The Cotton Club - Movie Review
Rating: 3 out of 5
Gangsters, tap dancers, and jazz musicians collide, in Francis Coppola's rather maligned tale of the famed Harlem jazz club during the Prohibition era.
Starring Richard Gere as a cornet player-cum-movie star (Gere even plays his own solos in the film) and Diane Lane as a kind of singer/hooker/kept woman, the film gets off to a wild start, throwing us into Coppola's archetypal world of violence and betrayal. Gere and Lane have an uneasy romance, the problem being they are low on the totem and the gangsters who control them wouldn't care for any such hanky-panky.
Alas, the film derails midway through, when Lane's character virtually disappears and the film detours deep into the mob scene and away from the "love" story. A subplot involving Gregory Hines (playing an ambitious tap dancer, wow!) has virtually nothing to do with the rest of the film. It comes off as tacked on because it is tacked on.
Coppola tries to make the movie seem real by imbuing it with a great soundtrack of jazz standards and appearances by actors playing the celebrities of the day (Jimmy Cagney, Gloria Swanson -- too bad none of the actors look the part). But in the end, the lack of a solid story is what takes The Cotton Club into nowhereland -- the main problem being not that the film is based on a book, but that it's based on a picture book.
Facts and Figures
Year: 1984
Run time: 127 mins
In Theaters: Friday 14th December 1984
Box Office Worldwide: $25.9M
Budget: $58M
Distributed by: Nelson Entertainment
Production compaines: Orion Pictures, PSO International, Totally Independent
Reviews
Contactmusic.com: 3 / 5
Rotten Tomatoes: 75%
Fresh: 18 Rotten: 6
IMDB: 6.5 / 10
Cast & Crew
Director: Francis Ford Coppola
Producer: Robert Evans
Screenwriter: William Kennedy, Francis Ford Coppola
Starring: Richard Gere as Dixie Dwyer, Diane Lane as Vera Cicero, Bob Hoskins as Owney Madden, James Remar as Dutch Schulz, Nicolas Cage as Vincent Dwyer, Gregory Hines as Sandman Williams, Lonette McKee as Lila Rose Oliver
Also starring: Allen Garfield, Fred Gwynne, Robert Evans, William Kennedy, Francis Ford Coppola