LoginFrancis Ford Coppola – An Annotated Filmography
Francis Ford Coppola turned 85 a week ago, and he has been all over the news with his comeback movie Megalopolis, a $100 million production he financed from his own pocket, due to premiere next month in Cannes and a constant target of hit pieces from the Hollywood press. There are few things Hollywood people dislike more than a crazy guy deciding to burn down his own money; this sort of artistic hubris goes against what the industry is all about. (Coppola also lost his wife and long-time creative partner Eleanor last week, and if you have never seen her film Paris Can Wait from a few years ago, it is very nice).
Coppola remains one of the better-known Hollywood filmmakers, his image gets mixed up with that of New Hollywood, but also one full of films that are underseen and even more underdiscussed, and there’s a lot worth pondering about them too. I love Coppola movies and often have a very eccentric taste in them because I love even more the ugly ducklings in his filmography. He is a popular artist who takes some very alienating risks, and he is often even more interesting to think about in the half-successes that come from that. So instead of writing a long article, I decided to go feature by feature covering everything from Apocalypse Now to Jack, 22 movies, his short entry for New York Stories and a few words on Wenders’ Hammett and Coppola’s short stint as a movie mogul.
Dementia 13 (1963)
Coppola got his first chance with this trashy horror movie produced by Roger Corman. The great attraction is precisely the dissonance between what is a slight movie and what is quite elaborate about its images; this is a first draft by an apprentice who visibly wants to be taken seriously. The movie is only 75 minutes long, the plot is partly a dilution of Psycho, partly a gothic version of Agatha Christie, flavored with several shocks taken from Mario Bava (Black Sunday had just been a big hit for AIP). But Coppola doesn’t want to be denied, he has talent, you see, every shot is meticulously studied, this isn’t always a good thing, but there’s something charming and touching about the efforts. Around the same time, Monte Hellman shot two movies in the Philippines for Corman, Flight to Fury and Back Door to Hell, which remind me a lot of Dementia in this mix of pulp and care, Kent Jones once said that they were worse movies because of the talent of their director, I understand what he means, there is something a bit stiff if you are after the thrills of cheap exploitation, but these three movies are much more interesting to think about than a well-rounded drive-in movie. It’s a bit like when musicians let their pre-fame recordings reach fans decades later, half the fun is in recognizing traces and speculating based on them. One curiosity is that Patrick Magee is characterized almost like Brando in The Godfather. Around the same time, Corman put Coppola in charge of another movie, The Terror, even more slight, a movie to be made from already finished sets and a few days of shooting that Boris Karloff owed him (years later it would be the movie within the movie in Peter Bogdanovich’s Targets). Corman ended up firing Coppola after a few days, supposedly because he was slow and over budget, which in retrospect is very funny and informative. In the end, it was a movie co-directed by everyone who was in the AIP offices at the time, Corman himself, Hellman, Jack Hill (who co-wrote Dementia 13). It’s a bad movie, but a lot of fun to speculate about.
You’re a Big Boy Now (1966)
In Andrew Sarris’ The American Cinema, published in 1968, there is surprisingly an entry on Coppola. It’s all based on this movie, I imagine he didn’t even know about Dementia 13 at the time, and he makes two observations: that Coppola was the first talented filmmaker to come out of film school and that the movie wasn’t particularly worse than The Graduate, but that Mike Nichols only referenced good movies and Coppola also chose a lot of bad ones. There’s something there that’s quite useful when thinking about the movie, everyone always compares You’re a Big Man Now to Nichols’ movie, Coppola made his before, but the movie wasn’t released until after. Both movies are certainly quite similar and derivative of 1960s European cinema, and Sarris is right that Nichols’ reference points belong to a tasteful canon and Coppola’s are let’s say eclectic. There’s a much more noticeable B-movie spirit, a lot of Italian comedy influence, which gives it great specificity, and the energy seems to come from Richard Lester’s movies, both A Hard Day’s Night and The Knack. The Lester side is probably the biggest limitation, it’s 100 minutes long in a consistently hysterical vein and at some point, it becomes exhausting. It’s interesting to note that The Graduate gets worse in its later scenes because it becomes more conventional, and Coppola’s because he follows his inspiration to the very end. Coppola presented the movie as his college thesis, even though it was made independently, which brings it closer to the debuts of Brian De Palma (The Wedding Party) and Martin Scorsese (Who’s Knockin at the Door), all of which are excessive and melancholic portraits of the youth of the period with autobiographical undertones. The movie is dominated by the director’s anxieties, the desire to succeed in the industry without giving up his personality. Coppola will allegorize his position many times later on, but never by putting himself from such a low position. It doesn’t feel at all like an independent movie with limited resources, from the established actors (Geraldine Page, Rip Torn) to the filmmaker’s craftsmanship and steady gaze. Apart from one thing, Nichols had Dustin Hoffman and Coppola, a certain Peter Kastner who never becomes very expressive, if Coppola had found a better young actor, or one with whom he connected more (as Scorsese managed with Harvey Keitel), the flimsy parts of the movie would have been much more tolerable. That said, he also deserves credit for discovering Karen Black for it; in my personal take on the New Hollywood, this counts for more than directing The Godfather.
