The Cotton Club is Francis Ford Coppola's best film. I bring it up now because Tetro is opening in theaters soon. It's good, but really The Cotton Club's the only Coppola that's worth a damn. Well, maybe Bram Stoker's Dracula, too.There's no betrayal in The Godfather, just pretty pictures -- but you can feel it in Maurice Hines' face and understand what's it's like to be the traitor in Gregory Hines' eyes. Richard Gere expresses more through his cornet than Marlon Brando ever could with his mumbling mouth. There are no moments in any of Coppola's other films like the Hoofers' Club tap-off, the screen test, the dance club slap. There is no tenderness like the half-second Gregory Hines kisses Loretta McKee's neck when they reunite after years apart, and no emotion more vivid than the tap dance number the Hines brothers share when they reunite in a Harlem club. No speech like the one Lawrence Fishburne delivers at the bar after being fucked over by the mob. It's Coppola's truest film.
2 comments:
I know the focus of this is COTTON CLUB, but I just have to say: Yes, Bram Stoker's Dracula! Glad to find another in on the secret...
I think the thing about Coppola is that he's a director of "infuriating films" -- a little hysterical, composed mostly of symbols that only he understands, very tied to literary ideas about "narrative." There's something alchemical to him and I think that really comes to the forefront in Bram Stoker's Dracula. The Godfather or The Conversation are really anomalies. People say "Coppola" and they think gangsters, but really something like Polanski's The Ninth Gate is the most "Coppola-esque" film ever made by someone other than Coppola.
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