The Cotton Club, (1984)
Nicolas Cage is Vincent "Mad Dog" Dwyer
Critics often cite Michael Cimino's Heaven's Gate as the deathknell for the '70's Golden Era of auteur filmmaking. Before Cimino's film single-handedly brought United Artists to near-bankruptcy money was no object in service of a director's artistic spectacle. Afterwards former golden boys like Robert Altman, Martin Scorcese and Francis Ford Coppola had to soft shoe a little more if they wanted anything near the budgets they were once allotted. If Heaven's Gate was a deathknell then 1984's The Cotton Club was the nails in the coffin. Throwing money at a troubled production wasn't a solution anymore.
The same year Heaven's Gate came out Francis Ford Coppola pulled up on the tiller and managed to cut his own near-debacle - the notoriously costly Apocalypse Now - into arguable the greatest war film of all time. Years later Coppola was in deep debt following his self-funded, little-loved film One From the Heart and Robert Evans' Zoetrope Pictures was looking for a hit. Evans, the financial force behind the Godfather movies and Coppola's biggest frenemy had optioned James Haskins' pictoral history of New York's famous Cotton Club with the intent on directing it himself. With distributor Orion Pictures' money already spent Evans hired Coppola to write a draft of Godfather-scribe Mario Puzo's script in the hope of attracting some private investors With tensions mounting between the two men directing duties fell to Coppola and once more he found himself trying to land a cinematic Spruce Goose.
In Apocalypse Now the madness and disease that plagued Coppola's production also served to infuse the finished film with a hallucinatory, paranoid beauty. In like form, life and art became muddled during The Cotton Club's production but the results were profoundly more dispiriting. In a fitting piece of irony Evans' film on the inseparable ties between '30s jazz musicians and dancers and the mob crime that funded them was bankrolled entirely by private investors of questionable means. The most notable of these were Arab arms dealer Adnan Khashoggi and vaudeville promoter Roy Radin, a New York impresario whose bullet-riddled body would be discovered in a dry California creek bed weeks into production.
Radin's killing was labeled by the press the "Cotton Club murder" and hobbled Evans' career (whom the police briefly suspected) much like Heaven's Gate did Cimino's. When the Cotton Club was released to a resounding shrug, investor turned on investor, suing each other and accusing each other for unnecessarily inflating costs on a film that had no chance of recouping its money. Like the powerful men in the film they financed, when things went awry for The Cotton Club's backers they were quick to shove the proverbial two-prong roast fork into each others' necks.
The legend behind Apocalypse Now only makes the finished product more marvelous but the legend behind The Cotton Club is almost insulting by being ten times more interesting than the picture itself. Wide in scope but shallow in depth, Coppola's film is full of actors playing real 1920's artists like Cab Calloway and Charlie Chaplin and real 1920's mobsters like Owney Madden (the always fantastic Bob Hoskins) and Dutch Schultz (James Remar). Into this historical recreation The Cotton Club thrusts a smorgasbord of boilerplate plot-lines and fictional characters seemingly cribbed from dime fiction of the same era and asks you to give a shit about all of them. A badly miscast Richard Gere plays Dixie Dwyer, a jazz cornet player who gets involved with Schultz after saving him from a surprise dynamite attack. Only problem is Dwyer also falls in love with Schultz's girl-for-hire, the beautiful Vera Cicero (Diane Lane) and Dwyer's brother, Vinnie Dwyer (Cage), tags along on his coattails only to get in too deep. Meanwhile, in the most interesting tangential storyline, brothers Sandman and Clayton Williams (real-life brothers Gregory and Maurice Hines) find their two-man tap act is thrown into jeopardy when one's star rises faster than the other's. There's also some business of Sandman falling in love with a half-black dancer who is passing for white (Lonette McKee), a Harlem roughneck (a glowering Laurence Fishburne) who offers to protect a black-owned club from Dutch Schultz's foot-soldiers and Tom Waits is there and Nicolas Cage shoots up a club with a tommy gun at one point and none of it seems to matter. It's like a huge meal made entirely of hors d'oeuvres.
Coppola is a sensualist but this is the great director in for-hire mode and his boredom is contagious. He doesn't so much bring a past era to life as preserve it in amber. The set and costume design is meticulous but the color palette is all browns and greys. The sepia tone doesn't evoke the '20s, it just drains it of its vivacity. There are shining moments: the montage sequences of men doing bad things while jazz music plays are predictably great, the dance numbers are compelling and Coppola's fascination with expressionistic lighting and framing remains. I particularly loved a scene where Gere and Lane (with a tattoo mimicking Man Ray's "Le Violon d'Ingres") finally cuckold Schultz as refracted light and the shadows
of lace curtains play on their naked skin. But these moments are too few, too far between.
Though Nicolas Cage reportedly wanted to distance himself from his famous uncle The Cotton Club is the second of three of Coppola's films he would star in and once again we see Cage used as the loose-cannon counterpoint to our thoughtful main character. Sporting a gross mustache (one of many on display) Cage gets some Cagey moments as "Mad Dog" Dwyer: aggressively wiping his nose with the palm of his hand as they sit in the titular club, cutting mobster Frenchy Demange's ear (AKA Fred Gwyne AKA Herman Munster) with a straight razor, horking down an apple while he watches an ill-starred drive-by shooting and letting loose that shrill chicken-laugh that is so unique.
To wax musical with my metaphors, these Cagey moments bring welcome life into Cotton Club but they seem out of key. Coppola is a director of orchestral control and Cage is an actor defined by his seeming lack of it. To quote David Lynch again, Nicolas Cage is a jazz artist and the little grace notes he adds to his performance feel out of place in Coppola's symphony. On the whole, though, The Cotton Club could use a lot more jazz performances and a little less pomp and circumstance.
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