Finian’s Rainbow (1968)
This was Coppola’s first movie for a studio and I confess that it baffles me both how he ended up in charge of it and how it didn’t damage his career. It’s his only movie that just seems bad to me. It’s a good-budget musical that Coppola treats mostly seriously and in the overblown style of the late 60s. It’s Fred Astaire’s last musical movie, so basically the only people who watch it are completists of the actor or the director. Astaire is by far the best thing about it, but his fans complain that Coppola doesn’t have much of an idea of how to film him in action, which is true, it’s his presence more than his dancing skills that seem to matter in this movie. Coppola treats Astaire as an image, a reminder of a lost Hollywood that the movie wants to dream about. It’s the only way he can connect with the material. So we’re at once in a very conventional movie and one that is very conscious of its processes and artificial images. Much of what he would go on to do 14 years later in One From the Heart appears in embryonic form, poorly developed and executed here. It doesn’t help that these fantasies belong exclusively to Hollywood. Finian’s Rainbow was a success on Broadway in the post-war period, but it was considered unfilmable because it dealt with racism. In 1968, after the end of the Hays Code, Warner decided to give it a try. It’s one of the most extreme examples of the kind of logic that could only exist on Broadway because the movie’s racial tensions are essentially resolved by leprechaun magic, so we’re talking about a movie that exists suspended in time, impossible for 1947 and completely antiquated in 1968. The movie’s stabs to sound accessible to a young audience in 1968 are quite embarrassing, and there’s probably nothing worse in the filmmaker’s work than Tommy Steele’s performance as the leprechaun. Coppola seems to basically regard the assignment as something he can survive until the next movie and not get too embarrassed by. It’s not always a successful battle.
The Rain People (1969)
The Rain People is the first great movie Coppola was involved in. In later career interviews, he always positioned it in a special place, one of the few truly personal projects of his career. It is one of the most of Francis Ford Coppola nig mysteries, he is one of the most successful Hollywood filmmakers, he is an obsessed man who can go to great lengths to make a movie, he might grow mad with it, but he didn’t start most of them, and this is something that often informs them. The Godfathers were always assignments, he was supposed to produce George Lucas’ Apocalypse Now, even One from the Heart, the movie he destroyed his first attempt at being a studio mogul for was a little movie that just got bigger and bigger. And that’s Coppola’s big paradox: he is a man who grows into passions, the movie will eventually overtake him and become life and death. That’s not how we usually think of major artists, but that’s how Coppola’s work. The Rain People is very much a late 1960s go-looking for America road movie. The themes are as loud as in The Godfather, only it’s about a housewife who runs from home and ends up taking care of a former football player who seems to suffer from a brain injury instead of something splashy. Everything is very underlined—how she can’t escape being a mother, how he is an emasculated macho innocent in all its contradictions—but this really isn’t the movie as much as what Coppola does with it. The landscape work is wonderful, the way the country is allowed to resonate in Shirley Knight’s face. It is a much more assured and visually expressive movie than Easy Rider to get another neowestern covering similar territory. There is a lot of tension and constant danger on the road and the central relationship is never too simple, even with its symbolic origins. Coppola gets plenty out of the interplay between Knight and James Caan, they often make what could be too obvious on page flow and become much more presence based on screen. Caan’s performance is wonderful for a character that shouldn’t work. The same is true about Robert Duvall in a part that is design too much as a deux ex machina who is there just so the movie can end but who works hard to ground it and adds so much genuine danger. Coppola has a weakness for easy conceptualization, it is there all over his films, and certainly on this one, but it is fascinating to observe this small-character movie negotiate through it. The characters matter plenty for him and one of his most touching and intimate films.
The Godfather (1972)
The big one. Whatever else, Coppola will always be known for the four movies he made in the 1970s and, above all, as “the director of The Godfather”. I like The Godfather, but not as much as others do; it is a little inflated for my taste, Coppola’s work do tend towards overblown and the Visconti-lite bits around the gangster movie often strike me as too much, but it is a very skilled put together movie. There are very few enduring popular Hollywood movies with as many very enjoyable big scenes, on this it is more Casablanca than The Leopard and that isn’t a bad thing. The usual take on The Godfather is that Coppola elevated a trashy best-seller novel, but it is worth pointing out that not only Puzo co-wrote the movie, but Coppola remained very faithful to him throughout the years. It is The Godfather fans that usually want to get rid of Puzo, not him and indeed, one thing that sets the first movie apart from the sequels is that it has a wonderful propulsive quality that comes from the novel. For a three-hour movie full of very long scenes, it decisively moves towards its violent destination. It is true that the more salacious details, like Sonny sexual potency, get downplayed, but Coppola keeps all the money shots, and the movie delivers on them as often as Jaws do. The body of the gangster movie remains there, and a lot of the thrills are cheap. The great thing Coppola and Puzo manage is perfectly structuring their adaptation so the movement from Brando to Pacino and the violence and more implacable post-war capital are raised together. What I don’t much care for is the whole “this is a movie about the damnation of a man’s soul”, as good as Pacino is, Michael functions better as a conduit than some tragic figure, and the need to turn the story into a grand tragedy plays to Coppola’s worst instincts. The movie’s loftier aspirations play better in the scenes with Robert Duvall, who very much acts like he is a business lawyer stuck in The Public Enemy, and his exasperated dealings get in the idea of the relationship between gangsterism and capitalism better than anything else in the movie. And of course, there’s that wonderful parade of character actors that help give the movie its rich textured world, people like Vigoda, Rocco or Lattieri are its unsung heroes. One of the main reasons the movie is so popular is how developed its world is, and all those guys are major reasons why that is true. And of course, the big fireworks ending when Coppola taste for the grandiose does pay off even if the really best bit there is the scene between Duvall and Vigoda that he allows to play straighter.
