Capsule Reviews: The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, Cœur Fidèle, On the Waterfront

The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (Robert Wiene, 1920)

Set in a hilly village more twisted with jagged, crowded shacks than a Brazilian favela, The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari is one of the great landmarks of film history. Like so many early films, its theatricality is literal—one can plainly see the edges of set design—yet Robert Wiene's Expressionist masterpiece turns the psychological thriller into one of the great examples of pure cinema in its infancy. This is a warped film, with buildings twisted and curved in wracked pain and characters plumbing the depths of facial expression. Even the title cards are twisted—the card that the titular doctor hands over is so gnarled and indecipherable in bunched, sinister spiracles that it seems the inspiration for nearly every black metal band logo. Regardless of what Siegfried Kracauer says, Caligari is not as political as later German silents, but its aesthetic power is so distinct from contemporary American and French filmmaking that it certainly feels confrontational. Lang, Murnau and others would soon use the style to tackle the depravity and anomie of Weimar Germany, but Wiene is content simply to wow. And I wonder, is this the first great twist ending of the movies? Grade: A

P.S. Be sure to pay attention to Conrad Veidt's show-stealing performance as the somnambulist Cesare, hypnotized into murder by Caligari. Big and bold as silent acting (especially Expressionist silent acting) was, Veidts introduction is subtle, a close-up on his sleeping face capturing ever slight tic as the synapses along his face slowly fire, undulating his flesh in zombie-like reanimation as Caligari first awakens him. Veidt's most memorable performance is, of course, the ever-disturbing protagonist of The Man Who Laughs, but he is no less unsettling here as the tortured sleepwalker.

Cœur Fidèle [Faithful Heart] (Jean Epstein, 1923)

I cannot even imagine how good MoC's new Blu-Ray of Jean Epstein's unfairly ignored silent looks, given the quality of the old video I downloaded. (It's one of those titles that makes me wish I could afford a region-free player.) Epstein's film, inspired by Abel Gance's editing innovations, makes a starkly realistic yet poetically magical work. Made before Eisenstein et al. started demonstrating their theories on montage, Epstein's film uses a realistic background of working-class concerns and romantic melodrama (its light evocation of Victor Hugo, particularly Les Misérables is no coincidence) as a means of editing experimentation. Even the final shots, showing romantic joy tempered with the traumas of endured trials, finds the balance between poetry and reality. Epstein uses close-ups of hands and faces not only to establish character and occupation but tension and the emotional subjectivity of the film's character relationships. The acting is often "big"—especially Edmond von Daële's lecherous Petit Paul, who infuses every gesture with boozy arrogance—but it too is remarkably restrained, setting a precedent for realist cinema even as it shows how daring and aesthetic probing realism can be. Grade: A+

Best Scene: The fairground sequence set after Paul steals Marie away from her lover Jean, a bitterly ironic jubilation surrounding the miserable woman and the sneering, victorious thug. Epstein turns the carousel ride into an experimental frenzy of editing, using a rapidly cut collage of faces and POV shots of the fairground swirling in a fast panorama to visually elucidate the tension between Marie and Paul and her slow resignation to his domination.

On the Waterfront (Elia Kazan, 1954)

Marlon Brando was just turning 30 when On the Waterfront premiered: in it, he looks a great deal younger and behaves a great deal older. His plain, goodhearted never-was Terry is world-weary before his time, a washed-up boxer-cum-stevedore gently but forcefully coerced into being a mafia hood, his bosses playing on his obedience and gullibility. Brando's performance set off a firestorm, dismissed today by those looking to kill gods by saying all he did was mumble. But take one look at Brando's plaintive face, occasionally wracked in unsuccessful attempts at intimidation and always filled with longing of romantic and existential varieties, and the hype justifies itself. "He tries to act tough, but there's a look in his eye," says Edie (Eva Marie-Saint), the sister of the dockworker Terry unwittingly lured to his death, and Marie-Saint's fascination with him at times seem as much unfettered astonishment of Brando's skill as Edie's attraction for this lovable bum.

