ONE FROM THE HEART 1982

Stephen Sondheim’s onetime-flop/now-revered 1971 Broadway musical, Follies: a tuneful, dark-hued elegy to aging and its attendant lost illusions, has always been one of my favorites. At age 14, my adolescent arrogance (a redundancy if ever there was one) convinced me that I had fully understood the show’s themes, when in honesty, all that my then-limited life experience could reasonably have brought to the table was sympathy. Now that I’m roughly the same age as Follies’ representative cast, I find the show to be not only infinitely smarter and more insightful than initially thought, but the passing years have added empathy to the mix. What I know now that I couldn’t have known at 14 is that the follies of one’s life aren’t regrets; they’re just youthful dreams that have just grown too burdensomely heavy to continue to carry with us as into old age.

This all calls to mind Francis Ford Coppola’s ambitious but flawed dream-project, One from the Heart being dubbed “Coppola’s Folly” on release, and the irony of its creation being instrumental in the demise of that other Coppola dream: his American Zoetrope Studios. As someone who came of age and developed a love for movies during the youth-centric, formative years of The New Hollywood out of which Coppola emerged (roughly 1967 to 1979), I've discovered one of the more sobering realities of aging has been bearing witness to what’s become of the ideals and ambitions of the golden boys of the Hollywood Renaissance.

Francis Ford Coppola takes an ordinary couple and places them at the center of an extraordinary, fantasy vision of Las Vegas

George Lucas, the once-venturesome director of the lively American Graffiti, now seems a virtual prisoner of his own success, holed up in Skywalker Ranch like Charles Foster Kane in Xanadu, content to spend his days endlessly tweaking and re-tweaking the same movie; film geek Peter Bogdanovich, after a couple of ill-fated Svengali episodes, reached creative stasis after exhausting his fan-boy catalog of borrowed film styles; Martin Scorsese is making kid’s films in order to stay relevant; and Steven Spielberg, always more a company man than maverick, has emerged more quotidian and old-guard than the most journeyman of filmmakers from the rigid days of the studio system.

Of all the directors of the era, the trajectory of director Francis Ford Coppola’s career is perhaps most indicative of what was right (individualistic, innovative, artistic) and wrong (arrogant, undisciplined, insulated, and out-of-touch) with the American New Wave in cinema of the '70s. His Godfather films (1972 & 1974) and Apocalypse Now (1979) all made good on the movement’s assertion that commercial film was a viable medium for artistic and personal expression. Of any of that film-school breed to proffer themselves as the worthy heir to the throne of the deposed moguls of yesteryear, Coppola alone seemed to possess the requisite business smarts and creative vision to see it through. Or so it seemed.

Raul Julia and Teri Garr lead a cast of seeming hundreds through a dance number staged on one of the meticulously recreated Las Vegas street sets 

Throughout his career, Coppola has spoken out (exhaustively) about the levels of studio interference he’s had to battle in order to get his films made. His unparalleled track record of critical and commercial successes only seemed to confirm his contention that meddlesome studio heads were the enemies of art. When, in 1980, Coppola purchased Hollywood General Studios to form his own, independent motion picture studio—American Zoetrope—it was the realization of a groundbreaking New Hollywood ideal: a space to make films independent of the interference of the Hollywood money men. 

Oh, but that Coppola could have had such interference. 

As the studio’s debut feature, Coppola envisioned a simple, old-fashioned Hollywood musical given a modern twist through the employment of cutting-edge digital filmmaking innovations Coppola would come to dub “Electronic Cinema.” This allegedly creativity-enhancing/money-saving innovation proved no match for a director unable to understand that technology fetishism is never a viable substitute for basic storytelling skills.

Teri Garr as Frannie

Frederic Forrest as Hank

Nastassja Kinski as Leila

Raul Julia as Ray 

Have you ever had a McDonald’s hamburger served to you on an antique sterling silver salver tray? No? Well, if you had you would have some sense of what it’s like to watch One from the Heart; an intimate, almost inconsequential, character-driven dramatic musical about a young couple as ordinary and uninteresting as any you’re likely to meet, inflated to near-bursting by a staggeringly inappropriate $23 million budget. Frannie works at a travel agency while Hank is co-owner of an auto junkyard. After five years together, on the eve of their July 4th anniversary, the couple finds themselves at a romantic crossroads: she wants adventure, he wants stability. How each works through their respective five-year itches is beautifully rendered in a meticulously recreated Las Vegas (everything was shot on the Hollywood sound stages), but the content never justifies the presentation.

It’s my guess that One from the Heart, in all its brobdingnagian excess, is attempting to comment on the transformative power of love and its ability to make even the most unprepossessing of souls feel as though they have suddenly stepped into one of those lushly romantic, old-fashioned MGM musicals. A charming idea, conceptually speaking, that holds a great deal of potential. It’s only in the practical application where things start to hit a snag. Where a feather-light touch and considerable wit is required for this kind of material, One from the Heart keeps tripping over its own intentions because Coppola’s directorial approach to tender matters of the heart is to pound you over the head with his tinker-toy infatuation with the technological.

