This is the US one sheet poster for one of the most epic and ambitious war movies ever.

I distinctly remember seeing Apocalypse Now in the cinema. It was at an arthouse cinema in Nottingham, which did not have the best sound. Consequently it was impossible to understand a word of Marlon Brando’s dialogue. At the time I thought this was intentional and it was only years later when I saw it on DVD that I realised that amidst the mumbling he actually had intelligible lines to say!

Apocalypse Now has so many iconic memorable scenes and lines, perhaps most notably the helicopter attack set to Wagner, followed by Robert Duvall’s throwaway comment “I love the smell of napalm in the morning”. It was a movie that I felt did not need revisiting, and yet we got the bum-numbingly long Redux version in 2001 which added seemingly everything left on the cutting room floor, including the lengthy ‘lost’ (and rather jarring) French plantation sequence. This is one case where less was definitely more!

I have also visited the site where Kurtz’s compound was filmed. The movie was famously made under trying conditions in the Philippines. (Check out the great documentary movie Hearts of Darkness for an insight into the madness the film-makers endured). The location is in a place called Pagsanjan, which is remote – but surprisingly not that remote: the temple location is actually on the water in the middle of the small town. 

Nearby is a beautiful gorge, which was reached in a canoe paddled by two guys upriver. They manfully dragged it up over the rocks of the various rapids en route for over an hour. Once we had reached the gorge, they turned the canoe around and we shot back down the river back to Kurtz’ stronghold in under 20 minutes! 

The one-sheet I hope to get around to framing at some point. I do have for sale a great complete set of 16 Spanish lobby cards. These can be found here.