A reworking of Arthur Miller's screenplay for The Hook, a project he was meant to work on with Kazan until HUAC pressure forced denouncing confessions from the director, On the Waterfront's morality play about the virtues of snitching smells of moral wish-fulfillment for Kazan, who wished to see a character honored for ratting. This moral equivalence and fantasy is even more potentially loathsome when one considers that not only are the crimes that prompt Terry to testify far worse than political affiliation, they also actually happened. Still, viewed within the diegesis and broader questions of the morality of speaking up, On the Waterfront emerges a morally sound treatise on the importance of not staying silent in the face of horror. Situated between these extreme poles of self-absolution and rectitude, On the Waterfront finds a moral complexity by truly considering what choice to make and then showing the consequences of those choices. Even the priest, guilted into a social crusade only to become a self-compelling force, is more than a moral stereotype. It's easy to pigeonhole Kazan's film as self-forgiveness, but to these eyes it seems a lot more like a confessional and ensuing penance. Grade: A

Best Scene: Cliché as it is, the "I could have been a contender" scene is iconic for a reason. When his brother Charley (Rod Steiger), the mob boss' lawyer and right-hand man, reluctantly pulls a gun on his own brother to ensure his silence, Terry has a defining moment of reflection and bitterness. Brando never sounds angry, only deflated and sad, as he recounts how his brother's boss ruined his boxing career, and Brando's even tones and measured volume convey overwhelming emotion. Brando was one of cinema's most heartbreaking actors, but I don't know if he was ever more wrenching than here.

The Godfather

No director epitomized the rewards and the pitfalls of New Hollywood quite like Francis Ford Coppola. All four of the feature films he made in the '70s -- the first two Godfathers, The Conversation, Apocalypse Now -- are masterpieces. Above his contemporaries -- above Spielberg, Cimino, Lucas, even Scorsese -- he used the freedoms afforded by Hollywood's bizarre social experiment of entrusting young, barely proven talent with heaps of cash to greatest effect, but he also became a symbol of New Hollywood's collapse, one of many directors who never punched through its bloated, distended corpse and continued to make meaningful films (I've got my fingers crossed until I see Tetro, though).

Indeed, The Godfather, Coppola's fifth feature length film after his start working for Roger Corman -- did he just discover everyone? -- in '63, was the film that definitively proved that New Hollywood was a lasting phenomenon after its "official" inception with '67's Bonnie and Clyde. Made with a budget of $6.5 million, not inconsiderate but far from the bank-breaking allotments that would arise in the near future, The Godfather started as an adaptation of Mario Puzo's hit novel, meant to be nothing more than your average gangster picture to cash in on a bestseller. However, with the involvement of Puzo himself and an Italian-American director -- über-producer/coke fiend Robert Evans was sly to insist that an Italian-American helm the picture -- The Godfather became a cornerstone of American cinema and a permanent mainstay on lists of the greatest films ever made.

The Godfather opens with a wedding and closes with a baptism, normally times of celebration (and both tied to religious ceremony), but they are both undercut with currents of extreme violence. As the iconic first notes of Nino Rota's theme rise over a black frame, we hear a man say, "I believe in America." He continues to speak of the promise America offered to him (and apparently fulfilled), before spinning a tale of his beloved daughter, a beautiful and moral girl beaten to a pulp by a group of boys for refusing to have sex with them. His American dream becomes a nightmare, as social institutions -- the police, the courts -- take no action against the men. We then see (the camera has been gently zooming out from the man, Bonasera, for three minutes before revealing another person) that he's appealing to Don Vito Corleone (Marlon Brando), head of the Corleone crime family, for justice. Vito criticizes the man -- whose harmed daughter is the godchild of the don's wife -- for keeping his distance from the family: "You never invite me over for coffee," says Vito, subtly placing himself into the role of a wounded friend, not the fearsome mafioso that intimidates Bonasera. The man makes amends for his lack of hospitality, and Don Corleone agrees to have the boys themselves mangled.

This almost quaint argument about, agreement on and assignment of brutality clashes with the end of the film, which cross-cuts between a baptism and actual glimpses at violence. The Godfather is, at its core, all about the transition from that dialogue-driven, perversely idyllic opening and its bloody finale, not in the sense of moving a narrative from A to B but in its psychological and sociological evolution: more than any film, The Godfather captures the shift between between rustic, ethical "mom and pop" business and growing economic homogenization. You couldn't make a better film about the transition between economic feudalism and mercantile capitalism if you set in in the Industrial Revolution; that Coppola and Puzo frame a commentary on this change around the modulations of organized crime is one of the film's -- and it's sequels' -- countless ironies.

