One From The Heart [1982]

Customer Reviews:

One from the Heart of Darkness.......2007-01-15

A huge roll of the dice that wiped out Francis Ford Coppola's Zoetrope studio and saw him spending the next decade churning out pictures to pay off the debts the $28m flop left him with, One From the Heart is one of those films I really want to like - to love, even - but which just won't let me. Visually it's a triumph, but the Tom Waits suicide blues score rarely works as a screen musical and as a human drama its kept firmly on the ground by the fact these characters just aren't likeable. Coppola seems more interested in his lavish studio settings than what's happening in them, with even the most mundane sequences shot like an imaginatively staged theatrical musical with intricate shifts of lighting and colour, dissolving walls and neon dreams. But perhaps the biggest problem of all is that Coppola doesn't seem to have made this film for the audience but for himself, and so it probably never connects with anyone not on his personal wavelength. The trailers give away a big part of the problem: the 1982 release stresses the Godfather and Apocalypse Now as evidence of Coppola's genius while the 2003 reissue trailer runs off a list of critical superlatives in a sternly unemotional voice: joy isn't on the menu here.

That the story is so simple as to be almost invisible - a couple split up over the 4th July weekend and become involved with new partners - needn't be a problem: after all, three sailors on furlough looking for Miss Turnstiles or a backwoodsman convincing his six bachelors to kidnap six local girls to marry aren't exactly complex. With good casting, good writing and good musical numbers, there's no real reason it shouldn't work. Unfortunately it doesn't get them. The argument that kicks off the split is atrociously written and just as badly acted - you've seen more vicious spats on The Dick Van Dyke Show - and because we never buy it for a moment the film is handicapped almost from the start. The fact that either lead can carry a movie, is even more of a problem, leaving you with a film without any heart at its center: Raul Julia is the only member of the cast who really shines, and he probably has the least screen time of anyone in the picture. The constant crosscutting doesn't help, with Coppola cutting away as soon as one scene starts to gel to focus on an awkward one that never does. Despite input from Gene Kelly (barely noticeable) and Michael Powell (visually very noticeable), it's not even quite a musical - aside from a couple of fantasy numbers it opts Yentl-like to keep the singing as an invisible chorus/underscore not so much commenting as setting the melancholy tone that counterpoints the bright, garish visuals. The film's one promising musical number, where Julia's serenade of Teri Garr spills out onto the streets of Las Vegas, is never allowed to play uninterrupted without meandering shots of Frederic Forrest wandering through the neon streets.

Coppola's 2003 re-edit of the film does nothing to improve matters. The revised opening is a little smoother but at the expense of Forrest's character, removing all remaining traces of color to make him even more of a boring homebody. It's an excellent DVD, however, with everything you could want to know and more and offering some fairly frank insights into the failure of Coppola's attempt to ally the expertise of the old studio contract system with the modern advances of electronic cinema, not to mention the constant financing problems. It's just a shame that the film itself is so damn hard to love.

Cotton Candy Cinema.......2006-08-29

One from the heart was Coppola's follow up to the exhaustive masterpiece Apocalypse Now, a film that famously went over budget, over schedule and over the heads of most Hollywood studio executives and yet, somehow, managed to win a clutch of major awards and eventually became a cult classic!! One from the Heart was supposed to be a change of pace for The Godfather auteur... a return to the low-key, character driven approach to filmmaking that Coppola had started out with on films like The Rain People and The Conversation, as well as standing as the flagship picture for the director's newly furnished Zoetrope studios.

In what would become part of contemporary Hollywood folklore, Coppola soon turned his small scale musical romance into a full blown epic, deciding to recreate the neon-lit fantasia of Las Vegas on a massive studio-soundstage, as well as using theatrical effects such as dissolving walls, rear projection and forced-perspective model work to give the film a close to "live" feel. After more than a year in production, the film went massively over budget and over schedule before finally being released to poor reviews and embarrassing box office receipts. Along with Scorsese's New York, New York, Cimino's Heaven's Gate and the big budget re-make of Dennis Potter's Pennies from Heaven, One from the Heart would be the final nail in the coffin for true, artistic, independent cinema from within the Hollywood system. For the rest of the 80's, Coppola would produce low-budget teen dramas (The Outsiders), star vehicles (Peggy Sue Got Married) and films that seemed closer to made for TV (Gardens of Stone) before finally clawing back some sense of integrity with the fine film Tucker: The Man and his Dream and his elaborate vision of Bram Stoker's Dracula. But in retrospect, is this film really that bad?

