A good if not great movie

Press, 27 May 1985, Page 14

A good if not great movie

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THE COTTON CLUB Directed by Francis Coppola Screenplay by William Kennedy and Francis Coppola Francis Coppola has a rather heavy-handed approach to filmmaking, which he demonstrates again in “The Cotton Club” (Westend). Using this technique, he makes blockbusters — “The Godfather,” “Apocalypse Now” — which usually are remembered as much for their length and plodding development as they are for the powerful impact of the work as a whole. Coppola has already given us what he must consider his definitive works on gangsters (“Godfather”) and musicals (“One From the Heart”), and now has gone one seemingly logical stage further by combining the two in one film set in the crime-ridden nightclubs of New York during the prohibition era. To do this, he has interwoven two superficially parallel love stories: one jetween a cornet player, Dixie Dwyer (Richard Gere), and a club singer and gangster’s girlfriend, Vera Cicero (Diane Lane); the other between a black dancer. Sandman Williams (Gregory Hines), and a

singer headed for stardom (Lonette McKee). The lives of these four tie in with those of the leading gangster bootleggers of the time: Dutch Schultz (James Remar), and the owner of the Cotton Club and elder statesman mobster (Bob Hoskins). The Cotton Club was an actual Harlem nightclub during the jazz era which flourished on the irony of featuring all-black musicians, singers and dancers to an all-white audience. This is the club where Duke Ellington first made his name, and where Cab Calloway later presented “Minnie the Moocher.” It was also the place for the glitterati of the time to be seen, and the film goes to great pains to give us brief glimpses of Gloria Swanson, Charles Chaplin, James Cagney, and the like. The film’s gangsters, like

Dutch Schultz, were also real enough, while the other characters are an interesting blend of fact and fiction: Dixie Dwyer, a cornet player employed by the underworld, becomes a Hollywood star, with touches of both Bix Beiderbecke and George Raft; and the lightskinned coloured girl who wants to reach the top as a singer has shades of Lena Horne. The film also provides the opportunity for most of the cast to give splendid performances: Richard Gere plays his own cornet; Gregory Hines is always great at his tap dancing; Diane Lane makes a delectable gangster’s moll; James Remar is convincingly psychopathic as Dutch Schultz; while Bob (“Pennies From Heaven”) Hoskin and Fred (Herman Munster) Gwynne add a touch of dignity to crime. Coppola’s script also has some excellent lines about the characters’ origins: The coloured singer muses, “My father was coloured. My mother was white. So what does that make me?” Schultz’s sepulchral bodyguard, known as the Golem (Julian Beck), says, “Nobody calls me nothin’ ... I didn’t have a mother. They found me in a garbage pail,”

With so many colourful characters and situations, however, one never has the chance to become closely involved with the film’s more personal developments. Indeed, one never gets the time to care whether boy gets girl, or vice versa. What keeps the movie going at an ever-increasing staccato pace are the undercurrents of the gangster world, with its numbers racket and bootlegging double-dealing, and the cabaret acts at the Cotton Club. This builds to a highly kinetic climax, cross-cutting the machine-gun slaying of Schultz with twirling tap dancing. Not content with this, Coppola goes off into a fantasy ending, with happy black and white folks going through their paces at both the club and Grand Central Station. Coppola is a big man who thinks big, and one of his main troubles is that he forces on his audience in huge helpings material that could be better assimilated in smaller doses. Thus, one may flounder through some of the darker moments of “The Cotton Club,” but still come away knowing that one has been richly served.

Of the various genre on which Coppola touches, I have seen better gangster movies (even TV’s “The Untouchables”), musicals (lots of them), and films about America’s Roaring Twenties (Milos Forman’s “Ragtime” was set a little earlier but comes to mind for epic excellence). Coppola has managed to combine all of these to give us a very good, if not great, movie.