Compared to Part II, The Godfather works in an intimate setting: nearly all of its scenes are set in New York City, headquarters of the Corleone family. The opening wedding brilliantly establishes the world of the gangster with tons of expository dialogue packed into scenes that do not themselves seem plot-heavy. Coppola gives us a clear understanding of this world through the interactions of all the gathered mafiosos, assuming that how they behave in recreation reveals their true nature: wedding photos prove a hassle because everyone there is trained to trace any bulb flash back to its source and destroy the camera; the men are unapologetic in their sexism and patriarchy; and the reverence in which the Italian-Americans treat their Sicilian heritage takes precedence over all else.

Positioned as a symbol of a dying -- literally and figuratively -- way of life, Vito is wisely kept out of frame for the majority of the film, appearing only sporadically after the 20-minute opening to better allow his legend to grow in the minds of the audience. Everyone, including -- especially -- his enemies, speaks of him with a reverence befitting a king, which is certainly what he is, albeit one with visibly human characteristics: Vito built his empire on a river of blood and sand made of crushed bones (Part II fleshes this out in greater detail), but he also adheres strictly to a set of morals, regardless of how skewed and perverse those morals are. Sollozzo, "The Turk" (Al Lettieri, who was related to actual gangsters and invited Brando over for dinner to let him get a feel for the people informing his character) comes to the city looking to push heroin with the support of the Five Families and use of their police and political protection; he promises massive returns on initial investments, and Tom Hagen (Robert Duvall), Vito's consigliere (adviser/lawyer), notes that drugs are the financial future of organized crime, away from the relatively lightweight organization of prostitution and gambling. But Vito declines the offer, believing practically that selling drugs would cost him his political allies and morally that it steps over some line even he isn't willing to cross.

I've said in the past that Brando's performance has been somewhat exaggerated, though I did so in my salad days when my idea of good acting owed directly on the amount of time one occupied on-screen (I still think, though, that he should have been nominated for Support Actor, not lead). Now, I can understand the appeal: with limited screen time, he casts a presence that covers the entire film -- a good contemporary corollary can be seen in Heath Ledger's performance in The Dark Knight. Some of his choices are exaggerated, such as stuffing cotton balls in his mouth, but he's as naturalistic and identifiable as ever: he genuinely looks annoyed when someone speaks out of turn, and one can feel his love and gratitude when his beloved Michael visits him in the hospital (after Sollozzo extracts vengeance for his refusal to help) and assures him "I'll take care of you now."

Brando's Vito is literally soft-spoken, a shrewd reader of men whose small-scale aspirations reflect more his narrow narcissism than his sense of ethics. After Sollozzo, with the help of the Tattaglia family, orders the hit on Vito, he impresses upon a kidnapped Tom the need to rub Vito out: "Ten years ago, could I have gotten to him?" he asks to prove his point that Vito is slipping, and indeed the don makes some questionable decisions, such as asking Luca Brasi, a thug so dumb he couldn't even make through a preplanned sentence thanking Don Corleone inviting him to Connie's (Talia Shire) wedding ("I am honored and grateful that you have invited me to your daughter... 's wedding") to approach the Tattaglias undercover to spy on them. But these are only outgrowths of his trusting and fatherly nature: in his final scene, he even reveals a certain innocence, chasing his grandson merrily through their miniature orange grove with an orange slice in his mouth to make himself into a jolly old monster before suffering a heart attack and dying, amidst all of the violence, in a moment of peace and happiness. His loving interaction with his grandson reveals a humanity that, by all evidence, is completely absent in his favorite son.

We meet Michael Corleone, as with nearly all the characters, at the wedding at the beginning. A war hero who served valiantly in the Marines in WWII, he returns a legitimate figure in a family that cannot distinguish between family and Family life. Compared to the hot-headed, entitled elder child Sonny (James Caan) and the jealous, soft middle child/black sheep Fredo (John Cazale, criminally underrated in his work across the first two parts of the trilogy), Michael is level-headed and views his father's throne with distaste, not lust. He relates horror stories of his father's "business" dealings to his girlfriend, Kay (Diane Keaton), and insists, "That's my family, Kay, not me." Yet we see Michael slowly drawn into the Family, at first reluctantly, then with cold ambition: when he heads to the hospital to protect his father, a crooked cop (Sterling Hayden) attempts to send him home in order to clear a path for rival gangsters to kill Vito and breaks his jaw when Michael calls him on his corruption. The injury puffs out Mikey's cheek and gives him a bit of a lisp, allowing him to physically resemble his father before he begins to truly work in the family business.

