Half A Great Film Destroyed By Brando

Rating: 6/10 (26 August 2008)

"Apocalypse Now" is almost impossible to give a numerical grade to. The reason why is simple, while the first part is very good, the film simply falls to pieces once Marlon Brando appears. Full of unforgettable scenes and images the first part might qualify as great cinema except for the need for a narration to make sense of the material - a sure sign of the mess the script was in as shooting began. Brando in the end manages to destroy everything with a mumbling, mannered wreck of a performance. If Brando had given Coppola one of his great latter turns in "The Godfather", here he gives the worst performance by a name actor I have ever seen. It stinks and anybody who tries to persuade you otherwise is deluded. Apparently Coppola was influenced by Herzog's "Aguirre", and certainly both movies are a mixture of the great and the awful, what lifts Herzog's film though is Klaus Kinski's performance. In my dreams I have an "Apocalypse Now" with Kinski in the Brando role -it's a much better film even though I'll never see it. The "Redux" version adds running time but detracts from the film by much more and should be avoided.