The New Biographical Dictionary of Film: Completely Updated and Expanded (87 page)

The Godfather, Part II
was a natural cashing in that made Coppola an impresario (something that lay heavy on the next ten years of his life); it allowed Robert De Niro to imagine an early life for Vito Corleone; it exhibited a mastery of so many periods and locations as to be entrancing; and it sought some way to redeem the alleged glamorization of the Mafia in the original film. Certainly the Michael of
Part II
is unequivocally wicked: he turns on his own family. But still Coppola cannot disown the adolescent authority, the acting tough, of the gangsters; and he cannot detach himself from Michael. There is no horror in
Part II
, no moral outrage. There is instead the numb, passive acceptance that such things are done in the name of order.

I am being tough on Coppola for the very reason I have been hard on Capra and Ford. These are three men of remarkable talent and facility. They shoot riveting, ravishing film; they are very good with actors (though Coppola is shy of women in his films); they are storytellers capable of … well, “genius” is the word Hollywood would use. But that genius is not enough. There is a talent in American films that makes for adolescent attitudes, veiled fascism, and a work that leads one to recognize the proximity of talent and meretricious magic. In all three, the work eventually seeks to hide its profound muddle in hysterical gesture and demagogic assertion. There is something in the best of American films that is not good enough, and that is dangerous. The disorder so easily seems visionary.
Apocalypse Now
was meant as a great film and a big statement: it was destroyed on the size of its hope, by the vagaries of a difficult location, by an ultimate vagueness of intent, and by the megalomania of Brando and Coppola. Make no mistake, it is a mess—or a war, lit up by beautiful explosions that no one can forget.

I suspect that the experience of
Apocalypse Now
did dreadful things to Coppola’s morale and his constitution. The risk of family crackup was very public in his wife Eleanor’s book
Notes
. But just as glaring was his own chronic indecision over the film, a profound loss of confidence. By 1982, his company, Zoetrope, was a disaster: the very delicate
One from the Heart
was a massive failure, the Los Angeles studio dream was over, and Coppola faced personal as well as business bankruptcy. For most of the eighties, he worked on assignment to stave off ruin. If he did not collapse, that does not mean that depression and dismay did no damage. He and his wife lost a son, too, in an accident near the set of
Gardens of Stone
. Then, when he cast his daughter Sofia in
The Godfather, Part III
, he seemed caught in an awkward mix of generosity and recklessness. Family remains the endless riddle in his life and work.

A number of his recent films seem to me as short on interest, meaning, or heart as they are long on spectacle:
The Cotton Club, Tucker
, and especially
Dracula
. But
One from the Heart
is enchanting and touching—even if it cost too much.
Rumble Fish
is a rueful story of a father and brothers. And then there is
The Godfather, Part III
. When I saw that film in a theater I was terribly disappointed: Pacino seemed to have lost the role; the papal politics felt misguided; Sofia Coppola was striking, but she missed the classical resonance of her role; and the whole thing seemed aimless and uncertain. How could
The Godfather
work with a reformed Michael? If the director sought redemption, then didn’t it have to come in other places—in Kay, earlier on in the story, or in Michael’s children? I urge readers to screen the revised version of
Part III
that is now available in the video edition of all three parts of
The Godfather
. Walter Murch did that assembly, and he continued a policy of cutting on
Part III
that had been terminated by the pressure for a December release. This revised version is not as good as the first two parts, but it is far superior to the theatrical release. The new Michael is clearer and more touching. Connie becomes a dominant figure. I could still do without the Vatican: Michael’s proper nemesis should be in Washington. Still,
Part III
is autumnal, sad, and full of confessions. It is more worthwhile than general opinion suggests, and one of Coppola’s most candid films.

There is another Coppola, still—the impresario, the executive producer on projects as mixed as his own films. But surely there is credit in this astonishing variety:
The Black Stallion
(79, Carroll Ballard);
The Escape Artist
(82, Caleb Deschanel);
Hammett
(82, Wim Wenders);
The Black Stallion Returns
(83, Robert Dalva);
Mishima: A Life in Four Chapters
(85, Paul Schrader);
Tough Guys Don’t Dance
(87, Norman Mailer);
Wind
(92, Ballard); and
The Secret Garden
(93, Agniezka Holland).

