The Cotton Club (1984) * *

Directed by:  Francis Ford Coppola

Starring:  Richard Gere, Diane Lane, James Remar, Bob Hoskins, Gregory Hines, Lonette McKee, Fred Gywnne, Nicolas Cage

The Cotton Club has an authentic look and feel of 1930's Harlem.    Wall-to-wall jazz and dancing are everywhere, while gangsters like Dutch Schultz and Lucky Luciano were treated like celebrities.     Despite the terrific production values, the film itself is uneven.     I read the production was fraught with difficulties, including scenes that were shot without a finished screenplay.    The trouble is, The Cotton Club feels like that in many spots.

The film opens in Harlem, 1928.    The Cotton Club was the hotspot of the time, which featured black musical acts performing to all-white audiences.     Local acts aspire to play there and local gangsters aspire to go there.   At a nearby club, Sandman Williams (Hines) is dancing while coronet player Dixie Dwyer (Gere) plays in the band.    Dixie saves the life of gangster Dutch Schultz (Remar) during an attempt on his life and soon he is part of Schultz' inner circle.    Soon after, Dixie's brother Vinny (Cage) gets a job with Schultz running numbers and then doing other dirty work.     Dixie learns early on that Schultz is psychopathic.   He also falls for Schultz' teenage mistress (Lane), which could be trouble for both of them.   Fortunately for Dixie, he is discovered by actress Gloria Swanson at the Cotton Club and becomes a movie star.    That gets him out from under Schultz' thumb, but also leaves his love behind to deal with the maniac.    

In an alternate storyline, Sandman falls hard for a mulatto singer (McKee), who by day works at a lawyer's office and passes for white.   He and his brother (Hines' real-life brother Maurice Hines) perform a tap dancing act, but tensions mount between them because Sandman fell in love with McKee, a girl Maurice was also sweet on.     Years later, the Williams brothers reunite at the Cotton Club in a very moving scene.      The scene was so well done, I wished there were more like them, but there weren't.

It's hard to fault the performances.    All involved are strong and lend much more gravity to the film than it deserves.    But because of the various subplots and characters being juggled, The Cotton Club never gains a strong foothold.    There are some strong scenes mixed in, but each is like an island onto itself.     Characters appear and then disappear for long stretches.   There are also many musical and dance scenes which didn't get me involved all that much.     Maybe onscreen dancing isn't for me.

Director Coppola was able to work with a variety of situations and characters much better in other films.   He is not a director who believes in small casts and intimate settings.    The Cotton Club is ambitious if nothing else, but sometimes trying to do too much is self-defeating.     Coppola tries to make an epic every time out.    That works most times, but sometimes he makes a choppy film that simply can't get out of its own way.     Such is the case here.