#6: The Cotton Club (1984)

Hello! My name is Ed and I am trying to win the lottery by watching Nicolas Cage films.

This time, it’s a family business, because a) it’s another film directed by his uncle Francis Ford Coppola, and b) it’s about gangsters and people call them a family even though they shoot each in the face a lot more than most families.

The Cotton Club was a real actual place where you could go to in 1920–30s New York if you wanted to see some top musical acts with some nice healthy racism and presumably people getting stabbed up sometimes because it was run by gangsters. The film is very vaguely based on some factual stuff that happened but all the people have different names so the writers can make stuff up about them when they feel like it. This is somewhat familiar territory for Coppola — to the point where the original screenplay was written by Mario Puzo, author of The Godfather.

The big difference between this and the director’s earlier gangster outings is that this time there’s a lot more singing and dancing — the film is really the story of the performers who get unwittingly dragged into gangland, centrally pianist-turned-actor Dixie (Richard Gere) and tap dancer Sandman (Gregory Hines). And it’s the musical sequences that stand out — the film snoozes through the shouting gangster stuff but wakes up a bit as soon as someone’s singing Minnie the Moocher or whatever.

There really isn’t a vast amount to say about the whole business — it just sort of bimbles along rather clinically for 2 hours until it stops, leaving us vaguely educated about the more seedy aspects of 1930s New York but never particularly engaged. Everyone’s called things like Frenchie or Dutchie. There’s a “funny” scene about Hollywood producers being quite cynical — sick burn, Francis. There’s an actually funny scene where black gangsters stick a racist man’s head into a toilet. Bob Hoskins is in it.

Cage takes the part of Richard Gere’s younger brother, convinced he can become a really good gangster despite the handicap of being a massive idiot. Witless aggression is well within his range, and *spoilers* he gets his first screen death. Because, kids: being a gangster is bad.

The most interesting scene is the very final one, in which reality falls apart. Dixie is taking the train out of New York to get away from all these naughty mobsters, but suddenly Grand Central Station merges with stage of The Cotton Club — staff and passengers start dancing all over the shop, and when Dixie finally gets the girl, the audience cheers. Fairly saccharine stuff, but a relief after the rather flat 2 hours that precede it. Still, on to business:

THE NUMBERS

13 — The female lead, Vera, claims to have been on her own since she was 13 years old. Diane Lane “won” a Razzie for this which only adds weight to my theory that the people who give out Razzies are arseholes because it’s really not a notably bad performance.

20 — The train in the surreal finale is “the 20th Century Limited” as prominently indicated by a sign hanging off the back. I don’t know if this is some sort of funny joke about the film business (20th Century being one of the companies that merged to become 20th Century Fox around this time) but there really was a train service called that so now you have learned a thing about a train.

23 — Dixie chucks a drink on Vera in the 23rd Street Bar and Grill, for reasons that now escape me.

28 — The film opens in the year 1928. In the film Stargate 1928 is the year they find the Stargate but it is not clear if Stargate and The Cotton Club are set in the same cinematic universe.

37 — ‘Gangster’ is the answer to 37 across in a crossword someone or other is doing. This is a very subtle joke because the film is about gangsters!

50 — Nicolas Cage ransoms Frenchie (or possibly Dutchie, who can remember?) for $50,000. It basically does not go well for him in the long run, so I am going to stick to playing the lottery.

THE RESULT

2 balls! Free Lucky Dip! If I can get 2 balls this often, how hard can it be to get 6?

NEXT TIME ON NICOLAS CAGE:

Birdy. Yet another bloody period drama, about WAR and FRIENDSHIP, I expect.