Word: cotton
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...COTTON CLUB is epic emptiness. Considering it had a mindboggling budget, a deluge of pre-release hype complete with melodramatic creation story, and a hip-hopping nightclub as its center, one might at least expect to be entertained...
...Cotton Club" really was a Harlem nightclub that popped up during the prohibition era. This infamous speakeasy partied socialites, mobsters and movie stars; gang wars were Hemingway's "lost generation" found themselves in the tunes of performers like Duke Ellington, Lena Horne and Bill "Bojangles" Robinson...
...surprisingly, "The Cotton Club" rambles along these storylines and several others while consistently failing to reach any dramatic climax, development or even coherence Coppola never investigates the dynamics of the gangsters world, even though "the power" changes hands several times during the film. Coppola presents the titillating moments of mob murders, like when Dixie and Vera watch the impulsive Dutchman stab his rival Flynn with a turkey carver during dinner. The blood sprays the walls, and covers the ivory tablecloth, while drops fall from the chandelier onto Lane's porcelian cheeks. Although scenes like these have dramatic bang, they never...
There is no sense of continuity in the "Cotton Club"; we never know how one gang accumulates or loses it's power. Coppola introduces the Irish Jewish and Italian rackets, but the only way one can tell the mob has changed hands is by the size of gangsters noses...
...backstage story as entertaining as this deserves the best of punch lines: rave reviews, big business, Oscars all around. But The Cotton Club-the movie, not the gossip machine-deserves less. The volatile drama that attended its making rarely flares onscreen; working at flash point made no sparks fly. On even the calmest of sets, the premise would have shown promise: to blend the early talkies' two most popular genres, the gangster film and the musical, into a sort of Public Enemy Goes to 42nd Street or, modernized, The Godfather Gets One from the Heart. Why, then...