I literally asked for this … so I suppose I should weigh in.
I see Kurtz as someone who had thought he was doing the right thing, but is realizing on his deathbed (if I’m not mistaken, the implication of the movie is that he’s sick, possibly with malaria) that in his zeal-come-obsession, he crossed a moral line somewhere along the way, and became something repugnant from which there’s no going back. The movie implies that he wants Willard to kill him — again, possibly because he’s sick, but I feel like it’s also because of his dawning guilt and horror at what he’s become.
To be fair, I think Brando puts that element of Kurtz across recognizably. I still think it’s a piss-take of a performance—it’s part of Apocalypse Now’s lore that Brando refused to learn his lines, and would stay on set only as long as he felt like it, the same as the lore surrounding The Island of Dr. Moreau is that Brando deliberately sabotaged the movie just because he thought it’d be funny—but he effectively embodies a broken-down man, whether he’s trying to “perform” as such or not. Either way, I have a hard time imagining him as the person Kurtz supposedly was only a short time before: a crack soldier, and a leader so charismatic that he inspired a cult to follow him without question. So who—of actors active at the time—could have been believable as the person Kurtz was and effectively portrayed the Kurtz we see in the film?
My first thought that seemed even remotely viable was Clint Eastwood, maybe assaying Will Munny twenty years earlier. But while Eastwood certainly had the gravitas, and would absolutely have been believable as a career military officer, I’m not sure how effective he would have been at portraying psychosis; a key component of the Eastwood persona at that time in his career was how in-control and self-possessed he always seemed to be. I try to imagine his reading of the “snail on a razor” speech, and I just can’t get there.
So then I had a thought (one night, in the wandering, dissociative thinking you do as you’re falling asleep): Henry Fonda.
Don’t laugh, if you haven’t seen his performance as Frank in Once Upon a Time in the West. Part of what made Frank interesting as an antagonist was his seeming comfort in the professionalism of his vocation. The flashback to “the event that spurs Bronson’s quest for revenge” (no spoilers here) indicates that Frank may have been more sadistic in his younger days. But by the events of the movie, he’s middle-aged, and well-settled into the routine of a workaday career. In terms of the morality of his profession, he has the solipsism of a white-collar professional: in this world, there are people who want other people killed, and there are going to be people who do it; that’s just the world we live in, and you’re wasting your time thinking about it. He’s Don Draper — except his job is killing people.
But now drop Frank into Vietnam. Frank doesn’t have a “code” that he lives by — but his afore-described moral solipsism is facilitated by his comfort in the unchanging simplicity of the world he lives in, and his comfort with his place in it. I could see him cracking in a world where none of that is recognizable any more; I can hear Frank, confused and shell-shocked, giving the “snail on a razor” speech. And even if he wasn’t “Method,” Fonda had the chops and the gravitas to deliver; his earlier-era technique might have even been a boon in portraying Kurtz’s physical, spiritual, and moral dissolution.
TL;DR: Watch Once Upon a Time in the West; imagine Henry Fonda’s Frank as Kurtz; let me know if I’m crazy. (Actually, watch Once Upon a Time in the West regardless.)
Re: Who Should Have Played Kurtz? (Apocalypse Now)
21Tone attorney formerly known as Tom Lael is Dogs.