Well, yes and no. Coppola's vision of the film is that of a preposterous candy-land of vivid reds, shimmering blues and glaring silver, as the camera dollies and swoops like something from a 50's musical, while the whole thing is cut to precision to the rolling rhythms of that ace soundtrack!! The score here is by Tom Waits and lounge singer Crystal Gayle and features a number of key Waits' compositions, such as Broken Bicycles, Old Boyfriends and Picking up after You (songs that seem to underpin the façade of glamour and the underlined yearning of defeat so central to the film itself). It also boats likeable supporting performances from Raul Julia, Nastassja Kinski, Lainie Kazan and Harry Dean Stanton, who each bring a sense of charm and pathos to their respective roles.

Visuals aside, though... and the film falls flat. The basic plot of One from the Heart can be transcribed on the back of a napkin; mismatched working class couple argue, break up, meet new people, have an adventure, realise they really miss one another, try to work it out... film ends!! As another online "critic" said, "the film seems all dressed up with nowhere to go", the two protagonists are neither likable, nor believable as a couple, the narrative saunters along with little momentum, large-scale spectacle seems shoehorned in, merely to justify the $25 million budget (a lot of money for 1982), and then the ending just descends into a mire of clichés invented simply to wrap things up as quickly as possible. Ultimately, we (or should I say "I"?) never came to care about the characters or even get to know them. Both of them lie and both of them cheat (and neither seems to have any respect for themselves or for each other). Fred Forrest as Hank tries to give the character a sense of charm with his cocky swagger, but instead comes across as a selfish, insensitive bully, who doesn't have the common sense to realise when he's onto a good thing with exotic high wire performer Kinski. Terri Garr as Frannie looks good... she spends half of the film prowling around in a skin-tight red mini dress and the other half with her breasts out, but on the whole, her character is similarly selfish, whiny and a bit of a tramp.

All the while Coppola is doing dazzling things with the editing and the production design and the cinematography, finding a middle ground between Stanley Donen and Federico Fellini. It also has similar parallels to the final film by legendary German filmmaker Rainer Werner Fassbinder, who's adaptation of Genet's Querelle is shot in the same highly stylised, theatrical manner (it can also be seen as a minor influence on Lars von Trier's great film Europa - which re-invented some of the techniques used here - as well as the fantasy elements of Paul Schrader's great film, Mishima). Like Fassbinder's film, Coppola's work never really makes the human connection, which, for a story that relies on our sympathies, is really a major failing.

Heart of Coppola.......2005-08-23

Hard to find for many years, Coppola's 'One From the Heart' at last gets a release: a 2-disk DVD packed with extras.

After the large scale Godfather and Apocalypse Now films, the director chose to film this small musical love story of a couple, played by Frederic Forrest and Terri Garr, who have a bust up on a holiday weekend in Las Vegas. The songs by Tom Waits and Crystal Gayle give voice to the lead actors' thoughts and emotions.

The film is visually spectacular. Filmed on soundstages which include a recreation of the Strip in Las Vegas, frame after frame is beautifully composed, with Waits' jazzy score perfectly matching the neon glare of the screen. Scenes dissolve into each other with expressive lighting and scrims; the effect is theatrical and Moulin Rouge owes a lot to it. But like many musicals, its problems lie in the slender plot which allows little scope for character development. The charismatic performances of Raul Julia and Natassja Kinski in the supporting cast often hold the film together.

It is highly ambitious however, both technically and artistically. The remastered and re-edited print is a joy to behold, and the wealth of extras on the bonus disk are first rate, giving a pretty unbiased view of the troubled production and Coppola's battle to create Zoetrope Studios. For me the film is 3 out of 5 and the extras 5 out of 5. Overall 4 out of 5.

One for the heart.......2004-08-28

If you love Tom Wait's voice, this vision is the 3D version of it,beautifully shot with a sound track that russles the heart strings and a story to warm the cockles of even the coldest heart, for all us romantics who pretend to be sceptics...

Customer Reviews:

One from the Heart of Darkness.......2007-11-23

One From The Heart [1982] (REGION 1) (NTSC)

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One From The Heart [1982] (REGION 1) (NTSC)
Director: Francis Ford Coppola
Manufacturer: Fantoma Films/Caroline
ProductGroup: DVD
Binding: DVD

All Drama | Drama | Categories | DVD | Video

Musicals | Classics | Categories | DVD | Video

DVD | Format (binding_browse-bin) | Refinements | DVD | Video
ASIN: 6308251186
Release Date: 2004-01-27

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