SOURCE: "Heart of Darkness and the Process of Apocalypse Now," in Conradiana, Vol. XIII, No. 1, 1981, pp. 45-53.

In the following essay, Hagen analyzes the relationship between Coppola's Apocalypse Now and Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness and concludes, "I tend to see Apocalypse Now as a failed masterpiece, another instance of the fact that the production-editing process cannot bear too much of the conceptual load in a feature film."

Toward the end of Apocalypse Now we reach that supremely Conradian moment when Willard, the Marlow figure, confronts the object of his journey, Colonel Kurtz. Does he come to rescue Kurtz and, in so doing, test himself? If Francis Ford Coppola had chosen to follow Joseph Conrad here, he might have gotten some desperately needed U.S. military assistance. But that was not the kind of script conclusion the director of The Godfather and Godfather II had planned for his...