The Ultimate Guide to Francis Ford Coppola

Francis Ford Coppola, a true American master, showed very little promise early on. The Bellboy and the Playgirl, a sex film with a 3D nude woman, and Dementia 13, an average thriller significant solely for its atmospheric music and cinematography, hinted at little that was to come.

With You're a Big Boy Now, a film actually started while Coppola was in film school, Coppola finally showed proof of his skill, even if the exciting, energetic techniques used in the film were seldom to show prominently in his films again. Unfortunately, he followed this film with Finian's Rainbow, an outdated Broadway musical. Despite having an interesting score, Coppola was ill-suited to the musical genre, and the film is held back more by his inability to find the proper directoral voice for the material than by its tired 'insights' into racial tolerance.

The Rain People found Coppola beginning to focus more on character-driven films fleshed out with an excellent cast. While the film was still a bit too self-concious to be fully sucessful, it was an important film to Coppola's development, and is still an interesting drama to view today.

All of Coppola's latent talent and evolution finally found perfect bloom in The Godfather and The Godfather, Part 2. One of the mightiest one-two punches in cinematic history, the Godfather story found Coppola uniting his early atmospheric touches (aided immensely by Gordon Willis' glorious cinematography) and his love of the genre film with his interest in characters and acting evident in The Rain People. The results were astonding. Where before Coppola's love of French New Wave techniques often called attention to themselves, here his editing and montage actually worked to layer the story with the richness of the past and the reality of the present and psychological insights. Al Pacino, Marlon Brando, Robert De Niro, and many others gave performances that rivaled anything else they had done or would do, and Coppola's enriching of a pop novel proved both commercially and artistically satisfying. He later edited the two works into one long film, The Godfater Epic. The final film, now in chronologically order and boasting several previously unseen scenes, was certainly a immensely rewarding work of art, though critics still argue over its merits compared to the original two film. Regardless of one's preference, it is hard to deny that both the originals and the united epic are rare and wonderful works of art.

Between these two keystones to American film, Coppola also produced the low-key, often overlooked masterpiece, The Conversation. Where The Godfather Epic sprawled over a family's history, this small, claustrophobic film focused on Gene Hackman's expertly-played sound surveillance expert, and the film's unique blend of visual and sonic imagery combined to create a film not at all out of place, in terms of quality, among his praised Godfather Epic.

Coppola finished this amazing period with his final masterpiece, Apocalypse Now. A huge film, famous for running drastically over time and budget, Apocalypse Now featured some of the most startling images captured on film, while struggling to remain focused in the minds of its main characters. The film's narrative grip may occasionally slip, but the final result, a hallucinatory journey through the Vietnam countryside at war and the 'heart of darkness' of Brando's Colonel Kurtz, is unique and breathtaking.

After Apocalypse Now, Coppola's career floundered, only rarely touching on the genius of his mid to late seventies work. One from the Heart, while visually impressive (and incredibly influential on many foreign directors), finally lost its hold on its characters, rendering the film hollow and cold.

Rumble Fish and The Outsiders, focusing on disadvantaged teens, proved both limp and uninspired, despite containing casts littered with future stars. The Cotton Club, however, proved a significant step up from his recent work. Coppola returned to the musical, this time emphasizing the drama framing the music, and despite another dreadful, overbudget shoot, The Cotton Club was a good, if not great, period and character drama. Even better is the under-rated Peggy Sue Got Married, a rare, light comedy-drama that stands out in Coppola's work. Featuring impressive performances from Kathleen Turner and Nicolas Cage, Peggy Sue Got Married perfectly mixed fantasy, nostalgia, and comedy in large doses, and the extremely entertaining film has proved one of the best of Coppola's post Apocalypse Now films.

The slow-moving Gardens of Stone was only marginally interesting, while Tucker: The Man and His Dream, benefited from Jeff Bridges' performance and Coppola's invigorating attempts to capture post-war American optimism. While New York Stories, a collection of three short films by Coppola, Woody Allen, and Martin Scorsese, is an undersung gem, Coppola's segment is easily the least enchanting of the three.

Perhaps attempting to cease his lack of focus throughout the eighties (and to score a much needed box office hit), Coppola started the ninties by revisiting the Corleone family in The Godfather, Part 3. Critics weren't very impressed, saving their sharpest barbs for the poor acting by Coppola's daughter, Sofia, but the film was actually an brooding return to form for Coppola. Playing more like tragedy than the first two films' family history, Coppola reunited most of the talent from the first two films, including Gordon Willis, and whatever weakness Sofia Coppola brought to the cast was more than compensated for by Andy Garcia's riveting performance. If not equal to the first two films, the third part is still an excellent and worthy end to the Godfather trilogy.

Unfortunately, this artistic revival was not to last. Bram Stoker's Dracula, while still visually impressive and sporting an interesting cast, managed to lavish on violence and sex while never achieving a sense of horror, suspense, romance, or eroticism usually inherent in the Dracula story. Jack, while not quite as bad as its reputation implies, was a sadly average attempt to capitalize on the talent of its star, Robin Williams. Saddled with a terrible script, the film never gels into a intriguing film.

Some hope for Coppola's future, perhaps, can be found in John Grisham's The Rainmaker. While, like Jack, sadly hampered by a subpar script, Coppola once again assembled an excellent cast, and his direction showed a bit of the confidence evident in his greatest work.

On an interesting, related note, Sofia has eventually proved a much better artist behind the camera than in front of it, setting critics astir wih her The Virgin Suicides.