In the course of the nineties, Coppola developed his winery in the Napa Valley, he founded a magazine,
Zoetrope
, for short stories, and also helped to produce his daughter Sofia’s feature debut,
The Virgin Suicides
(00). He took a close interest in the struggling affairs of MGM-UA, which accounts for his editorial assistance on
Supernova
(00, Thomas Lee). He was also still at work on a project to be called
Megalopolis
, at least twenty years in the making. For his own films,
Jack
was one of the worst and
The Rainmaker
was thoroughly old-fashioned and entertaining. But the real movie event was like the reclaiming of a child
—Apocalypse Now Redux
was a fascinating reworking of old material, with fifty-three minutes of cut material restored. It seemed to me to alter the film enormously and to make it into a masterpiece that left the contemporary landscape of films in 2001 looking even more threadbare. Whether Coppola has another great film in him is to be seen. That he has been a great filmmaker, and the inspiration for the northern Californian idea, is beyond question.

As he came to be seventy, Coppola returned to small, personal films (with Walter Murch as a valued associate):
Youth Without Youth
and
Tetro
were the films of a very good comp. lit. student. They were artsy, grave, and very personal. The great storm of Francis and his American genius—the identification of Michael Corleone—seemed to have passed.

Sofia Coppola
, b. New York, 1971
1998:
Lick the Star
(s). 1999:
The Virgin Suicides
. 2003:
Lost in Translation
. 2006:
Marie Antoinette
. Yes, Sofia is the baby (ostensibly, male) christened in the grand, murderous conclusion to
The Godfather
(72, Francis Coppola), and she is someone who can narrate her childhood in terms of the pictures and the locations on which her father kept her around as company. The first time I saw her as herself was just after
One from the Heart
, in Rutherford, when Sofia was painting voodoo pictures to post on the driveway of the family home to frighten off the bailiffs who might have taken away their furniture.

So it’s understandable that critics and filmgoers alike wonder how much her father helped or influenced her on
Lost in Translation
. Instead, they might do well to notice that that film has a calm, relaxed air, an amused view of life, such as her estimable father has never quite managed. Yes, a daughter growing up in war can become a great fighter—or someone who’d take any diversion to avoid the mad breath of conflict.

I don’t think we know enough about Sofia Coppola yet—except to say, look how she’s developing. They say she acted, but it’s more that she was in certain films just because she was on the locations: she’s a child on the ship in New York in
The Godfather: Part II
(74, Coppola); she’s Diane Lane’s kid sister in
The Outsiders
(83, Coppola) and
Rumble Fish
(83, Coppola); she’s in
The Cotton Club
(84, Coppola) and
Peggy Sue Got Married
(86, Coppola), and then she replaced Winona Ryder as Mary Corleone in
The Godfather: Part III
(90, Coppola). She was critically battered for that job, and her father might have thought about the choice more carefully. But it says a lot for Sofia’s stoicism that she weathered the storm, and pretty much decided that her acting career was over.

She went to high school in Napa, near the Rutherford home, and she attended Cal Arts for a while before dropping out. Since then, she has drifted in and out of a brief comedy series,
Hi-Octane
, on Comedy Central with her friend Zoe Cassavetes (John’s daughter) and a clothing company established with another friend, Stephanie Hayman.

There’s no doubt that family ties have helped her, for she is nowhere near as articulate, forceful, or ambitious as her father (or her husband, Spike Jonze—though that relationship ended in 2003). So I think it’s notable that already she has moved from filming a book she liked, Jeffrey Eugenides’s
The Virgin Suicides
, to thinking up a film of her own,
Lost in Translation
. The latter is her best work yet, though it’s a slight, truly modest work, feeling its way toward a sensibility that is not grasped yet, and which might slip away. Yes, she could be screwed up by too much praise—except that I’m not sure she believes in too much.
Marie Antoinette
was far too precious and a warning sign that history has been eclipsed by decor.

