Apocalypse Now (1979)
Francis Ford Coppola's Vietnam phantasmagoria begins at the end (or at least The End, as sung by the Doors). The jungle is aflame and Martin Sheen is burnt out in bed, sucking on a cigarette and listening to the chop-chop-chop of the overhead fan. Later he will be given a mission, "for his sins," and go boating up-river to meet a shaven-headed Marlon Brando. And yet it's hard to shake the suspicion that we have already witnessed the movie's true heart of darkness (an impression only reinforced by reports of Sheen's fragile health at the time): the sense that the real Colonel Kurtz is not spouting poetry to the natives of Cambodia; he's drunk and weepy and practicing karate moves in a Saigon flop-house.
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