He kills the police captain and Sollozzo and hides out in Sicily for the heat to dissipate, and there he meets Appolonia, a vision of classical beauty. The two marry, and Michael appears genuinely happy, until his bodyguard betrays him and unwittingly kills Appolonia with a car bomb. So, Mike returns home again, this time cold and distrustful of everyone except his family. He marries Kay, as she's the only person he knows would not hurt him, and promises to make the Corleone family legitimate within five years. Away from her, however, he proves to be more ambitious, and more ruthless, than his father ever was. He plans to acquire a casino and hotel in Vegas, a starter kit for the expansion of the family's empire, and plots to tie up all the loose ends of those who betrayed the family, right down to Connie's abusive, jealous husband Carlo. That final montage, an ironic juxtaposition between the baptism of Michael's nephew and godchild, in which the priest asks him "Do you renounce Satan?" as his minions execute the heads of all the rival families and the dissidents within his own, shows Michael capable of decisions that his pragmatic, ethical father would never make, a thread Puzo and Coppola would explore fully in the sequel.

If, by current count, I've only devoted 1713 words thus far to what many believe to be the greatest film ever made, it's because it was not my intention to watch this today: I'm still trying to finalize a list of the best films of the decade and to catch up with as many '09 films as possible before I finalize my list of the films of the year sometime in January (as I have to wait longer than the critics to see most of the potential heavy-hitters, there's no point in putting one out before I see and gauge them). But I received the remastered and restored trilogy on Blu-Ray for Christmas, and -- with my Band of Brothers Blu-Ray set missing a disc and my complete series of The Shield scratched all to hell from its terrible packaging, I had little else new to watch; I'm expecting replacements for both -- I decided to pop in the first film to compare its look to my old DVD set. That I emerged bleary-eyed three hours later restraining myself from calling friends and interrupting their shopping sprees or days of rest to badger them about the staggering beauty of its restoration is as ringing an endorsement as I can provide.

The prints of Parts I and II were so damaged with time and poor preservation that Robert A. Harris, head of the restoration project, had to work on them digitally because they could not be read by an analog machine; not helping the matter was cinematographer Gordon Willis' decision to make the prints as tamper-proof as possible. Harris worked with Willis, and the result is perhaps the closest we'll ever come to seeing the film as it was as a pristine 35mm print in '72 (though even the filmmakers admit they no longer remember what it looked like originally and that their color correction may or may not be entirely accurate). Even if it does change the color tinting slightly, the change in picture quality is more plainly seen in its striking clarity: The Godfather trilogy is filmed in amber hues and blacks, but this looks like the film was printed onto actual gold. I would not hesitate to call it one of those films one should buy a Blu-Ray player simply to own, alongside Baraka and perhaps Blade Runner (having seen the latter in all three formats -- DVD, HD-DVD and BD --- I don't think the leap between standard and high definition is as jaw-dropping as the other two, though it's still mesmerizing in and of itself).

But back to the film itself. I've withheld some points of discussion to save for a review of Part II, which will almost certainly be longer because A) I wrote a paper on it (and Chinatown) for a college course and therefore have an existing basis of argument that I can take from the comparative essay and B) it is my preferred installment of the series. Some of the my notes, actually, remark on scenes pointing to the next film, such as Don Tommasino lamenting to Michael (ironically) that kids don't exhibit the respect they used to and that "times are changing for the worse," as well as the scene in which Michael heads to Vegas to check on Fredo's progress with schmoozing the casino owners, only to find that his older but less mature brother has spent his time partying and carousing rather than establishing business ties: Fredo even defends his new "friends" against Michael when the new don speaks of buying out Moe Greene, owner of the hotel and casino Mike desires. This prompts Michael to tell his brother, "Don't ever take sides with anyone against the family again," a grim foreshadowing of the next film but also a reflection of an earlier exchange between Vito and Sonny, wherein Vito chided his son for speaking out of turn; Vito's chastisement was swift and forceful, but softened by the dynamic between father and son, a dynamic that doesn't exist in Michael's murderous utterance to his brother. Already we see his icy inhumanity, before he fully assumes the role of godfather at the end of the film, closing the door on Kay (who realizes that he really did order the death of Connie's husband and that Michael isn't going to pull the Corleones out of crime) and, with her, the last vestiges of whatever made Michael the kind and legal member of the family.

As I am busy with my aforementioned catch-ups, I likely won't return to review the rest of the Godfather series, which first expanded its themes of the coldness of modernization on a national level, then finally an international one, for a while, at least until mid-January. Until then, I urge all those with Blu-Ray players who do not own this set to purchase it, and I thank all of you for reading. And may your first child be a masculine child.

