Few actors are more closely tied to the spirit of 1970s American cinema than Robert Duvall. He came out of the New York theater world alongside contemporaries like Al Pacino, Dustin Hoffman, and Gene Hackman (Hoffman, Hackman, and Duvall shared an apartment early on). Duvall brought an intelligent, restrained, and quietly authoritative presence to the screen.

This series follows his rise during the New Hollywood era. It begins with Robert Altman’s anarchic military satire M*A*S*H, where Duvall’s rigid Major Frank Burns becomes the perfect target for the film’s irreverence. Duvall then created one of the era’s most memorable characters as Tom Hagen, the calm consigliere in THE GODFATHER and THE GODFATHER PART 11, a figure who sits at the moral center of Francis Ford Coppola’s epic saga. The series concludes with his unforgettable performance as Lt. Colonel Kilgore in APOCALYPSE NOW. His famous declaration, “I love the smell of napalm in the morning… it smells like victory,” has become one of the most iconic lines in film history. Together, these films capture the extraordinary range of an actor whose performances shaped some of America’s most influential films.