"The Cotton Club" (1984) - Forgotten Coppola Classic

Another movie that is as famous for the back story surrounding its making and another movie that tanked commercially and critically at its release but which has gained in reputation over time. It may not yet be considered a “classic,” but it is gaining momentum on cable re-runs.

Robert Evans, who as head of Paramount, had been credited with producing and overseeing THE GODFATHER I & II and CHINATOWN, the best films of the 1970's, had gone independent and this was his big package deal. Script problems and financing woes overwhelmed him at a time when he was trembling on the high wire of the Hollywood power structure. Evans became a poster boy for the excesses of the late 70's and early 80's, involving inflated egos and cocaine budgets that marked the fall of many wunderkind of the 1970's Hollywood renaissance.

As time dragged on during the long pre-production troubles of this mammoth project, Evans allegedly played footsie with some Florida pharmaceutical “importers” who wanted to use their ill-gotten fortune to buy into Hollywood glamour. An attractive dame, Lainie Greenberger, and a complex cast of low-lifes, who could have served as the basis for Elmore Leonard’s GET SHORTY, circled the project and murder ensued. The scandal and subsequent trial, in which Evans played a tangential role, was like those that threatened the Hollywood of an earlier era of excess, the 1920's.

That the movie involved the relationships of gangsters and show business in the 20's and 30's was an irony that has added to the film’s legend over the years.

Eventually Francis Ford Coppola accepted the challenge of cobbling a script and directing, and it is his vision (along with co-writer Mario Puzo) that is all over the final result. It is a fair addition to the Godfather genre (certainly better than his later made-for-dough GODFATHER III), matching scenes of violence with alternating and intercut musical numbers which comment on the action much as "The Godfather" had done with violent counterpoint to family issues.

Unlike The Godfather and more like APOCALYPSE, NOW, COTTON CLUB tries for too much irony, spins too many plates in the air at the same time. It evokes the Cotton Club era, when colorful gangsters ran the posh and trendy jazz club smack in the middle of Harlem, catering to a whites only audience with “colored” talent. The talent included some of the best musical artists this country has ever produced: Duke Ellington, Lena Horne, Cab Calloway, Bill Robinson, Ethel Waters and many others. Coppola wanted to show it all: the gangsters, the Black / White issue, talent in the grasp of evil patrons.

And it is very much a musical, recreating the popular jazz of the era with production numbers — singing and dancing in top hats, taps, costumes, big bands. By 1984, when the movie was released, the audience had lost its taste for musical movies, especially those full of American standards rather than rock. ALL THAT JAZZ (1979), Bob Fosse’s brilliant but difficult autobiographical film, had flopped. Only ROCKY HORROR PICTURE SHOW (1975), SATURDAY NIGHT FEVER (1977), and GREASE (1978), had clicked with the younger demographic in the 70's.

As in "The Godfather," the characters are a mesh of real people and some that are based loosely on real people or composites. The Lena Horne type, called “Lila Rose Oliver,” a light skinned chanteuse, is played by the beautiful Lonette McKee. Richard Gere plays “Dixie Dwyer,” a musician who becomes a movie gangster, a la George Raft. Diane Lane (then only 18), plays “Vera Cicero,” a gangster’s moll who wants to own a night club, like Texas Guinan. Nicolas Cage plays Dixie’s kid brother, “Vincent,” a gangster wannabe, who gets to be known as “Mad Dog” after a “hit” takes out some children as collateral damage. The real “Mad Dog,” Vincent Coll, made headlines in the early 1930's for similar activities.

Bob Hoskins plays Owen “Owney” Madden, the mobster who owned The Cotton Club (which had previously been owned by Black boxer, Jack Johnson). Madden was in fact English born, and was associated with Dutch Schultz, Vincent “Mad Dog” Coll, and Charley “Lucky” Luciano.

The movie depicts a true event. Desperate for money, Coll and his cronies kidnapped George Jean “Big Frenchy” DeMange (Fred Gwynne), an intimate of Owney Madden, who paid $35,000 for the safe release of his friend and then patiently plotted his revenge. Coll was lured to a drugstore phone booth to talk “peace” with Madden, and while on hold, he was aerated with a tommy gun.

