Francis Ford Coppola’s Rumblefish is one of the more visually striking movies of the 80s. It was shot back to back with Coppola’s similarly themed, but far less stylish, The Outsiders. Rumblefish has a deliberately avant-garde style, shot in high contrast black and white, with lots of noir overtones. The experimental approach extends to the…
The Conversation
“He’d kill US if he had the chance….” This I remember was the pivotal line in Francis Ford Coppola’s 1974 paranoid procedural thriller The Conversation. Inspired by Antonioni’s earlier arthouse thriller Blowup, Coppola cast Gene Hackman as a lonely, obsessive bugging expert, whose recordings indicate a potential murder. But it’s when he plays the tape…
The Cotton Club
Here’s a shout-out for Francis Ford Coppola’s OTHER great gangster movie, 1984’s Harlem-set The Cotton Club. Coppola took the job because he needed the money, having bankrupted himself making One From The Heart. Its production was an expensive shambles, spread over 5 years, it lost a ton of money, and one of its financial backers…
Apocalypse Now
This is the US one sheet poster for one of the most epic and ambitious war movies ever. I distinctly remember seeing Apocalypse Now in the cinema. It was at an arthouse cinema in Nottingham, which did not have the best sound. Consequently it was impossible to understand a word of Marlon Brando’s dialogue. At…
Tucker: The Man and His Dream
This is the soundtrack album for a somewhat underrated yet very enjoyable Francis Ford Coppola movie. Tucker flopped upon release and has never been held in the same regard as Coppola’s earlier classics such as The Godfather and Apocalypse Now. Its certainly much more lightweight than those movies (deliberately so), but its a terrific, stylish…