To anyone who has ever actually experienced the pains and joys of life, love, and romance, it’s plain that the only intensely felt passions on display in One from the Heart are the hots Francis Ford Coppola has for his “Electronic Cinema” gadgetry. A prime example of a man so lost in an onanistic orgy of film love that, $23 million later, he failed to even notice that he hadn’t yet made a movie.

Frannie finds her idealized vision of romance in singing (and apparently dancing) waiter,  Ray

WHAT I LOVE ABOUT THIS FILM

By 1982, bad word of mouth preceding the release of a Francis Ford Coppola film was as common an occurrence as an appearance by Charo on The Love Boat. From The Godfather to Apocalypse Now, Coppola seemed to willfully perpetuate the image of himself as the wild cannon maverick who could pull a masterpiece out of the ashes of months of troubled production rumors and bad press. It’s in light of all this that Coppola’s long-held assertion that One from the Heart didn’t get a fair shake from the press has never quite rang true.

I remember being among the throngs of people clogging the streets of Westwood Village in Los Angeles, excited beyond all reason at the prospect of getting a pre-release glimpse of One from the Heart in January of 1982. The crowd was abuzz, each of us parroting to the other Coppola’s rhetoric hype about being eyewitnesses to the beginning of a new era in filmmaking.

One of the many miniatures of Las Vegas signs used in the film's clever title sequence. I got the opportunity to see this and many of the other props from One from the Heart when, in 1984, American Zoetrope auctioned off its assets after declaring bankruptcy. As staggeringly beautiful as it all was, it was also very sad.

As is typical at these kinds of preview screenings, a general atmosphere of “The Emperor’s New Clothes” takes over and everybody loves EVERYTHING. Each set, dissolve, and digital camera trick was greeted with thunderous applause (in part, I suspect, because we all thought Coppola was somewhere in the audience) and we were all convinced that we were watching the Citizen Kane of the '80s. It wasn’t until I was walking back to my car that I realized that all of my laughter had been forced, all of my emotional responses self-generated; and though dazzled by the visuals, a great many of the much-touted innovations were in reality, age-old theatrical stage effects (walls dissolving, color fades). I love romantic films and anyone who knows me knows that I'm a sentimental slob who cries at the drop of a hat...and yet the only sequence that brought forth waterworks was the finale…and even that was due more to the still-touching-to-me instrumental theme "Take Me Home," arranged to sound like a child’s music box. 

Reluctantly I had to admit that all of my positive feelings about One from the Heart were keyed in to my anticipation of the project and to the artistic potential Coppola’s candy-colored confection presented. One from the Heart’s visuals and technology were indeed impressive, but as evidenced by the audience’s meeting each display of cinema magic with a round of applause; none of us got lost in the magic enough to stop taking notice of it. Shades of Martin Scorsese’s New York, New York!

PERFORMANCES

The structure of a great many musicals is to have at their center, incredibly ordinary, if not downright dull characters (e.g., Bells are Ringing, Sweet Charity, On a Clear Day You Can See Forever, Oklahoma) who find their lives magically transformed by love. However, few, if any, of the people involved in the making of these movies have ever been so ill-advised as to actually cast dull, ordinary people in these roles. Both Frederic Forrest and Teri Garr are wonderful, talented character actors, but neither has the requisite something (star-quality?) to make watching them more interesting than, say, spying on my neighbors over the back fence. (Imagine the 1949 Stanley Donen musical, On the Town with the emphasis placed on the Ann Miller/Jules Munshin romance instead of Gene Kelly and Vera Ellen.) 

Hammering home the obviousness of this fact are One from the Heart’s stupendously charismatic co-stars, Nastassja Kinski and Raul Julia. Both actors have in abundance what the film’s leads lack: screen presence. I kept wishing the story would somehow shift gears and magically become a love story about the circus girl and singing waiter.

Harry Dean Stanton and Lainie Kazan are terrific in their brief roles as the supportive friends of the constantly bickering lead couple 

THE STUFF OF FANTASY

For good reason this blog isn’t titled “Levelheadedness is What Le Cinema is For…”, because movies, like dreams, have this ability to get to us on so many different levels…even when said dream or movie doesn’t make a lick of sense. By the same alchemy that interprets movement from still images flickering past one’s eyes at 24-frames per second (precisely the way a zoetrope works, the magic lantern device from which Coppola’s production company derives its name), One from the Heart’s almost non-stop flashes of technical brilliance do much to mitigate the emotional hollowness at the center of the whole enterprise. The shimmering images Coppola devises for One from the Heart enchant in a way not dissimilar to mentally flipping through an expensive coffee table book on photography; beauty in no need of context.

