“You smell that? Do you smell that? ... Napalm, son. Nothing else in the world smells like that. I love the smell of napalm in the morning,” says Robert Duvall as the mad, hawkish, surf-loving Lt Col Bill Kilgore in Apocalypse Now (1979), Francis Ford Coppola’s two-and-a-half hour nightmarish ride through Vietnam.
Wearing a black stetson with a cavalry sword emblem and sunglasses, Kilgore is certainly a caricature of the American military, but Duvall, who has died aged 95, gave him a terrifying reality. Presenting a man who is only as insane as the war around him, his brief appearance was central to the film.
