Heart of Darkness Karloff) as its final act, and adds a backstory in which Marlow had been Kurtz's adopted son. The cast includes Inga Swenson and Eartha Kitt. The most famous adaptation is Francis Ford Coppola's 1979 motion picture "Apocalypse Now" based on the screenplay by John Milius, which moves the story from the Congo to Vietnam and Cambodia during the Vietnam War. In "Apocalypse Now", Martin Sheen plays Captain Benjamin L. Willard, a US Army Captain assigned to "terminate the command" of Colonel Walter E. Kurtz. Marlon Brando played Kurtz, in one of his most famous roles. A production documentary of the
Heart of Darkness "The Engineer of Human Souls", Kurtz is seen as the epitome of exterminatory colonialism, and here and elsewhere Škvorecký emphasises the importance of Conrad's concern with Russian imperialism in Eastern Europe. T. S. Eliot wrote "Mistah Kurtz—he dead" at the beginning of the poem "The Hollow Men", quoting the "manager's boy" when he announced the death of Kurtz to the crew. Heart of Darkness Heart of Darkness (1899) is a novella by Polish-English novelist Joseph Conrad about a narrated voyage up the Congo River into the Congo Free State in the so-called "heart of Africa". Charles Marlow, the narrator, tells