Fanciful imagery abounds: Hank finds his romantic ideal in circus performer, Leila - here seen dancing in a martini glass

THE STUFF OF DREAMS

When it all began, the New Hollywood presented itself as the antidote to the bloated, outmoded, assembly-line methods of studio system filmmaking. With minimal budgets but ingenuity and talent to spare, a veritable army of young and enthusiastic movie-makers succeeded for a time in rejuvenating American motion pictures in a way we will likely never see again. 

Unfortunately, success begat money, money was met with unbridled freedom, and with freedom came arrogance, a lack of discipline, and even respect for the principles that inspired the revolution in the first place. Directors once up in arms over the fact that the budget for a single over-inflated bomb like Paint Your Wagon ($20 million) could have financed 20 smaller, perhaps better films, themselves nearly brought the industry to its knees due to their own ego-driven excesses.

Of all the golden boys who imploded when given a big budget and free-rein (Michael Cimino -Heaven’s Gate, Stephen Spielberg – 1941, Martin Scorsese - New York, New York) it can at least be said of Francis Ford Coppola that he bankrupted his own studio and wasted his own money.

The version of One from the Heart currently available on DVD has been re-edited and is a tighter, and in some ways, better film than the one I saw in previews back in 1982. Alas, there’s just no getting past the fact that this neon heart has no real pulse. One from the Heart feels like a film made by someone who knows an awful lot about movies, but not much about life.

One from the Heart would have benefited greatly from the intimacy Coppola brought to The Conversation. Instead, this simple romance was handled with the bombast and overkill of Apocalypse Now

Today, One from the Heart still has the power to thrill me as eye candy, and pleases with its sometimes hauntingly beautiful jazz-tinged score, but in an odd way, it offends me in its epic waste.
In The Towering Inferno Paul Newman says of the smoldering shell of the skyscraper that needlessly took the lives of so many: “I don’t know. Maybe they ought to just leave it the way it is. Kind of a shrine to all the bullshit in the world.”

Maybe that’s One from the Heart’s ultimate merit: it stands as a melancholy shrine to all the tarnished optimism and corrupted ideals of the Hollywood New Wave of the '70s.

THE AUTOGRAPH FILES

Teri Garr autograph from when I was working at a bookstore on Sunset Blvd.

Harry Dean Stanton autograph I got when he came to the Honda dealership where I used to work

Copyright © Ken Anderson

YOU'RE A BIG BOY NOW 1966

Coming-of-age films have always been with us, but they really came into their own during the youth-obsessed '60s. The post-Baby Boom "youthquake" of the '60s, which impacted American culture in ways both social and economic, was the perfect breeding ground for films pertaining to social rebellion, sexual awakening, and the challenging of authority. As a genre, coming-of-age films were tailor-made for the New Hollywood. A Hollywood desperate to court the new-found economic clout of the young through "personal" films populated with anti-heroes and comprised of romanticized depictions of the struggles of the post-adolescent set (almost always male). Given that coming-of-age films have also always afforded ample opportunities for sex, drugs, and the baring of female flesh, it's not surprising that Hollywood's old-guard (usually rather reluctant to respond to change) proved so receptive to even the more way-out, avant-garde entries in the genre. After all, whether audiences be young or old, sex always sells.

Time has granted Mike Nichols’ The Graduate (1967) the uncontested title of representative coming-of-age film for a generation, but my favorite entry in cinema’s “pain of growing up” sweepstakes is this delightfully offbeat comedy from a young Francis Ford Coppola (only twenty-seven at the time). You’re a Big Boy Now was Coppola's first film for a major studio as well as his master's thesis submission to the UCLA film school, and as such, displays an engagingly youthful lack of discipline and the novice filmmaker's fondness for camera trickery...two things that don't exactly qualify as liabilities in '60s films.

Elizabeth Hartman as Barbara Darling

Peter Kastner as Bernard Chanticleer

Geraldine Page as Mrs. Chanticleer

Julie Harris as Miss Thing

Rip Torn as Mr. Chanticleer

Karen Black as Amy Partlett

You’re a Big Boy Now is about the misadventures of Bernard (scornfully nicknamed “Big Boy” by his self-centered father), a woefully under-experienced 19-year-old who, at the insistence of his father and against the protests of his obsessively over-protective mother, goes off to live on his own in Manhattan. Bernard’s naiveté and propensity to lose himself in flights of fantasy consistently get him into trouble as he attempts to navigate life and love along the bumpy path to adult independence.

