Word: coppolas
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TUCKER. Francis Ford Coppola fashions a grand entertainment from the heroic efforts of Preston Tucker to market his 1948 "car of tomorrow." Jeff Bridges and Martin Landau front a splendid cast...
...movie is powered by the director's sense of kinship with his protagonist. Indeed, it is possible that if Coppola had been able to make this picture when he wanted to, he and his audience would have been spared much painful groping. For since 1974, when he released The Godfather, Part II and The Conversation almost simultaneously, he has been a stylist in search of a subject. Even in the midst of a mess like The Cotton Club (1984), he was capable of striking stunning imagery, bold intensifications of reality that lodged permanently in one's movie memory...
...doubt about it, Tucker was Coppola's kind of guy, a figure no more able to contain himself within the bounds of realism than the director is. Or suitable for representation by realistic means. Tucker was an expressionistic character in search of an auteur. A self-educated backyard inventor, he designed a high-speed armored car that the Army deemed impractical and a gun turret that it learned to love during World War II. Tucker used the prototype of the armored car (according to the film) to make ice-cream runs with his kids. The reputation he gained from...
...depict Tucker's life with his family and its extension, his closest co- workers (Martin Landau is particularly good as his shadowy chief financial officer), Coppola uses the tones of an old Saturday Evening Post illustration, all lamplit glow. Tucker's public life, promoting his dream, looks like an ad from the same magazine, hard-edged, overly bright. But when he confronts the automotive traditionalists in his own organization or the politicians whom the movie shows endlessly harassing him at Detroit's behest, and when, finally, he ; is placed on trial for fraud, the film turns paranoid in the manner...
Tucker, about a cock $eyed optimist who in $vented a dream of a car, $is a winner for Francis $Coppola and a star $ vehicle for Jeff Bridges...