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Show ::N;: Keel WawrM gr! bv lick uruugi, I -rj- ; V? ' " : ' Diane Lane as Vera Cicero and Richard Gere as Dixie Dwyer in "The Cotton Club," Francis Coppola's portrait of the legendary Harlem night club where the finest talent of the Jazz Age entertained the era's most . notorious gangsters. 'Cotton Club' is ambitious but heavy '..The Cotton Club Director Francis Ford Coppola's record includes two great stories of elephantine proportions "the Godfather" God-father" saga and "Apocalypse Now." But now, in "The Cotton Club," the elephant just doesn't dance as well. The picture is about two pairs of brothers and the two worlds they live in show business and the gangster era of the Twenties-into-Thirties. Richard Gere plays Dixie Dwyer, a cornet player in Harlem who rescues a hoodlum from a bomb. The hood turns out to be the maniacal and powerful Dutch Schultz (James Remar), who forcibly takes Dixie under his wing with the cheerful commendation, "If I didn't like you, I'd kill you." Dixie is hired to squire around the Dutchman's mistress, Vera Cicero (Diane Lane. ) Dixie doesn't like the situation, but his brother Vince (Nicholas Cage), an aspiring gangster, cheerfully cheer-fully uses the family connection to hire on with Dutch as a henchman. The other pair is Sandman Williams and his brother Clay (played by Gregory Hines and real-life brother Maurice), who get jobs in Harlem's hottest night spot, the Cotton Club. The Club is an indictment of the times it operates on black talent, singers, dancers and musicians, but only whites like Dutch Schultz are allowed to come in through the front door. As the story develops you can see that Coppola is proposing an ironic theme: Fate in this racially-divided society is a lot kinder to the white man than the black. By the end of the movie, both Dixie and Sandman are reaching success, Sandman as a dancer and Pixie as a star of gangster movies. But for Sandman, it's been a continual struggle, as he's hassled by the whites at the Cotton Club, and his ambition causes a temporary rift with his brother. The racism almost pushes him to give up, but the older black dancers advise him to "kill 'em with your tap shoes." Hines convinces you he can do it too. Sandman and the other black talent in the Club are intense, sensual and real. On the other hand, Dixie seems to show no real talent. And he reaches success almost by pure luck. He is propelled by a set of circumstances: (1) Gloria Swanson, seeing him at the Club, likes his looks and arranges for a screen test, (2) Dixie makes a screen impression by copying mannerisms from the Dutchman and (3) the Club's owner Owney Madden (Bob Hoskins) sponsors Dixie's way to Hollywood to have a spy on the West Coast. Dixie's luck is incredible. Even when he rebels against Dutch Schultz, he's saved by the bell. Dixie survives because Lucky Luciano wipes out Schultz first. Toward the end of the movie, Coppola brings out another irony, as the Club is finally segregated in two ways. Black guests are admitted for the first time, and Dixie gets to perform with the all-black band. Okay, so it's ironic. So what? You don't care about either story, or how they relate to each other. As Dixie, Gere has one of the most passive roles ever handed a romantic actor recently. He doesn't seem to make anything happen. His story is the familiar triangle about the gangster, his henchman and the moll. And Diane Lane doesn't have the presence to make it any more compelling, mainly because she's miscast. (Why does Hollywood feel that you actresses like Lane and Elizabeth McGovern are dazzling romantic leading ladies?) When they go to bed, director Coppola has to maintain interest by throwing gaudy shadow effects over their faces. The black side of the story isn't much better. Coppola is good at showing you the sensual high-stepping atmosphere at the Cotton Club, but you don't see the hold the black performers have on the white audience. The love interest here is between Gregory Hines and Lonette McKee. And though both actors give it a decent shot, Hines is saddled with lines like, "Let me take you away from all this" and McKee gets stuck with a sub-plot (she passes for white) that is never resolved. The most interesting characters are the gangsters who kijl, loot and pull strings in the background. The story, by Coppola, Mario Puzo and William Kennedy is remarkably faithful to mob history. (Dixie would seem to be based on George Raft. Brother Vince, who comes to a early, bloody end, is modeled on a New York Thirties mobster named "Mad Dog" Coll.) James Remar as Dutch is ferocious, but he doesn't have as much impact as he did in his last notable film role, the killer of "48 Hours." Presiding over them all are the two gangsters who run the Cotton Club both real people out of the crime history books. They are little Owney Madden played by the volatile British actor Bob Hoskins and Big Frenchy DeMange, huge, slow and deadly played by Fred Gwynne. The chemistry between these two steals the show from the big effects and the bigger stars. They're more sympathetic than the other charactersthey char-actersthey have the only major relationship in the film that is completely steadfast and amid the reckless, quickly-dead gangsters, they are pragmatic, non-greedy survivors. At the end of the movie, they meet with the rising boss, Lucky Luciano, and give subtle but clear signals that they're retiring and Lucky won't have to fit them for concrete overcoats. "Cotton Club" has several other interesting facets. Julian Beck is a skeletal Schultz henchman who dourly says he wasn't born, but found in a garbage pail. He's another supporting actor more interesting than the leads. And the black dancers at the "hoofers club"-led by Charles "Honi" Coles lend a snappy atmosphere to the picture. But this, on the whole, has to be tallied as a' failure 1 in- Coppola's career. At the same time, I also say, "Thank God that Coppola takes chances." Sometimes his concepts don't work; sometimes gloriously, they do. His finest achievement, "The Godfather" tackled gangsterism, gangster-ism, free enterprise, family solidarity solid-arity and the American dream-values dream-values that reinforced and subverted each other. A notable climax was the famous double-tracking sequence where Michael eliminates his rivals while presiding at his godson's christening. In "Cotton Club," Coppola tries to for a similar effect. The killing of Dutch Schultz is juxtaposed with a dazzling dance number at the Club, with Sandman "killing 'em with my tap shoes." What's the relationship? Maybe Coppola is suggesting the same energy and drive is at the root of both men, but the rest of the movie doesn't make that connection even faintly. The two characters seem to be from different planets. The ideas in "Cotton Club" are muddled. That's why this ambitious, sometimes thoughtful, but mostly heavy picture comes toppling down. |