My World of Flops #154/Travolta/Cage 8: The Cotton Club
The pitch? The Godfather sings! Kid Notorious himself, Robert Evans, bearded wunderkind Francis Ford Coppola and ink-stained wretch Mario Puzo were getting the band back together for another riotously ambitious exploration of the American instinct towards violence and criminality, only this time with a Busby Berkley flair.
And black people!
Think Don Vito Corleone dancing a soft shoe, or Michael Corleone climactically belting out a brassy ballad by Sammy Cahn. It just plain made sense. What the violent, criminal, tribal world of The Godfather was clearly missing all along was wall-to-wall song and dance numbers. The Cotton Club would finally fix this oversight and rake in Oscars, kudos and break box-office records as a reward.
At least that was the plan. Then lightning hit: bad lightning. Robert Evans was supposed to make his directorial debut until he got costly cold feet not long before shooting was supposed to begin. The budget got higher than Charlie Sheen at the Wall Street wrap party as dozens of drafts of a script were churned out and the production bled money as the shoot dragged on and on and on.
The Cotton Club made a killing, alright, but not at the box-office! Evans’ princely name was dragged through the mud after Roy Radin, a grade-A Hollywood sleaze bag who made his name booking retro vaudeville revues that were sad exercises in elder abuse both for the audience and the desperate old-timers reduced to working for the con artist, turned up murdered after his relationship with a drug dealer who introduced him to Evans turned murderously sour.
It’s never a good sign when people have to specify whether you’re talking about a movie or a murder trial and the The Cotton Club murders, with Evans implicated as a possible person of interest, fascinated the American public in a way the bloated cinematic extravaganza it was connected to most assuredly did not.
The Cotton Club seemingly had everything going for it. It had a mesmerizing and tragically under-explored milieu in the legendary Harlem nightclub of the title, where the American melting pot sizzled with the electricity of black and white coming together in an explosion of black musical entertainment performed before white audiences. It had seemingly all of the money and resources in the world. No expense was spared painstakingly recreating 1920s and 30s Harlem.
The only thing The Cotton Club lacked was a good script, a compelling story and characters worth caring about and being emotionally invested in. Alas, The Cotton Club illustrates all too vividly that if you lack those core elements it doesn’t matter how beautiful a movie is, or how ambitious, or how absurdly fertile the cultural terrain it explores might be: it’s going to fail on a fundamental level, creatively as well as commercially.
The Cotton Club is the work of some dudes who CLEARLY saw The Godfather a few too many times, possibly because they’re also the dudes who made The Godfather. The early 1970s versions of Coppola, Evans, story co-writer Puzo and even production designer Richard Sylbert would resent the fuck out of their older, more desperate selves for shamelessly and ineptly ripping off their past triumphs.
As someone on the verge of publishing his second book about “Weird Al” Yankovic and in his thirteenth year of writing this column, I just think that’s wrong. You gotta constantly do something new and different or you will stagnate creatively and end up with something like The Cotton Club.
Watching The Cotton Club’s gorgeous art deco credits filled me once again with a delusional sense of hope. How could a movie this overflowing with talent behind the screen and in front of it, with roots in both one of the best loved, biggest and most important movies ever made in The Godfather and a scene like Harlem in the late twenties and thirties turn out so inert and lifeless?
The Cotton Club’s cast, crew and premise promise everything, which renders the film’s sub-mediocrity borderline unforgivable.
The miscalculations begin with transforming a story rooted in fascinating real-life figures and an explosive setting overflowing with gang violence and racial tension into a movie that’s mostly about how unbelievably cool and charismatic a boring white dude played by Richard Gere is.
Thanks to 1982’s An Officer and a Gentleman, Richard Gere was suddenly Johnny B.O. Then he made The Cotton Club and became a different kind of Johnny B.O after his movie stunk up the box-office!
The Cotton Club never begins to overcome its decision to tell what is essentially a black story, about black pain and black voices through Richard Gere and an absurdly too young Diane Lane, the future stars of the 2010 Nicolas Sparks adaptation Nights in Rodanthe.
I’m not sure anybody in the world has the talent and magnetism to pull off playing Dixie Dwyer, the film’s terminally white protagonist. As written, the role calls for the magnetism, charisma and overpowering raw sexuality of Marlon Brando and the musicality of Chet Baker. What it gets instead is a woefully mis and under-cast Richard Gere with a pencil-thin child molester mustache.
