Mike Frank's comments about the difficulty of adapting literary fictions to the screen in the case of novels which involve some sort of first-person narration is certainly relevant to my questions about APOCALYPSE NOW. We've discussed voice-over narration on SCREEN-L in the past. I regard it as a highly compromised technique if relied on heavily. (Voice-over in A.N. reduces Willard's role to the passive point of telling us things which it seems to me could more profitably be dramatized. Actually, there was some excellent dramatization of character in the film, but not much involving the principals. The implication underlying the Robert Duvall character, for example, is that you have to be half crazy to function in a war zone and if you end up pushing the envelope toward total insanity but still get the job done, who's going to question you? That's excellent preparation for considering Col. Kurtz's case, but the point is that the air-cav colonel Duvall is playing ends up being interesting in and of himself. Perhaps Brando was being asked to do the impossible; perhaps we've been told so much about Kurtz before we encounter him that the character is bound to fall far short of expectations. It's an excellent point that what Conrad withholds about Kurtz is vitally important to the success of HEART OF DARKNESS, even though the novelist was severely criticized in his own right for offering only a partial characterization. I don't see the novel's characterization as so damagingly partial, actually. The phrase "Exterminate all the brutes" and the wild native woman on the river shore speak volumes about Kurtz; the manuscript page and the native woman say very little about Col. Kurtz in A.N. because they haven't been set up properly. I'll close with a comment about what I consider the ultimate failed adaptation, CATCH-22, where the novel was so successful in conveying Yossarian as a state of mind involving embattled individuality confronted with a dehumanized bureaucracy. It was a topic that I could relate to perfectly, reading it during my last weeks in the Army, and I think the mere appearance of an actor on the screen trying to portray Yossarian (no offense to Alan Arkin) quite simply infuriated me. I was expecting the cinematic experience of my life, and I felt like walking out after five minutes. I give Coppola credit for solving many more of the problems in his adaptation than Nichols did, even as I lament the falling off of interest in the last third of APOCALYPSE NOW. Dan Gribbin Ferrum College (VA) [log in to unmask] ---- To sign off SCREEN-L, e-mail [log in to unmask] and put SIGNOFF SCREEN-L in the message. Problems? Contact [log in to unmask]