Heart of Darkness and The Secret Sharer (24 page)

Coppola transformed ‘‘Heart of Darkness'' into a grotesque melodrama set in Vietnam in the waning years of the Vietnam War. In the role of Marlow, an American army officer is sent to Cambodia to assassinate a renegade Green Beret colonel who has set himself up, like Kurtz, as a murderous madman-god. Imaginative in concept and vivid in execution,
Apocalypse Now
is undermined by the ludicrous overacting of Marlon Brando in the role of Kurtz, which neither he nor his director seems to have understood.

Conrad had a friend who had a yawl (a two-sailed boat of yacht size similar to a sloop or cutter, but with a small third mast far aft, near the rudder) named
Nellie
, and thus came the name he used in his novella. However it is also worth noting, an irony of literary history, that the only other significant novel in English preceding
Heart of Darkness
with the same configuration of distancing narrators is
Wuthering Heights
, and the central narrating figure in that story, the equivalent of Marlow, is the maid, whose name is Nellie.