Dwyer is supposed to be so explosively sexy and sexual that no woman can resist him, even if it means danger and possibly death via a violent gangster boyfriend, and so devastatingly handsome and blessed with movie star power that he becomes a star of the big screen pretty much by accident, or possibly because the universe angrily demands it.
Yet every moment this pretty boy spends onscreen showing off his mediocre cornet, piano-playing and acting chops I just found myself wishing that the focus was on literally anyone else, particularly the great Bob Hoskins as mobster Owen Meaney and the divine Fred Gwynne as Frenchie, his right-hand man, head goon and heterosexual life partner.
According to Wikipedia Gwynne, best known for his portrayal of Herman Munster in The Munsters as well as later supporting turns in Pet Sematary, My Cousin Vinnie, Fatal Attraction and Secret of My Success wrote what is easily the best film’s non-musical scenes, a simultaneously very funny and very sweet acting showcase where Frenchie confronts his boss and best friend for being a cheapskate about his kidnapping and the full extent of the otherwise cold-blooded mobster’s enormous, almost incalculable love and appreciation for his very good friend spills out in a heartwarming tidal wave of appreciation.
How the hell are you going to have Bob Hoskins playing a mobster, Gregory Hines tap-dancing up a storm as Delbert "Sandman" Williams, a gifted dancer whose ferocious ambitions sometimes put him at odds with Clayton "Clay" Williams (Gregory’s real-life brother Nicholas), his brother and dance partner, and Francis Ford Coppola piling on the style and eye candy in a desperate attempt to distract from the emotional vacuum at the film’s core, then expect audiences to pant in reverence for Richard fucking Gere’s explosive awesomeness?
Having a young, yet somehow still incredibly ancient Tom Waits on hand as an emcee and booker at the club just underlines how dreadfully short Gere comes up in the charisma department, as does the presence of a pair of young, skinny Rumble Fish alum on their way to auspicious careers: Laurence Fishburne as silky-smooth mobster Bumpy Rhodes and Uncle Francis’ intense young actor nephew, Nicolas Cage as Gere’s hot-headed enforcer brother Vincent.
The Cotton Club is a flashy and empty extravaganza about the tragedy of segregation that suffers terribly, if not terminally, from segregation itself. In The Cotton Club, the musical and dramatic elements are separate and most assuredly not equal. As a musical, The Cotton Club is bold, brash and wildly entertaining, a feast for the eyes and the senses overflowing with music and energy and life. As a mob movie and love triangle it’s a total stiff.
Take Lonette McKee as Hines’ love interest Lila Rose Oliver, for example. When Lila, an African-American singer light-skinned enough to pass for white, is expressing herself and her complicated, intense emotional life through song she’s absolutely riveting, a total powerhouse. When she’s expressing her inner life through dialogue, on the other hand, she is every bit as defeated as every other magnetic performer undone by a script that’s at once overwrought and under-written.
There’s a lovely moment in this version of The Cotton Club that speaks powerfully to what the movie could have been, in part because it has nothing to do with dialogue and plotting and feeble characterization or the need to tell a quintessentially black story in an insultingly caucasian fashion.
In this bravura sequence the black dancers of The Cotton Club, in their downtime, dance for each other’s benefit and for themselves but ultimately because that’s who they are on an existential level and nothing, but nothing, brings them more infectious, palpable joy than dancing for the sake of dancing.
This lovely, elegant and ultimately deeply moving production number does not move the story forward in the least but it does a wonderful job of fleshing out the universe of the story and the world of dancers for whom no audience could possibly be as demanding, or competitive, or rewarding, as an audience of other dancers off the clock but high on their extraordinary gifts and magnificent rhythm.
It seems all too fitting that The Cotton Club was based not on a novel or even a non-fiction tome but rather a pictorial history of the eponymous nightclub. That seems appropriate. For all of Coppola’s extraordinary gifts as a storyteller as well as a visual artist and visionary filmmaker The Cotton Club is an endless series of beautiful images, gorgeous music and exuberant rhythm in desperate search of an emotionally satisfying movie and a story worth telling.
Failure, Fiasco or Secret Success: Fiasco
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