The Conversation (1974)
The major success of The Godfather did allow Coppola to make The Conversation, the one among his bigger movies that really came from his heart. Another of the great Coppola paradoxes: he is one of the kings of big Hollywood spectacle, but he gravitates towards isolation, alienation and paranoia. That’s the emotional meat of his best movies, even in The Godfather, the one big trick towards connecting its auteur with the material is always to try to isolate Michael in the big crowd. This is all front and center in The Conversation, a personal movie that is also very much a follow-up to the big hit movie, so those preoccupations are filtered through filmmaking, and one thing it makes clear is making movies is a very dirty business. It is hardly ever discussed like that but The Conversation is a spy movie and Harry Caul (Gene Hackman) is very much a character of the Graham Greene/John Le Carré school, a melancholic and tired spy, but this is the US so he works for private interests. Most of the movie deals with how much Harry is willing to relate to others, and Coppola has to find the exact distance between him and them. It is quite a fascinating dance to slowly craft. Coppola mostly made this movie in partnership with two of the big pros he worked with, actor Gene Hackman and sound designer Walter Murch. It is amazing the extent that Hackman filters all Coppola’s concepts through body language, if the movie is something of a solo, Hackman is never showy and let the action play through the execution of tasks while Mutch crafts an elaborate soundscape for Caul, Coppola and the audience to get lost in. The three manage among them to get a lot about the way film labor can affect the audience in ways that are very sinister. Among other things, this is Coppola’s most malevolent movie, closer to De Palma including in its taste for punishment and irony. Hackman’s very specific Catholic guilt over how his work is used and the way it is made to reflect around him betrays how the movie doubles as a self-portrait of a Catholic artist navigating an ideologically dominated wasp business.
The Godfather Part II (1974)
The Godfather Part II is very secretly the real prototype of the bigger louder sequel that would later become how Hollywood operates. It is a big operatic tragedy, but as I said about Part I, I’m not very invested in the rotten of Michael Corleone’s soul and while I very much appreciate the John Cazale spotlight this offers, I find the whole Michael/Fredo business a little too much crocodile tears. The final scene has always struck me as rather hollow. Part 2 has almost as many great scenes as Part I does, but it lacks that movie satisfying construction: the big debt setting end feels too much like a replay, the senate hearings never work as the structuring device and the movie inside the movie with De Niro as young Vito is very good while often getting in the way. One thing that I think really hurts it, is that Paramount is a bunch of cheapskates and decided not to pay Richard Castellano to comeback so Coppola and Puzo are left crafting a new character Pentangeli to replace Clemenza, actor Michael V. Gazzo is as good as Castellano was on the earlier film, but that he is playing not-Clemenza does kill some of the illusion that this is an extension of Michael’s moral downfall, it highlights that The Godfather II is well The Godfather II. A very skilled, terrifically acted, and often thoughtful piece of brand extension made by superior artists.
Apocalypse Now (1979)
Coppola other very big movie, it is more flawed than The Godfather, but I like it better, probably because, as I said earlier, I like when Coppola is overtaken by the need to make a movie, and there are few times this happened as much as in Apocalypse Now. The meaning really is tied to the filmmaking method, for good and bad. A movie about how Hollywood apparatus can’t really be used for war purposes without it getting completely mixed up with it. The flaws are obvious: as a drama, it completely derails by the time of the confrontation its building towards (barely a thing works after Dennis Hooper invites Martin Sheen to the camp), Brando’s performance is a mannered disaster, its structurally wonky in a way that is very frontloaded, and let’s face it, Coppola has no idea on how to relate to war beyond making a big movie around it is awesome and kind like the war itself. His movie showcases plenty about what is the worst of American psyche and very little about the Vietnam War itself, but a Hollywood superproduction is much more likely to tell some about the former anyway. He was so lost that he did hire someone with actual Vietnam experience, journalist Michael Herr, to write the off-screen narration after the movie was done, which is one of its most fascinating aspects—an exercise in criticism as the movie is ongoing. Herr helps the movie exist as a consistent inquiry into the war and what Coppola is doing. Again, what makes Apocalypse Now great is that it is a process movie. That is probably why the part everyone remembers the most is the Duvall section, whose scenes show the biggest influence of screenwriter John Milius. The distance between the Hollywood and War apparatus is the smallest during these passages, which makes for the more populist scenes, but also some of the more troubling ones when Coppola can’t fake distance himself from what he is filming. A confession: I prefer the Redux cut to the original release one. Yes, it is more bloated, but this is one film that can be bloated. I like it because I love all the guys in Sheen’s boat, and they get more small scenes through it. I also find the movie better when it uses the going down the river device, and it plays more like it in the cut. Also, and that is probably the polemical part, I’m one of the five fans of the French plantation scene, it is slow and rhetorical, and It completely kills the narrative momentum, but Apocalypse Now has never been good as storytelling anyway. It turns the movie into more of a ghost story, implicates the filmmakers more, and reinforces that this Joseph Conrad adaptation is a particularly ugly ripped from the headlines spin on the 19th-century European notion of getting lost in third-world barbarism. It is very revealing and dislikable, but Coppola gets plenty of credit for actually allowing it to resonate in every troubling aspect.
