Film

Rip It Up, Issue 94, 1 May 1985, Page 39

Film

THE COTTON CLUB Director: Francis Ford Coppola "You start giving white people what they want and soon you’ve got no blood left” or so a young black hood advises Gregory Hines in one of the early scenes of Coppola’s new film. This racial tension is just one of the struggles portrayed in The Cotton Club, which offers a complex saga of love, ambition and politics, set against the colourful background of the legendary Harlem nightclub in the 20s. The film is almost an embarrassment of riches and fits neatly into the Coppola canon. There are many reminiscences of One From the Heart, while Fred Gwynne’s marvellously laconic Frenchie recalls the director’s Godfather movies. Young Nicholas Cage invests his role with the same sense of haunted despair as he does in Rumble Fish and the extended credits sequence featuring Ellington’s ‘Mood Indigo’ hearkens back to that long coda in Apocalypse Now.

Coppola’s film is built around the musical acts of the Cotton Club and these have been recreated with infinite care. Some, such as those of Cab Calloway, are almost eerily convincing far more so than the "cameos” by Charlie Chaplin, Gloria Swanson and other celebrities of the day. These musical numbers are often treated as a background setting for the action of the film although occasionally, as in Lonnette McKee’s harrowing account of Harold Aden’s ‘III Wind’, Coppola leaves the song almost intact to make its powerful impact. A line of chorus girls might become a frame in one of the many elegant montages and there is that extraordinary sequence in which Hines’ tap-dancing feet provide the accompaniment for the final ambush and assassination of the villainous Dutch. By the final scene at the Grand Central Station, cabaret and real life are almost imperceptibly merged with Coppola’s expected flair. In spite of all its muchpublicised production problems, The Cotton Club is a major film by one of the most creative directors

working in the American cinema today. It’s interesting to note as well that Richard Gere, as well as giving an amiable performance as Dixie Dwyer, plays all his own solos. His duet with Coppola’s favourite actress, Diane Lane, in ‘Am I Blue?’ is one of the highlights of the film. THE LAST STARFIGHTER Director: Nick Castle Fantasy mingles with some rather neat satire in what might seem to be the latest entry in the teen sci-fi/videogames market. The plot, with the blue-eyed Californian hero (Lance Guest) being recruited by the suave Centauri (Robert Preston) to fight the ultimate Battle of the Stars, is resolutely mock-heroic and this mood is sustained well in both Jonathan Betuel’s witty script and Craig Satan’s adroit pastiches of John Williams in the music department. As well as revealing the curiosities of life on the remote planet of Rylos, The Last Starfighter scores with its wry observation of life back on Earth in a small Californian trailer park. Typical of the film’s wit is when Guest’s robot replicant scorns the young American for wanting to save the whales but not being willing to lift a finger for the cause of the Universe. The other attractive features of Castle’s film are the appealing performances from Guest and Catherine Mary Stewart as his girlfriend whilst both Preston and Dan O’Herlihy have field days with their more exotic extra-terrestrial roles. BRAZIL Director: Terry Gilliam I have to admit that I have always been a little jaundiced when it comes to Monty Python’s particular brand of humour. Certainly, their work just seemed funnier and more pointed on the small screen than it ever was in the cinema where, with the possible exception of Monty Python and the

Holy Grail, their ideas tended to wear a little thin.

So it is with Brazil, a fantasy vision of the future which Gilliam himself described as "Walter Mitty meets George Orwell”: an ambitious description, as Brazil deals in neither the delightful fantasy of the Danny Kaye film or the taut social satire of the Orwell novel. Much of the blame can be laid at the two and a half hour running time and Gilliam’s tendency to fragment the overall structure of the film by being unable to resist a constant succession of nudging jokes. These range from a secretary coolly typing a transcript of a prisoner’s tortured screams to Peter Vaughan's bizarre appearance in a Santa Claus suit. The most successful moments of Brazil are supplied by Katherine Helmond (the batty mother in the late, lamented Soap) as the manic Ida Lowry, playing her first scene at the plastic surgeon’s with her face distorted and pulled back by giant paper clips. This is worth all those aimless scenes where Jonathan Pryce’s young hero soars into the air as a modern-day Icarus. CITY HEAT

Director: Richard Benjamin Benjamin’s last film, the 1982 My Favourite Year almost didn't work: in the final count its sprawling if amiable plot was held together by Peter OToole’s virtuoso performance as the flamboyant Alan Swann. City Heat relies on genre to give it the same cohesion but this is simply not enough

even Steve Martin’s Dead Men Don't Wear Plaid, with all its strained inclusion of 40s film clips, was more effective as a spoof on the type of films we associate with Bogart in his prime. In the all-important matter of timing, City Heat is far too laidback, too casual. At times, as in the first confrontation of Burt Reynolds and Clint Eastwood, one can sense that the actors’ deliveries are allowing for audience reaction in between their wisecracks: when the expected reaction doesn’t come forth, the scene falls more than a little flat. Nevertheless, it is the relationship between these two actors that gives City Heat any charm it has and it is indeed sad to see Jane Alexander in such a thankless role as Reynolds’ Girl Friday and Irene Cara struggle through a part that might have seemed tailor-made for a young Lena Horne.

William Dart