud, macho, gung-ho, Kubrickian-type who would seem at home in Dr Strangelove. Kilgore, like Coppola’s Patton, loves war, and his greatest fear is “someday this war’s gonna end.” He can callously flick playing cards over dead and dying “gooks” and then stop giving water to a man holding his guts in with a pot lid when he hears Lance, a famous surfer from Willard’s boat, is there.
You could argue that Apocalypse is like a tripped-out, riverboat version of The Wizard of Oz, with the protagonists encountering a series of increasingly-bizarre characters and situations until a confrontation with the befuddled and underwhelming “man behind the curtain” – the Wizard/Kurtz.
When I first saw Apocalypse Now, I thought it was a great film, but with a disappointing ending. As I have gotten older, I find it more and more appropriate. The whole movie has been a slow build-up of the myth of both Kurtz and Marlon Brando. In a way, nothing could live up to it. He is just a man, in the end, and a very odd and lost one. He is not so much assassinated by Sheen’s character as butchered with a cudgel (the comparison is made with cuts to the real slaughter of a water buffalo that Coppola filmed.) Which enables Brando to indulge in yet another one of his prolonged, masochistic death scenes that he was famous for.
The movie Apocalypse Now shares similarities with the play Macbeth by William Shakespeare. Both works explore the themes of power, corruption, war’s moral ambiguity, and the descent into the darkness of the main characters. They also utilize the imagery of blood, darkness, and fire to establish a sense of horror and tragedy. (The boat the characters travel upriver on is called The Erebrus. According to Encyclopedia Britannica: “Erebus, also spelt Erebos, in Greek religion, the god of a dark region of the underworld and the personification of darkness. Erebus is one of the primordial beings in the Greek creation myth. He is the son of Chaos, who is also the mother of Erebus’s wife, Nyx, the personification of night.”) Both works also quote or reference other works. For example, Apocalypse Now quotes Macbeth’s famous line “The horror! The horror!” at the end of the film, while Macbeth references “the dismal and fatal end” of Julius Caesar’s assassination, which is also the title of another Shakespeare play (and a film adaptation that Brando had starred in, only it was the assassination of his character this time).
Dennis Hopper’s manic character has no name in the film, and is just called “Photojournalist.” He seems to be modelled on The Fool in Shakespeare’s King Lear with some truth emerging in his ramblings. Lear abdicated his kingdom and you could argue that, in abandoning his command and his loyalty to his country to set up his own “kingdom” in Cambodia, Colonel Kurtz abdicated his responsibilities and descended into madness like Lear did with tragic consequences. Coppola had already said that he saw Vito Corleone in The Godfather as this great king who had to choose one of his three sons to succeed him, which is a very Lear-like description as he had three daughters to divide his kingdom among. Coppola would make the King Lear references more overt in The Godfather Part III with Sonny Corleone’s bastard son showing up like Edmund in King Lear and Michael ranting and raving during a thunderstorm like Lear on the heath.
Coppola also had a complicated relationship with Marlon Brando, who plays Colonel Kurtz in the film. Coppola had fought the studio tooth and nail to have Brando cast as Vito Corleone in The Godfather. Brando was perfect in it, it was a huge hit, and Brando won and refused an Oscar for his performance. However, in Apocalypse Now, Brando was overweight, unprepared, and uncooperative. He refused to learn his lines or follow Coppola’s directions. He demanded a huge payment for his role and threatened to leave before finishing his scenes. Coppola could not think of an ending and had to improvise and edit around Brando’s performance to make it work. Coppola felt a sense of betrayal and he never worked with Marlon Brando again.
It was very sad, as Coppola was the closest Brando had come to finding another Elia Kazan to work with again. Kazan had really put Brando on the map in the 1950s, directing him in classic movies like A Streetcar Named Desire (1951), Viva Zapata! (1952) and On The Waterfront (1954). (Kazan fell out of favour after naming names at a HUAC anti-communist hearing. Some even refused to clap when he was awarded a Lifetime Achievement Oscar decades later.)
Brando would make one more movie, 1980’s The Formula (which starred another actor who’d refused an Oscar, George C. Scott), and then disappear off the screen for nine years, living off his massive paydays from The Missouri Breaks, Superman and Apocalypse Now in Tahiti:
The Missouri Breaks (1976): Brando received $1.25 million plus 11% of the gross for playing a bounty hunter in this western film directed by Arthur Penn. The film grossed $14 million at the box office, which means Brando earned about $2.79 million in total. Adjusted for inflation, that would be equivalent to $16.4 million in 2023.
Superman (1978): Brando received $3.7 million against a percentage of the gross for playing Jor-El, the father of Superman, in this superhero film directed by Richard Donner. The film grossed $300 million at the box office, which means Brando earned about $14 million in total. Adjusted for inflation, that would be equivalent to $67 million in 2023.
Apocalypse Now (1979): Brando received $2.5 million plus 8% of the gross over $30 million for playing Colonel Kurtz. The film grossed $150 million at the box office, which means Brando earned about $11.6 million in total. Adjusted for inflation, that would be equivalent to $46 million in 2023.
Adding up these amounts, Brando earned about $129.4 million in 2023 dollars for making these three films.
Shooting for the film took place in the Philippines. While there, Coppola threatened suicide, broke his Oscars in frustration, remortgaged his estate to pay for the film’s completion, endured Typhoon Olga wrecking the film’s sets and the heart attack of lead actor Martin Sheen (that nearly led to the abandonment of the film after Sheen had replaced original star, Harvey Keitel).
Luckily for him, Sheen recovered, the film was a big hit and is now regarded as one of the best war films ever made. The film won two Academy Awards for cinematography and sound but lost the Best Picture award to Kramer vs. Kramer.
Under the octagon of glass and steel, A careworn man sits at his desk and sighs, He longs to leave this place of chilly lies, And find a hidden treasure that is real.
He knows a code that he can’t reveal, A sepulchre where the Holy Grail lies, He found it with his providence eyes, A numinous and haunting view that heals.
He takes a penknife from his drawer and peels, His finger till he sees a key inside, He wraps his wound and leaves without a guide, He runs towards the garden, full of zeal.
He finds the rhododendrons and the birch, He digs beneath the wisteria with care, Cracks open the tomb, and discovers there, A golden bird sitting upon its perch.
“Back! Thou tomb-raiding thief.” It squawks, its voice so stern, “Cleanse thyself, endeavour to learn. Do not touch the Grail without belief!”
Caving in, he seals the grave, The aureate avian conveys his thanks, The plumage rejoining arcane ranks, The man seeks out a confessor’s nave.
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