James Remar makes a convincing psychopath as Dutch Schultz, (born Arthur Fleigenheimer) the Jewish gangster (though he converted to Catholicism in time to get the Last Rites). Schultz ran the Harlem rackets (credited as perfecting the “numbers” game) until he threatened to assassinate Thomas Dewey, the “special prosecutor” who had been assigned to get him. Dewey later succeeded as a prosecutor, became governor of New York, and in 1944 and ‘48 ran for president and lost. Dewey, a small neat man with a thin mustache, was famously ridiculed by Teddy Roosevelt’s daughter: “He looks like the man on the wedding cake.”

The newly consolidated syndicate, headed by Meyer Lansky and Luciano, had Schultz eliminated, and this event is fairly accurately depicted in the film (although it happened a few years later, 1935). It is one of Coppola’s inspired editing jobs, a climactic scene intercutting a dazzling solo dance by Gregory Hines on the Cotton Club stage with the shooting in a New Jersey restaurant. The hired killers were contracted by Luciano and Lansky from Murder, Inc., the business run by Louis “Lepke” Buchhalter, and included, among others, Ben “Bugsy” Siegel, Charley “The Bug” Workman, and other notable Jewish and Italian psychos who became famous in gangster movies and tabloid photos of their bodies in pools of blood.

Another sub-plot involves African American gangsters trying to keep their share of the Harlem rackets from the incursions of white mobsters. Laurence Fishburne plays real-life mobster “Bumpy” Johnson (here called Rhodes) as if he is a pioneering civil rights activist, integrating The Cotton Club, and proving he can be as ruthless as the white mobsters.

The history is not much different. Johnson was viewed by Harlemites as symbol of “Black Power” against the white Mob. He and Madame “Queenie” St. Clair had fought for their share of the numbers swag against the more politically connected, better armed and more ruthless white gangsters of the era.

In a touching sub-plot which tracks a common historical issue, Hines and McKee fall in love. Conflict over her wish to pass as a “white” star, and their ironic problem getting a hotel room because they appear to be a mixed couple, are highlighted. At another point, Hines is excluded from a night club where she is performing. They do get together for a happy ending.

Coppola also gives more than lip service to the heritage of great tap dancing that the era represented. “Honi” Coles and other tap legends do a bit with Hines, and Greg and his brother Maurice have fine moments on stage. Gwen Verdon, the legendary Broadway dancer ("Lola" in DAMN YANKEES) and wife and partner of Bob Fosse, plays Dixie’s mother, but gets to do only a couple of steps. The Cotton Club chorus of beautiful light skinned Black dancers (including a young chorus boy, Mario Van Peebles) do lively numbers to several of the jazz age’s best numbers, including “Diga-diga-do.”

Ellington’s great lyrical melodies are the underscoring for violent action. There are several effectively erotic sex scenes between Gere, then the big star, and newly adult Lane, in her first big chance. After this flop and a few others, it looked like Diane Lane would never make it big. She and Gere were matched again 20 years later, and Lane would steal the movie from Gere, attain “instant” stardom and an Oscar, in UNFAITHFUL (2002).


A footnote. George Raft, the actor who was the model for Gere’s role in COTTON CLUB, is a fascinating character. He was born in one of New York’s worst slums, Hell’s Kitchen, but resembled Rudolf Vaentino and learned to dance like the silent film matinee idol. That assured Raft a raft of female followers, including Texas Guinan, who kept him around her night club to “perform.”

In 1932, he made it in Hollywood with a supporting role in Howard Hawks’ SCARFACE, with a trademark coin tossing bit. He was typecast in gangster roles partly because his lifelong pals included Owney Madden and Ben Siegel. The Raft part in BUGSY was played by Joe Mantegna.

James Cagney claimed in his autobiography that when he was president of the Screen Actor’s Guild, the Mob wanted to kill him for opposing their involvement in movie unions. He credited Raft in interceding with his friends to cancel the hit.

Under contract to Warner Brothers, Raft is most famous for turning down the leads in — no kidding: HIGH SIERRA (1941), THE MALTESE FALCON (1941), CASABLANCA (1942) and DOUBLE INDEMNITY (1944). He can therefore be credited with insuring the success of those classics, and making the careers of Huston, Bogart, Wilder and MacMurray.

He must not have been all dumb. He supposedly said: “I must have gone through $10 million during my career. Part went for gambling, part for horses and part for women. The rest I spent foolishly.”

Late in his life, he played a parody of his own image as “Spats Colombo” in SOME LIKE IT HOT (1959).

(Sources include Wikipedia, IMBD, various contemporary critics)