Daily Archives: January 29, 2025

Hearts Of Darkness: A Filmmaker’s Apocalypse

A fascinating 1991 postmortem on the making of Francis Coppola’s Apocalypse Now (1979), mainly consisting of footage shot by Eleanor Coppola in the 70s that has been intelligently selected, augmented, and arranged by Fax Bahr and George Hickenlooper. Like the Coppola film itself, this documentary at times seems to value self-styled profundity and rhetoric over observation and common sense; one especially regrets the absence of any thoroughgoing political or historical critique of Apocalypse Now in relation to the Vietnam war. Moreover, this movie only compounds the self-satisfied myopia that regards peasants of the Philippines (where Apocalypse was shot) and those of Vietnam as interchangeable. But the various personalities involvedincluding Marlon Brando, Martin Sheen, Dennis Hopper, and Coppola himselfkeep this watchable. Too bad that Michael Herr, who wrote Apocalypse’s effective narration after the film was shot, is overlooked in the kaleidoscopic clashes of male egos, but it’s nice to see that Orson Welles’s radio and screenplay adaptations of Conrad’s Heart of Darkness are acknowledged as precedents and influences. 96 min. (JR) Read more

H.e.a.l.t.h.

This rather tired and airless 1979 satire, which Robert Altman spun off from his own Nashville and (somewhat less tired) A Wedding, plunks its many oddball characters down in a health-food convention in a Florida hotel and asks us to smirk along with the direction. The cast includes Carol Burnett, Glenda Jackson, Lauren Bacall, James Garner, Henry Gibson, Alfre Woodard, and Dick Cavett (playing himself, and clearly pleased as punch about it). 100 min. (JR) Read more

Avalanche Express

The last film of both director Mark Robson and actor Robert Shaw (1979), and not the best of either, though the distinctive, talented Abraham Polonsky is credited with the script, an adaptation of a Colin Forbes novel. A rather lackluster spy thriller set largely on a train running from Milan to Rotterdam, it also features Lee Marvin, Linda Evans, Maximilian Schell, Joe Namath, Mike Connors, and Horst Buchholz. Because Shaw died during shooting, most of his lines have apparently been dubbed. (JR) Read more