One From the Heart: Reprise (Francis Ford Coppola, 1981, 2024)

Teri Garr in One From the Heart

Cast: Frederic Forrest, Teri Garr, Raul Julia, Nastassja Kinski, Lainie Kazan, Harry Dean Stanton, Allen Garfield. Screenplay: Armyan Bernstein, Francis Ford Coppola. Cinematography: Ronald Victor García, Vittorio Storaro. Production design: Dean Tavoularis. Film editing: Rudi Fehr, Anne Goursaud, Randy Roberts. Music: Tom Waits. 

Was it the success of Baz Luhrmann's Moulin Rouge! (2001) and Damien Chazelle's La La Land (2016) that inspired Francis Ford Coppola to try revamping One From the Heart, the 1981 musical that destroyed his hopes of creating a film studio? One From the Heart had often been called "ahead of its time," for its attempt to revive the movie musical with stylized sets and performers that weren't known for singing and dancing. The knock against One From the Heart was chiefly that the elaborate production overwhelmed the rather thin story: a couple who quarrel, split up, have flings with others, but return to each other at the end of the film. Unfortunately, that defect remains in the re-edited version, with previously unseen footage, that Coppola called One From the Heart: Reprise. And both Frederic Forrest and Teri Garr feel miscast: Forrest was a fine character actor, not a leading man, and Garr was a wonderful comic actress in movies like Young Frankenstein (Mel Brooks, 1974) and Tootsie (Sydney Pollack, 1982), but they have no chemistry together as the sparring lovers. Tom Waits's songs, beautifully sung by Waits and Crystal Gayle, work nicely as a kind of Greek chorus commenting on the action, but some who admire the original version of Coppola's film object that in the Reprise they've been smothered by dialogue. Mostly it's a treat for the eye and sometimes for the ear, but it never reaches the heart.    

After Hours (Martin Scorsese, 1985)

Griffin Dunne and Teri Garr in After Hours

Cast: Griffin Dunne, Rosanna Arquette, Verna Bloom, Tommy Chong, Linda Fiorentino, Teri Garr, John Heard, Cheech Marin, Catherine O'Hara, Dick Miller, Will Patton, Robert Plunket, Bronson Pinchot. Screenplay: Joseph Minion. Cinematography: Michael Ballhaus. Production design: Jeffrey Townsend. Film editing: Thelma Schoonmaker. Music: Howard Shore. 

Martin Scorsese's dark farce After Hours puts protagonist Paul Hackett (Griffin Dunne) through all the wringers that 1980s New York City could provide. It's often described as "Kafkaesque" with reason: Scorsese borrowed from a Kafka story in the scene in which Paul tries to persuade a doorman to let him into a night club. But it also reflects the director's feelings about being given the runaround by the bureaucracy of the movie business as he tried to get The Last Temptation of Christ (1988) under way. There are those who think After Hours has a misogynistic edge, given that most of Paul's troubles stem from his interactions with women, starting with Marcy (Rosanna Arquette), who flirts with him and sets the whole fantastic plot in motion. But Paul's frantic inability to seize control of events -- some of which, like the loss of his money, are pure accident -- is also to blame. He's an Odysseus blown off course by fate, with the occasional Circe or siren to make things worse. 

Close Encounters of the Third Kind (Steven Spielberg, 1977)

Cary Guffey in Close Encounters of the Third Kind

Roy Neary: Richard Dreyfuss
Claude Lacombe: François Truffaut
Ronnie Neary: Teri Garr
Jillian Guiler: Melinda Dillon
David Laughlin: Bob Balaban
Barry Guiler: Cary Guffey
Project Leader: J. Patrick McNamara
Farmer: Roberts Blossom

Director: Steven Spielberg
Screenplay: Steven Spielberg
Cinematography: Vilmos Zsigmond
Production design: Joe Alves
Film editing: Michael Kahn
Music: John Williams

There are two undeniable facts about Steven Spielberg as a director: He is one of the great visual storytellers, and he often doesn't know how to end his movies. The latter is usually held against him, as with the extended didacticism of the concluding scenes of two of his greatest films, Schindler's List (1993) and Saving Private Ryan (1998). We can see both at work in Close Encounters of the Third Kind, the film that let everyone know that his big breakthrough movie, Jaws (1975), was more than just beginner's luck. Spielberg resists spelling things out for the viewer through dialogue from the beginning, letting images and situations carry the narrative weight. Even a simple gag can work wonders: Roy Neary, the lineman out to resolve a power outage, is stopped at a railroad crossing to look at his maps when we see headlights behind his truck. A car then pulls around him and the driver calls him an asshole. But then another set of headlights shows up, and instead of pulling around him, the lights go up and over the truck as Roy has his first close encounter. The first sightings of the alien ships are thrillingly enigmatic: Where can Spielberg go with this? But by the time we get to the final payoff, things drag out much too long, as if Spielberg has become so enamored of the special effects that he can't bring himself to lose a minute of them. Nevertheless, Close Encounters is epochal filmmaking, not just in its elevation of sci-fi to a major film genre but also in its revelation of Spielberg's genius for instilling a sense of wonder in an audience.

Young Frankenstein (Mel Brooks, 1974)

No telling how many times I've seen this blissful comedy, but I always find something new in it. This time, I was struck by Mel Brooks's musicality. There's the great "Puttin' on the Ritz" number, obviously, and Madeline Kahn bursting into an orgasm-induced rendition of "Ah, Sweet Mystery of Life" as Jeanette MacDonald never sang it. But the score by John Morris is wonderful on its own, as in the serenade to the monster on violin and horn played by Frederick (Gene Wilder) and Igor (Marty Feldman). And even the gag references sing: Frederick's appropriation of Mack Gordon's lyrics to "Chattanooga Choo Choo" when he arrives at the Transylvania (get it?) Station, or the supposedly virginal Elizabeth (Kahn) singing "The Battle Hymn of the Republic." It's also surprising how little really smutty humor Brooks indulges in this time. There's Inga's (Teri Garr) appreciation of the monster's "enormous schwanzstucker," to be sure, but this is PG humor at worst. So many of the gags are just wittily anti-climactic, like Frau Blucher (Cloris Leachman) proclaiming that Victor Frankenstein "vas my ... boyfriend!" Or the Blind Man (Gene Hackman) wistfully calling out to the fleeing monster, "I was gonna make espresso." (Hackman ad-libbed this line, and many other gags in the film, such as Igor's movable hump, were improvised by the actors.) And has a spoof ever been so beautifully staged? The production design is by Dale Hennesy, who had the wit to track down and borrow the original sparking and buzzing laboratory equipment that Kenneth Strickfaden created for the first Frankenstein (James Whale, 1931). The equally evocative black-and-white cinematography is by Gerald Hirschfeld.