10 Best Final Speeches In Movie History

Marlon Brando is undoubtedly one of the greatest actors of all time.

Although his appearance in Francis Ford Coppola's Apocalypse Now is iconic, the movie wasn't without its fair share of well-documented turbulence, owing in no small part to Brando's on-set antics and the difficulties that they presented for the cast and crew.

The movie's plot revolves around Captain Benjamin Willard's mission to assassinate Colonel Kurtz, a renegade Special Forces officer presumed to be insane.

Upon finally meeting Kurtz, we discover that he is insane, as evidenced by Brando's halting, haunting delivery of a speech regarding the horrors of war.

In a rambling monologue that lasts almost 5 minutes, Kurtz remembers a mission in which he helped inoculate children for polio, then returned to discover that their arms had been cut off. Brando goes on to admit his admiration for those with the willpower to commit such an act, and laments that he could have used such men to achieve great things in the pantheon of war.

Not only is the scene incredibly unsettling, but it was also reportedly almost entirely improvised by Brando, who arrived on set having not bothered to memorise his lines.