Robert Duvall is only onscreen for a little over ten minutes in Apocalypse Now, but that’s more than enough time for him to steal Francis Ford Coppola’s twisted war epic. Crouching shirtless on a Vietnamese beach moments after ordering the firebombing of the shoreline, his Lieutenant Colonel Bill Kilgore delivers the film’s most quoted line: “I love the smell of napalm in the morning.”
That line, as memorable and shocking as it is, is only the set-up. As Coppola’s camera slowly moves in on Kilgore’s face, the soldier’s eyes partly obscured by his oversized U.S. Cavalry hat, he reminisces fondly about the nightmarish death and destruction wrought by a previous napalm attack he had instigated. “The smell, you know that gasoline smell? The whole hill. Smelled like... victory,” he says, with terrible pride. Then, with something like grief: “Someday this war’s gonna end.”