Roger Corman
, b. Los Angeles, 1926
1955:
Five Guns West; Apache Woman; The Day the World Ended; Swamp Women; The Oklahoma Woman
. 1956:
Gunslinger; It Conquered the World; Not of This Earth; The Undead; The She Gods of Shark Reef; Naked Paradise; Attack of the Crab Monsters; Rock All Night
. 1957:
Teenage Doll; Carnival Rock; Sorority Girl; The Viking Women and the Sea Serpent; War of the Satellites
. 1958:
Machine Gun Kelly; Teenage Caveman; I Mobster
. 1959:
A Bucket of Blood; The Wasp Woman
. 1960:
Ski Troop Attack; The House of Usher; The Little Shop of Horrors; The Last Woman on Earth; Creature from the Haunted Sea; Atlas
. 1961:
The Pit and the Pendulum; The Intruder; The Premature Burial; Tales of Terror
. 1962:
Tower of London; The Young Racers; The Raven; The Terror
. 1963:
The Man With the X-Ray Eyes; The Haunted Palace; The Secret Invasion
. 1964:
The Masque of the Red Death; The Tomb of Ligeia
. 1966:
The Wild Angels
. 1967:
The St. Valentine’s Day Massacre; The Trip
. 1969:
De Sade
(codirected with Cy Endfield). 1970:
Bloody Mama; GAS, or It Became Necessary to Destroy the World in Order to Save It
. 1971:
The Red Baron
. 1990:
Roger Corman’s Frankenstein Unbound
.

In 1970, the enterprising Edinburgh Festival ran a program of Corman films to crystallize the growing interest in his work among avant-garde critics. It was a proper gesture, since Corman was one of the most interesting and influential “operators” in the tortuous world of commercial cinema. “Operator” is chosen carefully: Corman had produced and directed more than forty films in seventeen years at a time when better known and larger talents were giving up the ghost—there is an obvious comparison with Nicholas Ray or Minnelli. In addition, Corman had an admirable record as a sponsor of new talent: in particular, Monte Hellman, Francis Ford Coppola, Peter Bogdanovich, and Martin Scorsese owed their debuts to him. But Corman’s most characteristic achievement was to flourish with the B picture, made for very little money in ridiculously little time. Corman seized what was a dying form, reestablished its worth, and managed to introduce its crazy disciplines to the indulgent perceptions of underground cinema.

The Edinburgh tribute took Corman very solemnly: it exposed him to criticism that he had not courted; it camouflaged his mixture of vulgarity, humor, psychological insight, chronic lack of detail, and the ability to revive stale genres. Nothing weighs down
The St. Valentine’s Day Massacre
or
Bloody Mama
more than to claim that they surpass
Bonnie and Clyde
(67, Arthur Penn). While the enterprise of
The Man With the X-Ray Eyes, Machine Gun Kelly
, and
The Last Woman on Earth
is dwarfed by the determination to see them as the work of an immense, despairing philosophy. No matter what authorities are wheeled out in defense of the apocalyptic undercurrent in Corman’s work, his films never approach the emotional and intellectual resonance in the work of Penn, Nicholas Ray, or Welles. On the other hand, few B-picture directors have wrought so much under such harassed circumstances.
The Tomb of Ligeia
, at least, is worthy of a place in the history of screen horror and
Bloody Mama
is a scathing portrait of maternal smothering. And if Corman seems a gadfly, more inventive than creative, more interested in setting up audacious ventures than in pursuing serious themes, in diverting the cumbersome, inert quickie into unexpected ideas—there is room for a hundred such figures amid so much dullness.

Corman obtained an engineering degree in California and then went to England to read English. In the early 1950s he began writing screenplays and went into production before turning to direction. He was closely associated with American International Pictures and, in turn, has renovated the cheap Western, the cheap sci-fiction, the cheap horror flick—in this case Edgar Allan Poe adaptations—the gangster picture, and the drug movie. He worked at frantic speed with skimpy resources—often aided by photographer Floyd Crosby and art director Daniel Haller—but it is unhelpful to allege that those handicaps do not show. The visual art in his films is more meager than the ideas that flutter haphazardly through them.