One from the Heart (1982)
At this point it should be clear that I really like Francis Ford Coppola movies and that my taste in Coppola movies isn’t quite the New Hollywoodish ones, so it probably should be of little surprise that my favorite Coppola movie happens to be One From the Heart, the little musical about small people that became a super production that killed his studio American Zoetrope. It is the oddest entry in Coppola’s oeuvre because it is almost ridiculously over-conceptualized even by his standards and yet the entire achievement is predicted by how heartfelt the movie is. The entire idea is to put as much Hollywood gloss as possible over the action and still make it feel sincere and it does and it is beautiful, at least if you happen to connect with it. Of course, it is a musical, so Coppola goes all in on the artifice and he makes it very studio-bound with characters that often diminish next to the size of production. Vittorio Storaro and Dean Tavalouris do some of their finest work, every movie-like quality of this pops up from the screen. It is worth mentioning that the movie is patterned out of FW Murnau’s Sunrise, the key start of Hollywood expressionism. One From the Heart started the second leg of Coppola’s career, he had always been a mannerist, but the movies from this point on will take place almost always at the surface of a very self-aware image, and even the ones that seem slightly more naturalist will often betray themselves, like Coppola is increasingly lost in a film myth that belongs only to him. And it is not a period that ever truly ended. Tom Waits composed a beautiful score, among the best in a modern musical, but the movie has songs more than numbers; it operates through setting a mood that is inseparable from them. I often listen to the soundtrack album by Waits and Crystal Gayle, and while I love the songs, I usually just want to get lost in my memories of the movie. The movie’s aesthetics and drama remain tied. At the center there’s Federic Forrest, an actor Coppola loves and uses often during this period, he is a very good actor but isn’t much of a star, he certainly pales next to Raul Julia as the other guy. Julia and Nastassja Kinski, the two temptations, are foreign actors whose exoticism is intended to make them more attractive. When Teri Garr complains that Forrest doesn’t sing, that’s Coppola’s own aesthetic problem, to construct such a fantasy that, as absurd as it might be, Forrest becomes touching as leading man. He lost the gamble as far as the market is concerned, but my eyes get misty on the final scenes every time I see them, so I’d say he won.
Before we go on, a small parenthesis. The Zoetrope bankruptcy is after The Godfather, the key chapter in Coppola’s image and it has been thoroughly romanticized through the last 40 years, but that isn’t quite how it played out at the time. Coppola’s attempt at becoming a movie mogul did felt like that more than a desire to setup some alternate movie industry; his sensibility is over everything, but it was not really quite set as some paradise for other artists, Coppola mostly wanted to be his own Harry Cohn. Godard made a beautiful short, An All Round Maid, while following the set of One From the Heart, but what he take from it was more suspicions about Hollywood machinery. Critics like Jonathan Rosenbaum complained about his handling of the restoration of Abel Gance’s Napoleon. And Wim Wenders, who directed Hammett for Coppola, the one movie made at Zoetrope other than One From the Heart people might’ve seen, regarded the experience in the same ways many foreign artists who go to Hollywood do—a rough awakening. When Zoetrope went down, the feelings were fairly mixed even beyond the mainstream mean-spiritedness. There is certainly some unfairness to this, but some demystification of Zoetrope might be useful. There is little to suggest it would regularly work like Coppola’s using the opportunity to use his power to become a patron to like-minded artists as much as multiply his own sensibility through many filmmakers willing to work in the Coppola way, the mode seems much closer to Tsui Hark’s later Film Workshop. One can observe this through Hammett, a fascinating mess, whose noir pastiche (starring Forrest as Dashiel Hammett getting involved in his own Maltese Falcon) sounds like something that might attract American culture crazy Wenders but plays a lot like one of Coppola’s 1980s experiments. The two men have a fascination with past images, but Wenders is the kind of allure foreigners often have, while Coppola concerns the more practical ways it can be expanded, modernized and made his own and Hammett emerges very much a Coppola movie executed by a talented proxy. .
The Outsiders (1983)
Coppola followed the One From the Heart’s disaster with a couple of SE Hilton adaptations. Young Adult novels set in the 1950s among juvenile delinquents. Nostalgia for the time period had become very popular in the 1980s, and a return to the past in often troubling ways will dominate Coppola’s work from the decade, he actually wouldn’t make another primary contemporary set feature until 1996 much maligned Jack. As a coming-of-age film set in a popular time period during a boom for teen movies, it feels like a very calculated commercial move, and indeed, it is known now mostly for its cast of future stars/almost stars. Coppola’s very anti-naturalist images most inquire over this past, more than let the nostalgia be celebrated. It equates the arrival of maturity with an embrace of death in a way that is very odd for a movie aimed at a young audience. It is a creepy and painful movie, haunted by a hard-to-identify failure, perhaps related to the mostly absent adults. The Outsiders is one of the couple of 1980s Coppola movies people did see back then, but it is far more slippery than its initial image suggests. It always felt to me a little cold and studied, but I must say I’ve never seen Coppola’s later cut, and in my experience, his revisits to his later movies are always improvements.
