Coppola's apocalyptic obsession THE ARTS ABC 1 and 2, Shaftesbury Avenue (from Dec 19) Star Trek (U) Empire, Leicester Sq La Cage aux Folles (AA) Gate, Notting Hill The Prisoner of Zenda (A) Plaza The House on Garibaldi Stret (A) C.lassic Haymarket It is a frequent pattern of the creative- process that a work originates from an idea which is in time altogether outgrown, so that it may be discarded like the wvooden form on which a mason builds an afch 6f brick and stone. Thus Battleship Potemkin grew out of a single, small sequence in an intended panoramic spectacle about the Russian Revolution. The catastrophe of Francis Ford Coppola's Apocalypse Now is that the author failed. to recognize the point at which his first idea, outgrown, should have been jettisoned. This first and admirable notion wvas that Joseph Con- rad's mystical and metaphysical novella, Heart of Daenkness could provide a basis and parallel for Coppola's Vietnam epic. Conrad's tale is set among Visions of war: Martin Sheen in Apocalupse Nowo colonialist traders at the turn of the century. In the course of a long odyssey up river, his hero, Marlowv, wvitnesses scenes of the greed and ignorance.and cruelty *and incomprehension of the conquering powver. At the end of the journey, in the heart .of the darkness of that continent, in " the stillness of an implacable force brooding over an inscrutable intention", stands the enigmatic figure *of Kurtz, a man ' who has been more terribly -corrupted than the rest, simply because he had " come Gut' equipped with moral ideas of some. sort ". - The hero of Coppola's script (written, in collaboration with John Milius). is Willard (Martin Sheen), an officer vith a shady career. of CIA 'operations behind -him. He is given the mission of goin:g up river from Saigon to Cambodia to liquidate a certa.in Colonel Kurtz, a once exemplary. officer vho has gone off the rails and established his own kingdom. Like Conrad's Kurtz, he is now " getting the company 'a bad name down.tthere". Conrad and Coppola botlh deal in concrete inages, but while Conrad's .journey' is . a metaphysical exploration, to- wards " some knowledge of the self ", Coppbla's is a progress into nightmare and madness. The openiing of the film is it- self a nightmare, with Willard's inverted head and dilated eyes superimposed upon his (drunk or. drugged) visions of the war. -- Then, after the first tlVo reels, in* wrlich Willard's mis- sion is. established, the central 90 minutes of the film (which runs a total of 140 minutes) provides a series of individual set-pieces. The first into which we.- are violently launohed is the craziest and most haunting; a helicopter strike oh a Viet- namese village, with loud- speakers blaring, out the, Ride of the ValkVries from, aircraft which bear the legend-"Death from Above " The set pieces-others in- clude a crazed, lost group of soldiers frantically shooting into the dark nothingness of the jungle, and the panicky massacre of the blameless criew of a passing fishing boat-are filmed with all-' the flair and spectacle*- youa miglit expect from Coppola's known skills, aided by four years' work and $30 million. Indeed, if you walked out of Apocalypse. Now after thesie first 110 minutes, you would feel you - had seen tlhe most memorable, if not the most profound, reflection of the Vietnam adventure: At this point, though, Coppola remembers his- commitment to Conrad and Colonel Kurtz and his original notion. By this time however he has constructed everytliiig on a scale so massive that Conrad's Kurtz-a dying, spectral presence in a crumbling trading station-will not do. To balance the rest, Kurtz and his kingdom have to be built up to spectacular scale; so that we have a monolithic Marlon Brando brooding over a vast city of ancient temples and rock sculpture, ornamented wvith the dangling corpses and severed heads and heaped-up human sku-lls that are-along with his arniies-the signal of his corrup- ted power. Kurtz's city is Tarzan's magic island; Kurtz is no more than a sort .of Wizard of Oz; and the film is lost. Kurtz's portentously mumbled musin,gs, his readings froin The Hollow Men, his bibliography, obligingly illustra- ted (Fraser's Golden BoughL; The Waste Land; Jesse Wes- ton's Fromn Ritual to Romance) diministh everything to an em- barrassing supermarket philo- sophy. *Small wonder thar Coppola could not decide how to -end the film, even as late as its premiere at the Cannes Festival in May. The ending on which he has settled is as good as any, and as irr&!evant to the ambitions of this majestic, spoiled enterprise: Star Trek7-The . Alotion Picture is essentially the same story. Space travellers of the twienty-third cenitury (wvhen, significantly, Earth is all one great America) penetrate to the heart of cosmic darkness to find a presence that has lost its bearings and begun to threaten: it is a.300-year-old NASA space probe that has outgrown its intelligence and, turned nasty because it has lost contact with its creator. This much at least I under- stood, though the film is generally fairly incomprehen- sible, from the turgid opacity of' the neo-scientific dialogue, the wooden'ness of the actors -and the massive dullness with which Robert Wise directs them. La Cage aiLv FoUes has already had a surprising, almost wvorld-wide success. Edouard Molinaro, a fairly undistingui- shed director of comedy, has had the wit or-good fortune to adapt an effective stage farce, and to cast in it a nice trio of comic actors, Ugo Tognazzi, Miichel Serrault and Michel Galabru. The s.tuation is tradi- tional. The parents of a couple of young lovers come from irreconcilably opposed social circles. The social differences are however novel. The girl's parents are fanatically bigoted moral reformers; the boy's are a couple of homosexual men who run a gay club on the Cote d'Azure. The Prisoner of Zenda could benefit from the comic writing and the verve of the French farce. As it is, it does not get much above the sort of play that can be made wvith lines like " The King has trouble w.ith1 his Rs ". EVen if the script had been brighter, or clearer as to whether or not it intends parady, Richard Quine seems hardly to possess the comic touch. It is a lost opportunity, since the film has the incom- parable Lionel Jeffries as a general from the Franz Josef mould, and Peter-Sellers work- ing diligently at his dual role and coming out best as Sydney. the Londont cabbie called to impersonate his double, the King of Ruritania. Peter Collinson's reconstruc- tion of the kidnapping of Adolph Eichmann, The House on Garibaldi Street, must be factual, since no one could possibly make fiction seem so prosaically dull. This, and an appearance of having been shot on 8mm film, are insuperable handicaps; though the cast, including Janet Suzman, Topol and Leo McKern (as Ben Gurion!) is ambitious. David Robinson Coppola's apocalyptic obsession Apocalypse Now (X)
