Top 10 War Movies
Apocalypse Now (1979, Francis Ford Coppola) — Vietnam
The 1970s were the decade of ornery, realistic movies, when filmmakers dared to address topics like government conspiracies, racial animosity and big cities' fetid decay. Odd, then, that no American in the '70s made a movie about the war in Vietnam until after it ended. (M*A*S*H doesn't count; it was set in Korea.) Coppola, fresh off his two Godfather epics and The Conversation, decided to film a John Milius script roughly based on Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness, about an Army captain (Martin Sheen) cruising through hostile territory into the lair of mad Colonel Kurtz (Marlon Brando at his most grotesque and gnomic). On location in the Philippines, the crew endured every possible calamity, from monsoons to the leading man's heart attack. (Sheen recovered.) Presenting an unfinished cut of the film at Cannes, Coppola said he had endured his own private Vietnam. Not that any movie is worth such sacrifice, but Apocalypse Now nailed the madness of Americans lost in a jungle of misguided motives and foreign-policy screwups. Turning Norman Mailer's question, "Why are we in Vietnam?," into psychodrama, the film says that only the deranged survive — like Robert Duvall's macho surfer, proclaiming, "I love the smell of napalm in the morning ... It smelled like ... victory."