Walter E. Kurtz

Walter E. Kurtz
Created by	John Milius and Francis Ford Coppola
Portrayed by	Marlon Brando
Information
Gender	Male
Spouse(s)	Janet Kurtz
Children	1 son
Nationality	American

Colonel Walter E. Kurtz is a fictional character and the main antagonist of the 1979 film Apocalypse Now, portrayed by Marlon Brando. Colonel Kurtz is based on the character of a 19th century ivory trader, also called Kurtz, from the novella Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad.

Biography

Walter Kurtz was a regular army officer in the United States Army; he had risen through the ranks and was seen to be destined for a top post within the Pentagon. In his first tour of Vietnam in 1964, he was sent by the Joint Chiefs of Staff to compile a report on the failings of the current military policies. His report was not what was expected and was immediately restricted for the joint chiefs and President Lyndon B. Johnson only.

Not long after, Kurtz applied for the 5th Special Forces Group, which was denied to him out of hand because of his advanced age of 38 for the basic training. Kurtz continued with his ambition and even threatened to quit the armed forces, when finally his wish was granted and he was allowed to take the airborne course. Kurtz graduated in a class where he was nearly twice the age of the other trainees, and was accepted into the 5th Special Forces Group.

Kurtz returned to Vietnam in 1966 with the "Green Berets" and was part of the hearts and minds campaign which also included fortifying hamlets. On his next tour, Kurtz was assigned to the Gamma Project, in which he was to raise an army of Montagnards in and around the Vietnamese–Cambodian border to strike at the Viet Cong and N.V.A. Kurtz located his army, including their wives and children, at a remote abandoned Cambodian temple which they fortified. From their base, Kurtz led attacks on the local V.C. and the regular N.V.A. in the region.

Kurtz employed barbaric methods not only to defeat his enemy but also to send fear. At first MACV didn't object to Kurtz's tactics, especially as they proved successful, but this soon changed when Kurtz allowed photographs of his atrocities to be released to the world. In late 1968, when Kurtz failed to respond to MACV's repeated orders to return to Da Nang and resign his command after he ordered the summary execution of four South Vietnamese intelligence agents whom he suspected of being double agents for the Viet Cong, the MACV sent a "Green Beret" Captain named Richard Colby to bring Kurtz back from Cambodia. Colby joined up with Kurtz instead of bringing him back to Da Nang, either because he was brainwashed or because he felt a sympathy to Kurtz's cause.

With Colby's failure, MACV then selected Captain Benjamin L. Willard, a former paratrooper and now a CIA assassin, to journey up the Nung river and kill Kurtz. Willard succeeds with his mission only because Kurtz, himself broken mentally by the savage war he wages, wants Willard to kill him and release him from his own suffering. Before Willard kills him, Kurtz asks Willard to find Kurtz's wife and son and explain truthfully what he'd done in the war.

Inspiration

Colonel Kurtz is based on the character of a 19th century ivory trader, also called Kurtz, from the novella Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad. However, the character is widely believed to have been modeled after Tony Poe, a highly-decorated and highly unorthodox Vietnam-era Paramilitary Officer from the CIA's Special Activities Division^[1]. Poe was known to drop severed heads into enemy-controlled villages as a form of psychological warfare and to use human ears to record the number of enemies his indigenous troops had killed. He would send these ears back to his superiors as proof of his efforts deep inside Laos^[2][3]. Coppola, however, denies that Poe was a primary influence and instead says the character was loosely based on Special Forces Colonel Robert B. Rheault, whose 1969 arrest over the murder of a suspected double agent generated substantial news coverage.^[4]

Portrayal

When Brando arrived for filming in the Philippines in September 1976, he claimed he was dissatisfied with the script; Brando didn't understand why Kurtz was meant to be very thin and bald, or why the character's name was Kurtz and not something like Leighley. He claimed, "American generals don't have those kinds of names. They have flowery names, from the South. I want to be 'Colonel Leighley'." And so, for a time the name was changed under his demand. When Brando showed up for filming he had put on about 40 lbs and forced Coppola to shoot him from the waist up, making it appear that Kurtz was a 6-foot 6-inch giant. Many of Brando's speeches were ad-libbed and performed off the cuff, with Coppola filming hours of footage of these monologues and then cutting them down to the most interesting parts.

Filming was put on a week-long filming hiatus so that Brando and Coppola could resolve their creative disputes. It is claimed that someone left Conrad's source text, which Coppola had repeatedly referred to him to - but which he had never read - the houseboat which Brando was staying in at the time. He returned to filming with his head shaved, wanting to be 'Kurtz' once again; claiming it was all clear to him now that he had read Conrad's novella.^[5]

Trivia

• Brando was paid a fee of $3 million for his work on the film, plus $70,000 for an extra day's filming.

References

1. ^ Leary, William L. "Death of a Legend". Air America Archive. Retrieved on 2007-06-10.
2. ^ Warner, Roger. Shooting at the Moon.
3. ^ Ehrlich, Richard S. (2003-07-08). "CIA operative stood out in 'secret war' in Laos". Bangkok Post. http://web.archive.org/web/20090806040904/http://geocities.com/asia_correspondent/laos0307ciaposhepnybp.html. Retrieved on 10 June 2007.
4. ^ Isaacs, Matt (1999-11-17). "Agent Provocative". SF Weekly. http://www.sfweekly.com/1999-11-17/news/agent-provocative/1. Retrieved 2009-05-02. 
5. ^ Ondaatje, Michael (2002). The Conversations: Walter Murch and the Art of Editing Film. London: Bloomsbury Publishing. pp. 68–69. ISBN 978-1-4088-0011-9.