I have to tell you, I’m a sucker for gangster films. From the first time I saw Jimmy Cagney on the screen I was hooked. Humphrey Bogart in High Sierra (or was it Petrified Forest?) completely blew me away and made me wish I were a guy on the lam, like Duke Mantee. Movies about John Dillinger, Al Capone, Legs Diamond, Dutch Schultz, Lucky Luciano, Lepke, and the like got my undivided attention and gave me many pleasant daydreams.

As you can tell, most of these movies were made in the thirties and forties, probably the pinnacle of film craftsmanship up to now. At least it seems that the makers did their work for love and were cognizant that these films would be judged by history, just as a piece of literature, music, or art would be. In the fifties, the new medium television brought us the gritty story of The Untouchables and the all out war between good guy Eliot Ness and the evil gang lord Al Capone in old Chicago.

Most of these gangster movies were told from the perspective of the good guy or as a fly-on-the-wall observation of how both sides operated. By the eighties, that had changed. The film makers wanted to be “relevant,” so they started to tell their stories from the point of view of some minor character and how the turmoil surrounding the major league gangsters played out as viewed by the “little guy.” This, in my opinion, was a mistake. With rare exceptions, the latter day gangster movies have all been less than stellar. Films like Billy Bathgate, concerning the notorious Jewish gangster Dutch Schultz, is told from the point of view of a mere kid, and not a very interesting one at that. Hoodlum, telling the same events from the black perspective, made the mistake of focusing on Larry Fishburne’s half-hearted portrayal of a minor thug, rather than the controversy that swirled around the main characters Schultz, Legs Diamond, and Lucky Luciano. As a result of these misguided choices in point of view, the viewer is subjected to all-too-brief flashes of brilliance when the camera is turned on the “big fish,” punctuated with long interludes of boring character development concerning the insipid protagonists.

With the exception of Mobsters, a pretty good version of the story of Lucky Luciano’s rise to power, the later gangster movies have been uniformly disappointing. Even The Untouchables, despite its glitzy Brian DePalma packaging, was only redeemed by the relatively minor roles assigned to Sean Connery and Andy Garcia.

And so it is with The Cotton Club, Francis Coppola’s post-Godfather contribution to the gangster genre. The Cotton Club is a series of vignettes with no obvious plot that I could see in my couple of viewings. This approach to filmmaking could possibly be compared to abstract art, maybe, but Director Coppola chose to use actual characters interspersed with fictional characters. There is Dutch Schultz, stunningly portrayed by underrated but very welcome James Remar, Owney Madden by similarly welcome Bob Hoskins, then there is Dixie Dwyer, played by Richard Gere, obviously interested in a paycheck more than the role. As an extra added attraction, Coppola’s nephew Nicolas (Coppola) Cage gets to play (unconvincingly) the real psychopath Mad Dog Coll but with the trumped up name of Vince Dwyer. As frosting on the cake we have Gregory Hines playing a hard working tap dancer based on the famous black brothers, one of whom had a relationship with Dorothy Dandridge in the real Cotton Club. Hines tries hard but his part has almost no relationship to the rest of the admittedly thin story.

Coppola does throw on generous dollops of glitz in the form of camerawork, costuming, and sets, peppered with a period jazz score and many old standards. Lots of famous people are characterized, but the actors bear very little resemblance to the real people they are portraying. James Cagney, Gloria Swanson, Dorothy Dandridge, and many others can be recognized from the situations but the casting really missed most of the time. Fred Gwynne, along with James Remar and Bob Hoskins in their too few and far between appearances as the bad guys probably made the biggest impression on me.

As a practical matter, I really have to give Coppola high marks for making the film look stylish. I just wish he would have combined the look with a coherent storyline and a lead character who acted like he cared about the part. One star.


Recommended:
No

Viewing Format: DVD
Video Occasion: None of the Above