Apocalypse Now

The real stars of Francis Ford Coppola's troubled epic are not Martin Sheen or Marlon Brando. They're not even Coppola or writer John Milius. No, the real people behind the success of the film are cinematographer Vittorio Storaro and sound editor Walter Murch. Murch's fluid, deeply troubling sounds pervade the film, bleeding into one another seamlessly. Indeed, he grabs you in the first shot, when the sounds of helicopter rotors fade into the dull hum of a spinning fan. For the rest of the film, he skillfully combines Carmine's haunting, ethereal score with diegetic sound, to the point that you can't trust your own ears, much less the hell that unfolds on-screen.

If war is hell, then Apocalypse Now is as much an adaptation of Dante's Inferno as it is Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness. Some may complain about its disjointed nature, particularly in the final chapter in Kurtz's compound, but Coppola isn't out to give us a simple story. He doesn't even want to make a film about the effects of war. No, Apocalypse Now is a film about the deepest, darkest levels of human conditioning, the kind we've spent our thousands of years on this Earth attempting to outgrow.

"Saigon. Shit, I'm still in Saigon," Capt. Willard (Martin Sheen) growls in the first lines of the film. He signed up for a second tour and wants to head back into the jungle, but not for the clichéd gung-ho reasons. He's been back home, but Vietnam so changed him that he could not re-assimilate into society. His restlessness leads him to get high and destroy his hotel room, eventually cutting his hand on glass and smearing himself in the blood. In the very first scene, the notion of the poster boy multiple-enlistee has been viciously perverted, shown to be the victim of war, not the ideal man who stands above it.

He eventually gets a new mission, classified like all his others. A general invites him to lunch and assigns him the task of assassinating decorated colonel Walter E. Kurtz, who disappeared into the jungle after accusations of murder and built his own empire of natives to take the fight to the North Vietnamese without the setback of arbitrary rules of engagement.

Willard heads upriver to Cambodia in a PBR with a motley crew consisting of the surly Chief (Albert Hall), tripped-out surfer Lance Johnson (Sam Bottoms), New Orleans saucier "Chef" (Frederic Forrest) and 17-year-old "Mr. Clean (Laurence Fishburne). Apart from Chief, these sailors are all just kids, all spit and vinegar, ready to take on Charlie anytime, anywhere.

Their picaresque adventures through Vietnam are by turns horrific, absurd, hysterical and deeply, deeply unsettling. The film's centerpiece, an Air Cavalry assault on a NVA-controlled village, is as terrible as it is exhilarating. Led by the certifiably insane Colonel Kilgore (Robert Duvall, in a show-stealing performance), the sequence, famously set to Wagner's "Ride of the Valkyries," must be the largest set piece ever constructed. Now, CGI fills the screen, and entire wars can be waged in a single scene, but the sense of placement, of meticulously construction, camera set-ups, and stunt co-ordinations required for this one 10 minute stretch demonstrate the true craft of filmmaking.

And Kilgore is more interesting than any of it. With a handful of lines, Duvall crafts the craziest SOB you'll ever see. Shells fall all around him and he doesn't flinch, and only when they come within inches does he react, and then only with annoyance. When Willard's boat runs into an operation already in clean-up, the captain can't get the colonel to pay attention long enough to relay orders from COMSAC, but the Kilgore perks up when he learns that Lance, his surfer idol, is among them. With only a small hunk of screen time, Duvall gets two of the three most memorable lines in the film: the hysterical call to arms "Charlie don't surf!" and the insane, poetic rant that starts with, "I love the smell of napalm in the morning." As he commands his soldiers to break out their surfboards to ride waves that are still under fire, as mortar shells burst around him, he says with sadness in his voice, "This war's gonna end someday." We look on bewildered, but Willard knows the truth, that life will never be the same for any of them.

Elsewhere, Willard and Chef take a stroll through the woods looking for mangoes, only to be ambushed by a tiger. In the middle of the river, the USO erects a garish stage to host a couple of Playboy bunnies, and it appears to double as a thriving black market. The bunnies so rile the cheering men that some storm the stage and attempt to possibly rape the women, who run back to their helicopter and depart. In the scene that ensures that no member of the audience can mistake the movie for some fun epic (many point to the Valkyries scene as exciting over horrific), Chief orders a Vietnamese boat stop for boarding, and confusion leads to accidental massacre of all aboard, shattering the young boys and forever turning the Chief against Willard.

