Reel Talk: Film distributors love the smell of easy money in the morning

Everyone loves 70s American cinema, right? The scattershot chaos of Altman, the swaggering rock and roll of Scorsese, those DePalma fever dreams; a golden age where mainstream and arthouse collided in an explosion of violence and beauty. How fitting that the decade’s cinematic climax was Francis Ford Coppola’s Apocalypse Now (1979), a hallucinatory orgy of madness as overblown and poetic as anything in the New Hollywood canon. And it’s back in cinemas May 27.

"Fuckin' A!”, I hear you say. A chance to go back into the heart of darkness, only this time on a screen the size of a double decker bus with Wagner’s Ride of the Valkyries reverberating in Dolby surround sound. Will I be rushing out to see it come opening weekend? Not a chance.

My boycott isn’t for iconoclast kudos, it’s a self-lacerating protest against film distribution myopia. Apocalypse Now is not a film that needs to be rediscovered: its director's cut ‘Redux’ was released in 2001; search its name on Amazon and you’ll find a plethora of DVDs, Blu-rays and special editions; start channel surfing and you’ll barely wait a week before it turns up on some TV station. If you haven’t seen Apocalypse Now by now then you don’t want to.

Lets not be fooled into thinking this rerelease is about education or cinema heritage: it’s about commerce. This is cinema with broad appeal, loved by Sight and Sound snobs and Nuts knuckle-scrapers alike. I love this era of movies too, but the truth is that the cultural omnipresence of the New Hollywood movie brats, and Coppola in particular, stifle those undervalued films that are truly in need of your patronage – films like Ivan Passer’s criminally underseen neo-noir Cutter’s Way (1981), rereleased on 10 June by Park Circus.

There’s also another reason I hope Apocalypse Now bombs. Dracula’s 20th anniversary is coming up in 2012. Let’s not give Coppola, or those distributors, ideas.