Rumble Fish (1983)
The Outsiders does feel like more of a rough draft for Rumble Fish. More 50s mystification, more haunted artificial images pushed to much larger extremes, Matt Dillon, who gets the meatier part in the early movie back only this time around looks in admiration at older brother Mickey Rourke. It is Coppola’s most mannered movie, and when I was a teenager I hated it; everything seemed too much, and from Rourke’s slow cadences to the elaborate black and white cinematography, it felt very phony. My young self was, of course, an idiot, although it is pretty much exactly like that only it is also the point. I particularly appreciate the use of Rourke, that most mythic of 1980s stars who finds here an ideal director/character combo, he seems unreal and marked to burn fast, as does the motorcycle boy (by the way, this movie is called The Savage of the Motorcycle in Brazil, sometimes distributors can be inspired) . Coppola blows up the Hinton drama much bigger than it can quite sustain. There are a lot of outsized male emotions in what feels like a sketched relationship, but the feelings like in One From the Heart do register, it is like a 70s Springsteen song. The movie fully works only when Rourke is around or after Dennis Hopper shows up as their much talked father, he comes with all his 1960s burnout associations, but with a humanity one doesn’t quite expect from the movie, the family drama suddenly feels like the real deal. Rumble Fish is maddening, maybe silly on spots, but it is quite beautiful and, as a way forward for the new Coppola, very successful.
Cotton Club (1984)
Coppola’s other 1980s box office disaster. Former Paramount head Robert Evans came to him about doing a new period gangster movie set in the jazz age, but the filmmaker’s artistic interests couldn’t be further from where they were a dozen years before so this is very far from The Godfather Redux. It is a big production that seems to have gone on forever (Nicolas Cage has talked about how taking a supporting part in his uncle movie actually slowed down his career because of how many parts he lost due the consistent delays) and ended up with mixed reviews (which complained it was no Godfather) and empty theatres. It is a very alluring movie in a similar way to One From the Heart, wonderful cinematography and production design, but it has very little narrative momentum; it has a setting (the club) and a series of social observations filtered through a sense of old school spectacle. If most Coppola 80s movies play like inquiries on Hollywood nostalgia, this doubles for The Cotton Club, in many ways a didactic movie about the ways entertainment and capital/gangsterism intersect. Coppola is too much of a showman to stop anything for a lecture, but the culture observations are a key part of it. There is also a lot on the ways the artists in the club are black and the audience is white (among the many reasons to love The Cotton Club is that it includes one of Woody Strode’s last performances), although that can feel more underlined than developed. There are two stories about struggling artists: Richard Gere who gets involved with gangsters before becoming a movie star, and Gregory Hines, a dancer who works in a club. The way to see the movie is through Coppola’s recent Encore cut, which, among other things restored a lot of Hynes cut footage. Although the movie remains hardly balanced between them, his exploits add a richness to the movie. It is pretty much a portrait of a place in a time, so more does means its world registers strongly and that is what this movie is going for. There is a wonderful deep cast that plays a major role in this as well. Cotton Club feels a lot like the movies Alan Rudolph was making at the time, like Choose Me and Trouble in Mind, a large phantasmagoria of images of Hollywood past. Only Rudolph’s romanticism is stated bluntly, while Coppola’s more complicated relationship with it comes with plenty of commentary baggage.
Peggy Sue Got Married (1986)
It is the safest movie Coppola was involved in the post Zoetrope days and arguably his only popular at the time movie made between Apocalypse Now and Dracula. It is more 80s nostalgia played with a good amount of ambivalence; only the very artificial elements have much less of an alienating effect than in his other movies from the time. The central mechanism is actually very close to Back to the Future, with the science fiction trappings replaced by fantasy ones. I’m sure this was in development before, but the similarities are loud and like the early movie this is about using the trip to the past to make the 80s better while also recognizing the trip as somewhat traumatic. Zemeckis is, of course, much funnier, but Coppola’s is far more intimate, and like a lot of his work from the time, he manages to include far more emotion in the cardboard scenarios than expected. There is a little of It’s a Wonderful Life to it as well, and Coppola’s is one of the few 80s filmmakers that get that what makes Capra interesting is the more troubling subtext. Peggy Sue is a very mannered movie played through its two central performances by Kathleen Turner and Nicolas Cage, a high school couple destined to be broken by adulthood realities. They are highly skilled, very non-naturalist performances who never really go together and the disconnect can limit the movie some. Turner, in her early 30s at the time, does wonders with the whole adult playing teen, and Cage’s work was one of his first high expressionist performances, one weird choice after another, starting with his voice. Turner tried to get him fired and the executives were all for it, but Coppola stood by him. I have no idea he understood what Cage was doing, but I’m sure he could appreciate the sight of very idiosyncratic artistic expression arriving in the middle of commercial considerations.
Gardens of Stone (1987)
This would be my pick for Coppola’s most underrated movie. It is hardly seen and often dismissed. It is Coppola’s John Ford movie, complete with James Earl Jones giving modern Hollywood’s greatest Ward Bond impression. If Cotton Club got punished for not being The Godfather, Gardens of Stone got murdered for not being Apocalypse Now. It is a war-at-home movie set during Vietnam in an army cemetery. I’m far from the first to mention that it feels very close to Ford’s The Long Gray Line, which was a biography of a professor at West Point. Ford’s movie was a celebration of a well-lived life through a strong marriage and a connection to his students; Coppola’s is a strange tale of the alienation of a man suspended between his loathing of the current war and his love for everything the army stands for. The movies gave a similar awe for military and wistful perspective while coming to far different meanings. Coppola just treats his main character’s worldview with empathy and respect, which was more than enough to get the movie dismissed as Reaganite cinema by quite a few progressive critics. There is a romantic plot between James Caan and Anjelica Huston as a left-leaning journalist that falls for him, which is my favorite romance in a Coppola movie. Their scenes have a lived-in grown-up quality that relationships in movies don’t achieve very often. Huston is as wonderful as Jones (and Caan is pretty good too). Their first date at a dinner with Jones and his wife is among my 10 favorite scenes in a Coppola movie. That said, I have to stop before saying Gardens of Stone is one of his best movies because the heart of the movie is Caan and Jones taking care of the son of an old army buddy, who the movie makes clear is doomed and comes out as a little too much of a symbol, and because of that, those scenes are nowhere as good as everything else. So, this is a movie where everything around the central plot is amazing, but that can get a little thin at its center. Still, I kinda love Gardens of Stone, it is not Apocalypse Now, but I wish more people gave it a chance.
