Editor

Gerald B. Greenberg

3: briefs
13:00: average
39 min: in total

On film.briefs3

Apocalypse Now

Francis Ford Coppola · 1979

Francis Ford Coppola's 1979 film relocates Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness to the Vietnam War, sending Captain Willard up a river into Cambodia to assassinate Colonel Kurtz, a decorated officer who has gone rogue and established himself as a warlord among a private army. Shot by Vittorio Storaro on a production in the Philippines that ran a year over schedule, battered by a typhoon, a leading actor's heart attack and an unprepared, overweight Marlon Brando, it premiered unfinished at Cannes to win the Palme d'Or, and later took home Oscars for cinematography and sound on a budget of $31.5 million against an $83.5 million return.

13:00

Scarface

Brian De Palma · 1983

Brian De Palma's 1983 remake of Howard Hawks' original relocates the story to Miami's 1980 Mariel boatlift, with Oliver Stone's screenplay tracking a Cuban refugee's rise through the cocaine trade under Al Pacino at his most excessive. Giorgio Moroder's synthesizer score and a mansion-siege finale that a visiting Steven Spielberg helped shoot gave the film an afterlife in pop culture far larger than its mixed initial reviews suggested.

13:00

The French Connection

William Friedkin · 1971

The French Connection follows two New York narcotics detectives, modelled on real officers Eddie Egan and Sonny Grosso, as they trail a heroin shipment tied to an actual 1962 seizure. Made for $1.8 million after seven actors turned down the lead, it won five Academy Awards including Best Picture and Best Actor for Gene Hackman, and its documentary-style handheld camera and an unscripted-feeling car chase set a template for the decade of American crime films that followed it.