Given how male writers and filmmakers never seem to tire of wistful, semi-autobiographical tomes hearkening back to the days of their sexual awakening; there’s never been a shortage of these “rites of passage” films to choose from. Indeed, one could probably fill an airplane hangar with them. Inherently similar in tone, most suffer from a kind of willful masculine myopia and gender fear which finds endless charm in the sexual fumblings of doltish, socially awkward, physically unattractive, emotionally superficial young men who nonetheless feel they rate the designated "dream girl" figure. Being the wish-fulfillment fantasies they are, our callow hero usually does get the longed-for beauty, but it’s a certainty that before the end credits roll, said dream girl will reveal herself to be somehow undeserving of his noble affections (take THAT pretty girls who snubbed the director in high-school!).

Message  Received: Women Are Terrifying

You’re a Big Boy Now doesn’t deviate far from this well-trod narrative path, but Coppola invests the proceedings with such creative exuberance (every scene holds at least one element of surprise - whether visually, verbally, or in the goofily straight/comic performances he elicits from his game cast), that the film feels more like a surreal satire of the genre rather than a representative of the genuine article.

Tony Bill as the exotically named Raef del Grado, Bernard's more sexually-assured friend

WHAT I LOVE ABOUT THIS FILM

Providing, as it does, a subjective view of the overwhelming and perilous adult world as it's perceived by the sheltered Bernard, there is much to enjoy in the film's many eccentric visual flourishes, absurdist characters, and anarchic editing style. With its blaring (and rather good) score of pop songs by The Lovin' Spoonful, You’re a Big Boy Now is a '60s film to its core, complete with an overarching air of reproach directed at middle-class repression and sexual guilt.

"Don't eat too much, don't stay out late, don't go to suspicious places or play cards, and stay away from girls! But most of all Bernard, try to be happy."

I'd always thought of Peter Kastner (right) as looking like a cross between Robert Morse & Michael J Pollard, but a friend nailed it when he said Peter reminded him of Ernie (Barry Livingston) from My Three Sons.
The late Peter Kastner starred in his own TV series in 1968, The Ugliest Girl in Town; about a man who poses as a female model and becomes a boyish fashion sensation, a la Twiggy

PERFORMANCES

The desirable, yet dangerous, female is as much a staple of the coming-of-age film as the virginal hero having a more sexually sophisticated best friend/adviser (in this instance, the appropriately unctuous Tony Bill). When it comes to scary women, You’re a Big Boy Now has probably the most disturbing, dick-withering example of that gynophobic archetype ever to come out of the free-love era: the man-hating, aspiring actress/go-go dancer, Barbara Darling.

The character of Barbara Darling in less capable hands would be just another bitch-goddess cliché, but someone had the inspired genius to cast against type, and the late Elizabeth Hartman manages to be downright chilling, yet terribly funny, in the role. What makes her performance here so amazing is that I saw You're a Big Boy Now only after I had already seen Hartman in A Patch of Blue (1965), The Group (1966), and The Beguiled (1971); all roles emphasizing the gentle, almost fragile vulnerability of this immensely likable actress. Though obviously talented (she was Academy Award® nominated and won the Golden Globe for A Patch of Blue), there is nothing about her performances in any of those films that would lead you to believe she could be so aggressively carnal and convincingly, psychotically, mercurial. In a transformation the likes of which I've rarely seen, the Elizabeth Hartman of her earlier films is nowhere to be seen in You're a Big Boy Now. She gives my favorite performance in the film.

Displaying a surprising range and a flair for comedy, the man-eater of You're a Big Boy Now is light years away from the Elizabeth Hartman in A Patch of Blue.

THE STUFF OF FANTASY

You're a Big Boy Now has some great shots of Manhattan and New York's seedy Times Square area that predate the gritty images in Midnight Cowboy (1969) and Klute (1971). It's fun seeing theater marquees advertising films like Born Free and The Russians are Coming, The Russians are Coming.

THE STUFF OF DREAMS

What's fun about watching the early works of accomplished directors is trying to catch a glimpse of some kind of nascent artistry or budding style that would later emerge as a defining trait or characteristic of their work. To look at the early films of Roman Polanski or Woody Allen is to see the beginnings of a style and preoccupation with themes they continue to bring to their work even to this day.

Watching You're a Big Boy Now, I was left with two thoughts: 1) with this film's pre-MTV kinetic rhythms, how is it that all of Coppola's subsequent musical outings (Finian's Rainbow, One From the Heart, and The Cotton Club) all turned out so flat?; 2) Coppola shows such a flair for comedy here, I'm surprised he hasn't had many more comedies on his resume.

Although You're a Big Boy Now is not a particularly well-known or talked about title today, Elizabeth Hartman and Geraldine Page were both nominated for Golden Globes for their performances, with Miss Page (married to co-star Rip Torn at the time) garnering an Oscar® nod as well. Best of all (for me, anyway, because I'm such a big fan) the film gave Karen Black her film debut. Pretty classy pedigree for a director's first major film.

Copyright © Ken Anderson  2009 - 2011