Skipping a beat
One From the Heart back for seconds
In the cinematic wonder years of the 1970s, American directors made some of the most influential, groundbreaking work in film history including Francis Ford Coppola’s The Conversation, Robert Altman’s Nashville and Martin Scorsese’s Taxi Driver.
And just as suddenly, all three directors tanked when they followed their wunderkind successes with questionable ventures into the musical genre.
When you think of Altman, Scorsese and Coppola, chances are Popeye, New York, New York and One From the Heart are not the films that spring to mind as consummate examples of their auteur chops. Breaking away from the vanguard, gritty realism that defined their ’70s work, that powerhouse trio all gambled, and essentially lost, with those ventures into old-school entertainment.
When it opened in 1982, Coppola’s musical comedy One From the Heart joined the ranks of legendary cinematic misjudgments like Ishtar and Heaven’s Gate. After an abysmal opening and much critical tut-tutting, the $27 million production crippled Coppola’s fledgling Zoetrope movie studio.
In a theatrical reissue that may prove as unprofitable as its original debut, Coppola is re-releasing his sweet and slutty blue-collar Vegas fantasy, perhaps to remind baby cineastes that Sofia wasn’t the first Coppola to define cinematic cool.
Heart signaled a new direction for Coppola, away from the familial machinations of The Godfather and Vietnam verite of Apocalypse Now toward the self-conscious artificiality of more stylized films like The Outsiders, Rumble Fish and Bram Stoker’s Dracula. Coppola broke with the hyper-realism that built his reputation in favor of production designer Dean Tavoularis’ outrageously painted backdrops and $6 million recreation of Vegas on the Zoetrope soundstage. Like everything else in this idiosyncratic film, that strange aquarium-artifice merges classical Hollywood musicals with the Bertolt Brecht attitude of an avant-garde New York stage production.
One From the Heart takes an equally modern, oddball approach to its love story. Instead of following the usual romantic course, One From the Heart begins in medias res with love on the rocks. As the country-meets-cool strains of Crystal Gayle and Tom Waits blend on the soundtrack, grease-monkey Hank (Frederic Forrest) and worn-out, far-from-dewy clerk Frannie (Teri Garr) decide that their love affair has petered out.
Each goes their own way, hooking up with new lovers who promise the excitement they couldn’t find in each other’s arms. In the comically abbreviated time frame of film fiction, Frannie meets a smoldering Latin piano player, Ray (Raul Julia), while Hank falls for the infatuating charms of a fawn-eyed, sultry circus performer, Leila (Nastassja Kinski).
One From the Heart’s musical numbers define its strange mix of the scuzzy and the enchanted. In one memorable number a nubile Kinski lives up to her effervescent, head-turning qualities as she dances like a human bubble in a giant champagne bottle.
Coppola blends such examples of cornpone Hollywood romance with enough ’80s schmaltz to forever link One From the Heart with the era of big hair and new wave. In an enormous dance number where a charismatic Frannie and Ray tear the Vegas strip a new one, the periodic glimpses of afros, headbands and Lycra jolt viewers out of the movie fiction as effectively as Tavoularis’ tequila sunrise backdrops and perpetual neon.
Though critically panned upon its release, One From the Heart does not lack merit. A la Eyes Wide Shut, Coppola tackles a fairly sophisticated emotional state of passion’s dying embers.
Maybe One From the Heart wasn’t so unlike the post-Vietnam, post-Watergate films that defined Coppola’s Americana reality. After their individual rolls in the hay, both Frannie and Hank experience a very pragmatic, post-coital epiphany. Behind Ray and Leila’s bewitching exteriors lie infidelity’s dark side: a vacant, empty, emotionally unfulfilling lay.