Something to watch tonight: Thursday 30 January

One from the Heart (Coppola, 1982)

One from the Heart is a pretty notorious film for such a charming and lovely story.

Its notoriety largely comes from being the second or third time that Francis Ford Coppola bankrupted himself in order to follow his own idiosyncratic vision. In this case he financed the film independently through his American Zoetrope studio and lost something like $30m in the process.

He’s now revisited the film and produced a new director’s cut which he calls One from the Heart Reprise. (He recently did something similar with Godfather Three which was similarly reviled on first release).

This recommendation isn’t for the Reprise version because I haven’t yet seen it (and may never). But the great thing about the Reprise being given a 4K UHD disc release is that the package includes a second disc with a beautiful DolbyVision master of Coppola’s original cut and that was what we watched last night.

An ordinary couple living and working in Las Vegas (she is a travel agent and he works in a wrecking yard), break up because the spark has gone out of the relationship. On the rebound each one meets someone who seems to be the answer to their romantic dreams – he meets a circus acrobat and she a part-time cocktail pianist.

But over the course of one night they both realise that the grass isn’t necessarily greener on the other side.

It’s a highly stylised, pseudo-musical with some stunning theatre-style transitions and a total commitment to its romantic theme. This was my first rewatch since it first came out in 1982 but the soundtrack CD by Tom Waits and Crystal Gayle has been a staple in my collection for decades. The editor-in-chief didn’t actually know that Baby-Waits was known for writing actually listenable music before he went off into the avant-garde, so we have some catch-up listening to do there.

What I wasn’t expecting was that it would be so similar in style to Coppola’s recent solo effort Megalopolis, even to the extent of his fascination with Ancient Rome. I mean, look at this photo of Frederic Forrest as Hank. He’s wearing a bedsheet like a toga and you can’t quite make out that his haircut – before the makeover that he gets after meeting Nastassia Kinski – is a classic Caesar.

The casting is also in line with the theme. Forrest and Teri Garr were great actors but usually supporting players, not leads, but by the end of the film they are the stars that their talent deserved. Their glamorous alter-egos – Nastassja Kinski as Leila the acrobat and Raúl Juliá as waiter/pianist Ray – are other-worldly in comparison. Oh, what we lost when Juliá passed away from stomach cancer thirty years ago.

Coppola famously decided to recreate Las Vegas inside a sound stage and the theatricality is one of the things that provides the film’s charm. In some of the street scenes on the new restoration you can clearly see the painted black ceiling of the studio.

This is a great disc to have in the permanent collection as there are plenty of extras to help shine a light on this remarkable production, many of them newly created for this package.

---

---

Where to watch One from the Heart