Storaro manages to make each segment look entirely different without losing visual flow. The reason so many of us love that Air Cavalry scene is that it's filmed from the POV of the soldiers. One must step outside of the film for a moment to look at it objectively to see how terrible it all really is. That scene with the tiger is funny in retrospect, but Storaro makes the lead-up as frightening as anything in a proper horror film. My personal favorite piece of the film, the Do Lung sequence, strikes me as being shot from the perspective of Lance, who drops acid shortly before the boat pulls up to this nightmare. As a result, light flows in and out, as flares arc over the trees, momentarily blinding before all is plunged back into darkness. Willard searches for the commanding officer, finally asking one of the entrenched soldiers, "Who's in charge here?" to which the manic kid replies, "Ain't you?"

Storaro's cinematography at Kurtz's compound alone earned him his Oscar: Marlon Brando got the job after convincing Coppola that he'd read Heart of Darkness, only to show up having read neither the script nor the book, as well as 40kg overweight. Already guaranteed $1 million even if fired, Brando created a dilemma for the director, which Storaro fixed by covering Kurtz in shadow. The night shots of the compound are bathed with a jaundiced yellow, reflecting the sickness and "slow death" of the camp and its leader. Shadow, in cinema, naturally reflects the moral complexity of a character, but Kurtz and even Willard are so enshrouded in these scenes that they're practically invisible. Willard remarks in his narrations throughout the film that the colonel's methods actually display a brilliance and ingenuity, and he's certainly got a number of deaths on his conscience, and he does not yet know whether he will kill Kurtz or join him.

Brando, difficult as he was, really was perfect for the role. In a mixture of scripted and ad-libbed dialogue, Brando captures the manic insanity of Kurtz. No, not insanity; I read an interview once -- I can't remember who said it, perhaps Grant Morrison -- that discussed the Batman villain the Joker. In it, the interviewee described the Joker as possessing not a madness but a kind of "super-sanity," one that worked on a level that was utterly mad but made sense on a level no normal person could process. Kurtz reached this level after witnessing the VC hack off the arms of every child in a village that his Special Forces team inoculated, simply because they refused that the children receive aid from the enemy. "If I had 10 divisions of such men, then our troubles here would be over very quickly," he intones. Kurtz, a decorated, respected officer who'd seen combat in Korea and in a previous tour of 'Nam, snapped not because of war but because the jungle brought out his primal behavior, the kind that resides in all of us.

There's no truly satisfactory way to end such a film, one that mixes the visceral here-and-now of warfare with metaphysics, but the juxtaposition of two ritual sacrifices, one of tribesmen killing a water buffalo and the other of Willard slaying Kurtz, the bloated, weakened king so that he might die with dignity, is brilliant. Willard emerges to a tribe of warriors already willing to bow to him, but he simply heads back to the boat with Lance and sets off, as Kurtz's immortal "The horror. The horror" plays over a shot of a stone face of the compound. While he's been completely broken by the experience, forever haunted by what he did and what happened to him, he stands as the better man, for he did not lose himself in the jungle.

According to some, Apocalypse Now stands as the last great American film (those who disagree cite Scorsese's Raging Bull). While I would venture to say that 2007's one-two punch of No Country for Old Men and There Will Be Blood changed that, you could certainly argue that no other films in the interim combined the epic scale of Coppola's final masterpiece with its personal and psychological themes. Coppola began production on the film in 1976, seven years after John Milius completed the first draft of his screenplay. Three years, one heart attack, a hurricane and numerous other production delays later, it finally reached screens.

"What must people have thought then?" I often wonder when seeing a film ahead of its time. I know that Gene Siskel famously gave it a negative review when he first saw it, only to later perform a mea culpa and give it a positive review. Mainstream Vietnam movies had only just started getting releases, and they tended to convey how the war affected its soldiers, who were always brave and cruelly destroyed by a pointless war. Apocalypse Now dared to suggest that this war simply brought out the worst in us, that its soldiers were by and large terrified and looking for any chance to get home, that we were still responsible for our actions even if the government forced thousands to fight.

The film netted Oscars for Murch and Storaro, but it's safe to say that it was robbed in every other category in which it received a nomination, and how Duvall didn't get a nod for Supporting Actor will keep me scratching my head for hours. Apocalypse Now is more than the greatest Vietnam film ever made, more than the best war film period; it is a document of a part of man that no amount of conditioning and evolution will ever fully eradicate, and it's a beast that can emerge with only a strong push.