Tucker: The Man and His Dream (1988)
Tucker leads itself very easily to allegorical autobiographical reading: the tale of the man who comes up with the perfect car and gets squashed by the automobile industry as Coppola’s own. The project actually predates Zoetrope, as Coppola already mentioned it in the 70s (his dad was a Preston Tucker investor), and the movie doesn’t feel like an auto portrait, but it is likely that his own experiences inform its urgency, and it is worth pointing out that Coppola finally agreed to Paramount pleas for a Godfather III after they picked up this. It is part celebration and part inquiry into the idea of American free enterprise. The word dream is certainly the big one in the title and it does double duty, presenting Jeff Bridges as the perfect pitchman for the idea while often pulling back. The images are as unreal as anything else in his 1980s filmography, and the production design and careful period detail less work towards make the movie cozy as something of a trap, past as an ideal that can only exist as movie images and the only place Tucker’s dream can fully exist. The editing and dialogue have a musical cadence without, of course, any numbers. The acting is pitched high and very enthusiastic, everyone seems taken by Tucker’s mania, and Coppola does a terrific job of bringing every cast member into it. At the heart of Tucker isn’t the trial or the struggles of his company, but the relationship between Bridges and Martin Landau as the businessman running the company, who should be the practical man taking care of things but is of course caught in Tucker fever too. The movie is this dance of seduction between an image of what could be and this audience who gets caught in it, their dynamic is where the real movie lies, the way an image that everything is possible can overtake others, a plea less to entrepreneurship as the passion a project can generate. Bridges is great, but Landau is even better—one of the finest turns in a Coppola movie. This is at the same time one of his most hysterical and eccentric works, with all the energy that comes from Tucker madman’s pitch and one of his most warm and affectionate, due to how Coppola’s generosity extends itself to a whole family, not only of kin, that gets behind him and how they are allowed to function together. The idea of the musical soon makes sense, it’s like a band playing together in harmony.
Life Without Zoe (episode of New York Stories (1989)
New York Stories was an anthology film with the easy pre-sold premise of putting together the three most respected mainstream American filmmakers around the time: Coppola, Martin Scorsese and Woody Allen. Coppola is sort of the odd man out, given that he is the one without a more pronounced New York connection and he answers that by delivering an episode centering on the private life of a privileged young girl. As the description suggests, this feels very close to Coppola’s daughter Sofia work and she, who was 17 at the time, co-wrote the script, and there has long been internet speculation that he mostly farmed the episode to her. A narrative that unites both Francis fans who want to blame the trifle on her and Sofia fans who want to expand her filmography further. She is certainly the intellectual auteur and it is easy to imagine Coppola is using the assignment as an opportunity to offer her some training ground, and as such, it was certainly successful. The images have a delirious quality close to his work from the time as well as an intense fable towards many of the individual moments, and the most Francis’ touch is how this seems set against the anthology proposal, from Sofia’s large presence to how it is all about escaping New York. It feels very much like a family affair, with Talia Shire playing the mother and dad Carmine doing the score. It is a movie of an affectionate curiosity. The Sofia movie it suggests the most is predictably Somewhere, the one that concerns Francis more directly, but there is a very warm quality to the father-daughter scenes, easily the ones that linger in the memory.
The Godfather – Part III (1990)
A while ago, Coppola released a new cut of Godfather III called “Coda: The Death of Michael Corleone” It is an improvement, much better balanced and paced, he claimed he wanted to call it that at the time, but Paramount didn’t allow him. It is also a better title because Coda makes it clear that this is less a sequel than an epilogue/commentary. I actually love The Godfather III, which I know is an utterly perverse thing to say considering I’m not crazy about the early ones, but the moment Pacino confesses his crimes to the Pope is by far my favorite moment in any of those and it is the only movie in the series where the idea of cost seems seriously considered and whose emotional stakes resonate to me probably because it is presented as thoughtful revisit of past mistakes. I can understand people who love those early movies who get annoyed by it. It is not that Coppola made it against them, but there is a good deal of it that is negative towards the early ones: Michael is a very passive figure, there’s only one big action showstopper (the helicopter massacre), Connie, the one character who wants to be in a Godfather sequel, seems like a zombie, and most of what the movie has to say about them is a bummer. There is plenty about collateral damage, about how awful and stained criminality is, there’s even a scene where civilians get gunned down, something the original movies avoided like the plague, the Church presence is there to make clear Michael’s life work of amassing power is useless and can’t really buy him absolution. And the Corleones fail more or less the whole movie. It does have some genuine flaws, Paramount were again cheapskates and Robert Duvall not being in this feels very stupid, Diane Keaton is but she is the only person barely bothering, and yes, as everyone says Sofia is bad, although I find her touching. One thing I love about the movie is that it feels far less removed from our world, not so much in time (it takes place around a decade prior to release instead of some 15/20 years), but in how the Corleones feel integrated into it and how Michael punishment left the realm of the metaphysical and gets rendered flesh. And it is very much a movie of its time full of echoes about the last days of the cold war plus one gets to love Coppola for making an expensive movie that suggests John Paul II’s papacy was the result of a political/criminal conspiracy. It is also fascinating to observe it come out at the same time as Texasville and The Two Jakes. Three very belated sequels to New Hollywood classics (The Last Picture Show and Chinatown in those cases) that are similar ambivalent works by artists who had reached a point to be far less certain about where they stand about much of what their early movies cover. A very expressive movie about moral reckoning.
Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1992)
The one big hit Coppola had after the 70s, I used to resent this one a lot because it is the prototype of a horror movie for people who do not like horror movies, and this is not something I enjoy. I don’t resent it anymore, but that is still pretty much true. It is a big doomed romance that happens to be about a guy called Vlad, but couldn’t Coppola put a bit more meat into the thrills? That said, the big operatic excess of the whole thing is incredible, one of the most sumptuous movies to come out of that Hollywood period. I often joke that it is like Coppola made the most expensive Werner Schroeter movie. Jonathan Rosenbaum made this comparison at the time as well, along with another one to Raul Ruiz. The point is that Coppola’s 1980s flirting with artificial excess do reach a new level that both moved him closer to some modern cinema greats and finally connected with audiences. A big grand guignol orgy. One of the horniest Hollywood movies, and in absolute panic about that. The Hammer’s Dracula was about Victorian prudishness, Peter Cushing’s Van Helsing’s whole job is about making sure women’s sexuality is kept safe under a lock; Coppola’s version takes place long after thar and its sense of confusion is palpable and powerful. I do like how Coppola approaches acting with every performer having one or two note they are asked to repeat nonstop which led poor Keanu Reeves to get shit on for decades for doing his job (if he is bad, so is Anthony Hopkins). As pure spectacle, it is the most satisfying Coppola movie along Apocalypse Now, those practical effects and the production design are a wonder. And much like the early movie, it a often repelled by itself but very decided to follow its creative instincts, whatever they led him to. A madman movie in the best sense.
Jack (1996)
I happen to like Jack. I know, I know—this is the one even hardcore Coppola fans are supposed to apologize for. It is corny, and it stars Robin Williams as a grown-up kid, and it is full of sentiment in that cloying way Williams 90s movies often have. An “embarrassment”, but I like how Coppola takes the premise and treats it straight. There are a few concessions to the Williams formula that come out as phony, but it gets the kid in the adult body premise and accepts and confronts it in every non-nice intimation that comes with it. The movie it mostly makes me think of is his pal Steven Spielberg’s AI, in which every superficial sentimental moment turns out to be rather creepy. We are more than 20 years removed from the last time Robin Williams starred in something like it, that cultural moment is long past, so there is no need to mistake it for Patch Adams. This is a movie in which Robin Williams plays a grown-up kid and it is weird and disturbing. There is a lot of good scenes in it and Williams and Diane Lane are very good. And it is one of Coppola’s most direct treatments of the isolation and failure to connect that often shows up on his movies. Sometimes, when it comes to making fiction, it is a matter of looking at something as silly and stupid as it might be and finding the emotional center behind it and Jack is scary and depressing the way the life of its character should be. Jack might be minor, but it is far from some stain in Coppola’s work.
The Rainmaker (1997)
Orson Welles made The Stranger in 1946 to prove he could play the game, do a reasonably conventional thriller on time and budget without too many obtrusive touches, and mostly pulled it off. The Rainmaker is Coppola’s version of The Stranger, but it turns out to be the last Hollywood movie he made. It is a John Grisham legal thriller, as fashionable as anything could be in 1997, starring a hot actor of the moment (Matt Damon), it doesn’t have any of the artifice and unusual tics of his post-Apocalypse Now work, and it is even set in a very recognizable here and now, something one can hardly claim about any of his post-60s work. It is a return to one of the key Coppola paradoxes: how he has the air of a maverick around him while often functioning as a hired gun, adapting big novels, and taking assignments—only there is little madness about it, save from a very genuine desire to bring old studio craft back in a time when everyone agreed things were feeling shaky. Cinephiles are often nostalgic for 90s studio movies, but it should be said this is not how things felt at the time, and while this sort of courtroom drama now gets people waxing about “movies for adults,” the words “John Grisham” mostly generated winces, only Coppola takes the assignment very seriously. It is a very handsomely made movie, the best talent 1990s studio money could assemble (Coppola ever get Michael Herr back to write a voice-over as he has done in Apocalypse Now) and the storytelling couldn’t be better, very nicely woven together, angry and serious-minded behind its “small lawyer after corporate malpractice” central tale, and packed with very good scenes. The supporting cast is full of good people doing great work (Mickey Rourke, Dean Stockwell, Mary Kay Place, Roy Scheider, Teresa Wright), plus Danny DeVito and Jon Voight doing wonders to make the courtroom scenes lively. One could complain about some of Grisham’s easy moralizing or a weak subplot about Damon getting involved with a victim of domestic abuse he helps, but put The Rainmaker next to Joel Schumacher Grisham movies or a more prestige version of it like A Civil Action, and it becomes clear how much Coppola’s choices are more thoughtful and successful. If one wants to show others how Coppola is a superior talent, this one is a great example because the material is more plain, and it is all about first-rate execution. Also, it is shocking now how ambivalent about the law it is. Most legal thrillers question the rule of the law by turning the courtroom into a major stage for performance, but The Rainmaker is very good at detailing the inner workings around the case and made clear the its success is not based on Damon’s charm or the righteous of his cause, but on things like a judge cozy with corporations dropping dead and the lottery awarding him a former civil rights lawyer taking his place, absolutely not the way society should function, and the movie is angry about that as much as the bad corporation plot doubles as one of his Hollywood tirades. Time was probably running out by then, and he just quietly went to deal with wine.
