The Cotton Club, 1984
Directed by: Francis Ford Coppola
Screenwriter: William Kennedy & Francis Ford Coppola
Music by: John Barry
Photography by: Stephen Goldblatt
Genre: Crime/Musical
Main actors:
Richard Gere (Dixie Dwyer)
Diane Lane (Vera Cicero)
Gregory Hines (Sandman Williams)
Nicolas Cage (Vincent Dwyer)
Bob Hoskins (Owney Madden)
James Remar (Dutch Schultz)
The Cotton Club placed in Harlem (New York) is the most famous jazz club of the 20’s. The movie follows two different main line. The life of Dixie Dwyer, a slick cornet player, that saves a dangerous gangster from death and without any choice he joins his hood. At the same time two colored brothers, Sandman and Clay Williams, do their best for make real their dreams of being hired in the Cotton Club as tap dancers.
Coppola’s “Cotton Club” is a perfect symbiosis between musical and crime. The main characters of the story are two couples of brothers (the Dwyers are white and the Williams are black) and at the same time, there’s two couples of lovers who harassed their life for loving each other inside a complicated and violent world. The whole movie is a huge dichotomy between different worlds and personalities, perfectly represented in the extreme racism of the late 20’s in America. In the Cotton Club the musicians could only be black, but the audience was exclusively white.
The movie has a strong pace as a consequence of the excellent jazz soundtrack that mixes swing, ragtime and even blues with spectacular choreographies of tap dance and musical performances. The music gives cohesion to the different stories of the movie. The exceptional performance of Cab Calloway the king of the “hari hari hoop” not only shows how much enjoyed the audience in the Cotton Club but also a change in the direction of the club orchestra that was produced in 1932. The film combines historical characters with fiction; in Calloway’s performance we can see Charles Chaplin, James Cagney and Gloria Swanson among the audience. Coppola uses an invented plot combined with real elements that truly happen in the époque with the objective to capture the essence and the atmosphere of the time; he understands the cinema as a representation that emerge from the reality.
The performance of Diane Lane as the adolescent girlfriend of Dutch, the violent mob boss that has been saved for the handsome musician performed by Richard Gere, is simply marvelous. Lane is astonishingly beautiful, he seems to have truly lived with those men and the love story with Dixie is mainly sustained by her magic portrayed of a girl who dreams to own a club. Madden, the owner of the club performed by Bob Hoskins, couldn’t be better played. He irradiates violence and aggressiveness, but he also has a lovely touchy side and his relation with Frenchy his criminal associate, played with deep voice by Fred Gwynne, is absolutely charming.
The most remarkable sequence of the film has clearly the Coppola brand. The rhythmic parallelism between the tap dance of Sandman Williams in the club and the sound of the machine guns destroying Dutch and his hood is just extraordinary. The parallel montage is an element that we had already seen in the mythical “The Godfahter” saga, in which we observe a conception of the cinema similar to the opera, a huge catharsis with amazing bursts of violence, that incredibly look like poetry.
Directed by: Francis Ford Coppola
Screenwriter: William Kennedy & Francis Ford Coppola
Music by: John Barry
Photography by: Stephen Goldblatt
Genre: Crime/Musical
Main actors:
Richard Gere (Dixie Dwyer)
Diane Lane (Vera Cicero)
Gregory Hines (Sandman Williams)
Nicolas Cage (Vincent Dwyer)
Bob Hoskins (Owney Madden)
James Remar (Dutch Schultz)
The Cotton Club placed in Harlem (New York) is the most famous jazz club of the 20’s. The movie follows two different main line. The life of Dixie Dwyer, a slick cornet player, that saves a dangerous gangster from death and without any choice he joins his hood. At the same time two colored brothers, Sandman and Clay Williams, do their best for make real their dreams of being hired in the Cotton Club as tap dancers.
Coppola’s “Cotton Club” is a perfect symbiosis between musical and crime. The main characters of the story are two couples of brothers (the Dwyers are white and the Williams are black) and at the same time, there’s two couples of lovers who harassed their life for loving each other inside a complicated and violent world. The whole movie is a huge dichotomy between different worlds and personalities, perfectly represented in the extreme racism of the late 20’s in America. In the Cotton Club the musicians could only be black, but the audience was exclusively white.
The movie has a strong pace as a consequence of the excellent jazz soundtrack that mixes swing, ragtime and even blues with spectacular choreographies of tap dance and musical performances. The music gives cohesion to the different stories of the movie. The exceptional performance of Cab Calloway the king of the “hari hari hoop” not only shows how much enjoyed the audience in the Cotton Club but also a change in the direction of the club orchestra that was produced in 1932. The film combines historical characters with fiction; in Calloway’s performance we can see Charles Chaplin, James Cagney and Gloria Swanson among the audience. Coppola uses an invented plot combined with real elements that truly happen in the époque with the objective to capture the essence and the atmosphere of the time; he understands the cinema as a representation that emerge from the reality.
The performance of Diane Lane as the adolescent girlfriend of Dutch, the violent mob boss that has been saved for the handsome musician performed by Richard Gere, is simply marvelous. Lane is astonishingly beautiful, he seems to have truly lived with those men and the love story with Dixie is mainly sustained by her magic portrayed of a girl who dreams to own a club. Madden, the owner of the club performed by Bob Hoskins, couldn’t be better played. He irradiates violence and aggressiveness, but he also has a lovely touchy side and his relation with Frenchy his criminal associate, played with deep voice by Fred Gwynne, is absolutely charming.
The most remarkable sequence of the film has clearly the Coppola brand. The rhythmic parallelism between the tap dance of Sandman Williams in the club and the sound of the machine guns destroying Dutch and his hood is just extraordinary. The parallel montage is an element that we had already seen in the mythical “The Godfahter” saga, in which we observe a conception of the cinema similar to the opera, a huge catharsis with amazing bursts of violence, that incredibly look like poetry.
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