Once upon a Time in Harlem

By RICHARD CORLISS

THE COTTON CLUB Directed by Francis Coppola Screenplay by William Kennedy and Francis Coppola

It is the sorry fate of some big-budget movies to be remembered as the indifferent sequels to their own prerelease publicity. Mention Cleopatra and the memory swirls, not with images from the film but with tabloids screaming the latest indiscretion of Liz and Dick. Mention The Cotton Club 20 years from now, and the graybeards will have forgotten whether it was a good film or a bad one. Instead, they will gather their young ones around the video fireplace and enthrall them with this fable:

A long time ago (1979) in a mythical land (Hollywood), a producer named Robert Evans had a dream: to make a $20 million spectacle about Prohibition-era gangsters operating out of a legendary Harlem nightclub, to cast Al Pacino and Richard Pryor as the stars, and to direct it himself from a screenplay by Mario Puzo. But Evans wanted financial as well as creative control of the film. So he snubbed the studios and went elsewhere for money. He made a deal with an Arab arms merchant but returned the dough. He wooed a bunch of Texas oilmen, but that deal fell through. Then, early in 1983, Evans found his angels: a couple of Las Vegas casino moguls.

Now he had his millions, and even a couple of new stars-Richard Gere and Gregory Hines-but Puzo's script wasn't working. Enter Francis Coppola. He had once made a movie called The Godfather, from Puzo's novel, with Evans overseeing the production, and they all made pots of money. But now Coppola was deep in debt and willing to write Cotton Club for $250,000. Coppola loved his script; Evans thought it read like a PBS documentary. And so, while casting continued for roles that hardly existed and sets were built in a Queens studio at $140,000 a week, Evans persuaded Coppola to rewrite his rewrite (another $250,000) and then sign on as director, with a promise of total creative control.

And here, my children, is where things went from chaos to crisis. The first week of shooting, Gere refused to show up until he had a contract. As costs ballooned, money ran short. Seven weeks into shooting, in a contract dispute with Evans, Coppola walked off the set and flew to Europe; the cast and crew missed their paychecks and refused to work until they were paid in cash. And in exchange for a quick $15 million from the film's distributor, Orion Pictures, Evans relinquished his control over the movie. By the spring of 1984, Evans was suing everybody in sight. But the show went on, and after five years and $47 million, The Cotton Club premiered on Dec. 14, 1984. The rest, my children, is silence.

A backstage story as entertaining as this deserves the best of punch lines: rave reviews, big business, Oscars all around. But The Cotton Club-the movie, not the gossip machine-deserves less. The volatile drama that attended its making rarely flares onscreen; working at flash point made no sparks fly. On even the calmest of sets, the premise would have shown promise: to blend the early talkies' two most popular genres, the gangster film and the musical, into a sort of Public Enemy Goes to 42nd Street or, modernized, The Godfather Gets One from the Heart. Why, then, is The Cotton Club such a frigid, juiceless mess?

Certainly there is enough going on. The story centers on two pairs of brothers and two troublesome women, and surrounds them with the ricochet rhythms of tap dancing and gunfire. The white brothers are the Dwyers: Dixie (Gere), a cornet player soon to turn Hollywood actor, and Vincent (Nicolas Cage), a bad boy heading for gangland death. The black brothers are the Williamses:

Dancers Sandman (Gregory Hines) and Clay (Maurice Hines), who secure a spot on the stage of the Cotton Club. Dixie's girl is Vera Cicero (Diane Lane), the satiny moll of Mobster Dutch Schultz (James Remar); Sandman's girl is Lila Rose Oliver (Lonette McKee), a light-skinned torch singer with aspirations to make it in the great white way. To lend some resonance to their characters, Coppola and Co-Author William Kennedy (whose tough-guy novel Ironweed won a Pulitzer Prize) have merged them with real-life figures of the jazz age: Bix Beiderbecke, George Raft, Texas Guinan, Lena Home. But the parallel stories do not effectively intertwine; they simply pass in the night like city strangers with menace in their eyes. There is too much geometry here, and too little chemistry.

Around the edges of the tableau vivant one can detect signs of life. Julian Beck, the grand old mandarin of the Living Theater, is a cadaverous hoot as Dutch Schultz's gunsel. The snippets of Cotton Club choreography have a sprightly sass that busts out of the archive; and there is a lovely scene (though indifferently shot and synced) featuring a dozen hoofers led by Charles ("Honi") Coles. Two witty montages-all headlines, quick cuts and oblique angles-portend an exciting future for their creator, Gian-Carlo Coppola, the director's son. And Father Francis ends his movie with a delirious crosscutting of the Cotton Club and Grand Central station, happy white folks and happy black folks, Hollywood fiction and a sense of fantasy all his own.

There are pretty slim pickings, though, when the lead actors perform their love scenes as if at gunpoint, and the characters are lacking in charm or moral weight, and the climax is lifted, without improvement, from The Godfather, and the "period" color makes the screen look as if it is coated with plaque. The Cotton Club is not a bad film, just a bland one; not inept, just inert. Given its garish production history, one rather expected The Cotton Club to sing with hot-jazz desperation. Instead, we get the mediocre craftsmanship of a pit band in Vegas. -By Richard Corliss