Youth Without Youth (2007)
Coppola went into retirement for a decade and then he came back and made three self-financed low budget movies, offbeat arty objects. Those movies have plenty of continuity with what comes before, but the Hollywood break does make them their own thing. They don’t have the resources, but they do show a miniature ingenuity that feels different from what has come before. Roughly, one can divide Coppola’s work into four periods that approximate decades: the independent up-and-comer of the 1960s, the superstar of the 1970s, the eccentric drifter of the 1980s and 1990s, and these self-made movies that are very much the work of a wealthy amateur. Youth Without Youth is the work of a very liberated man, this is Coppola unfiltered, uninterested in pleasing producers or fans. Most of his 80s experiments with non-realist images, unusual narratives and artificial sets are double-down. When Youth Without Youth come out in 2007, I kind of hate it, why was Coppola subjecting us to a movie that was all his worst affections in what felt like a stilted epic narrative about a guy who gets struck by lightning, deages and gets to experience love and the middle of the 20th century? 17 years later, it seems to me to be one of his very best movies. It is his most romantic work, very close to Dracula, only without the Hollywood apparatus to support him, it actually does play like something Werner Schroeter might’ve made. Coppola communicates through spectacle, but he more often than not functions less a great storyteller than someone who moves through autonomous blocks of feeling, no wonder he keeps flirting with musical form. The movie has a sweep that suggests his more famous films, but again, the fact that it is super cheap actually makes it more touching and likable. It has so many ideas and so many situations, it feels like a movie that is trying to pack as much as possible in its 2 hours and it is never ashamed of sounding ridiculous. Coppola’s sense of alienation and displacement has never been so fully expressed, and its romantic leanings are at their most grand. It is very much a movie about movies, a revisit from a post-film world on how popular fiction from the 20th century look like and the desire to freeze a romantic moment in time and the consequences of it, something movies his lifelong obsession actually are better equipped to achieve than most.
Tetro (2009)
Of Coppola’s three post-retirements movies, Tetro got the warmest reception, probably because it is the one that feels the most like a 1970s movie. Not a Coppola movie exactly; it is again too small and intimate, but it does seem to be in dialogue with the major Luchino Visconti influence that exists over him and many of his generational peers. A big melodrama of family shared pain and brotherly love, one of his most Italian movies. It takes place in Buenos Aires because I suspect Argentina feels like the kind of place that can serve as a stage for such large emotions. He certainly gets a lot of mileage out of the scenes between Vincent Gallo and Aiden Ehrenreich. The movies give Gallo, a very instinctive actor, plenty of room, he is not as good as he was in Skolismoski’s Essential Killing, made around the same time, but he does bring an intensity that feels very different from most late Coppola. I never fully warm to Tetro, it feels a little too conceptual for what it is going for, like there’s too much noise between the movie and its emotional content, like if for once Coppola’s very elaborate images got the worst of him, but it is a very respectable swing.
Twixt (2011)
A quick confession: the only time I ever got around to reviewing a Coppola movie during its release was when Twixt came out in Brazil, and I was respectably mixed towards it. I complained that its discussions about filmmaking were too didactic, that the lack of resources was endearing but limiting, and compared it negatively to Alain Resnais’ final films. That I linked it to Resnais and Manoel de Oliveira should probably have told me the movie wasn’t quite operating the way I was castigating it. Twixt indeed is a didactic parable about filmmaking, but it is a feature, not a bug, it is art povera about how alluring but ultimately painful coming up with images is. A movie about movies made by someone who can’t quite dream up movies the way he used to, so he must dissect them and try to conjure what he can. The liberation of Youth without Youth is still present, but there is a certain bitterness to it, probably because the vision of cinema is decidedly more mixed. Coppola is back making a cheap horror movie, as he had done almost five decades before in Dementia 13. There is a lot of self-depreciating humor, particularly in the performances by Val Kilmer and Bruce Dern. The amateurishness of those final films seems ever more pronounced this time, both in the digital images (which lack any texture) and sets and in the action between friends feel that takes over the whole movie. What does it say about Coppola that his most naked stand-in is a horror writer that gets described as a poor man’s Stephen King? The movie is a constant fight between its more likable surfaces and the sense that the images it conjures are haunted—that there is something truly terrible about the fascination and need for cinema. Then, near the end Edgar Allan Poe shows Kilmer’s writer a flashback to his daughter’s death that alludes very directly and with little distance to the boat accident that killed Coppola’s son Gian Carlo in the late 1980s and Twixt’s home movie cheapness, its painfully awkward discussions about struggling to create, the dark cloud over it, all make sense, as does this troubling relationship with movies and the obsession they generate. Coppola can’t make movies anymore, but he can conjure some magic around pain. Megalopolis feels like the opposite of Twixt, big and expensive (although similarly self-financed), Coppola’s back in his madman mode, hopefully with the same ingenuity and feeling that this movie shows.
