Coppola's greatest failure?

One from the Heart (1982)

This is the movie that put the last nail in the coffin of Francis Ford Coppola's dream factory Zoetrope Studios. Even though the company didn't disappear, it went bankrupt and every bit of income from the following movies until the end of the 90's was used to pay off the debts from this movie. With a budget of 27 million and box office of less than one million it's clear that the movie was a disaster for the studio. Then again reading about how extravagant the production was I'm not really surprised, in a way I'm actually happy that it failed as it showed that you can't make a great movie by just throwing money at it. These “studio killers” are actually very interesting and there are quite a few of these kind of movies out there where the studio decides to bet all it's money on them and end up losing. Maybe some day I'll focus more on them, but for now lets focus on this one.

This is actually the kind of musical that I like, the music carries the movie but the movie does not stop so that the cast can perform their musical number. That's one of the main reasons I hate musicals as the movie stops when the music starts, same reason I don't like Bollywood movies. So the actors don't sing in this one, but the songs from the soundtrack tell the story as we go along. Even though the concept was great, this is still not a great movie. The biggest issues are the story, or the lack of it and the main couple. The story is just too simple and way too common to keep any interest up. And the main couple, even though Teri Garr has her moments, are just not up for carrying a movie like this. They were rather uninteresting and in a movie like this that's just not going to work. That's mostly the fault of the script and direction but also Frederic Forrest and Teri Garr are not the first that come to mind when speaking of captivating screen presence. It says a lot that the support cast, Raul Julia and Nastassja Kinski, would have made a better lead couple for this movie. But the whole movie is not totally bad. I loved the look of it and even though the ridiculously expensive indoor sets were the main reason for the fall of the studio, they really worked brilliantly for the look. That artificial neon lighted look was by far the best part of this movie. Another thing I liked were the numerous split cuts throughout the movie and the music was quite good as well. So the audio-visual aspect of this movie is great, but unfortunately the heart is missing.

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