Word: tucker
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...order finally to make Tucker, he formed a partnership with his sometime protege, George Lucas, a producer gifted in what the director lacks: story sense and budget sense. The result is a film consistent narratively, confident stylistically and abounce with the quaint quality that animated both the hero and his times, something we used to call...
...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...
Unlike the cars turned out by the established manufacturers, the Tucker looked like the vehicle the country had been fighting for, unbeholden to the past in design and loaded with unheard-of engineering features that became standard issue years later. And Tucker himself was the kind of citizen for whom the troops had been making the world safe, the maverick entrepreneur whose capital is mostly pluck and luck, making his way upward in a supposedly open society...
...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...
...energy from the surrealistic yet unpretentious play of these styles. But not all of it. The script is rich in ambiguous allusions to the sustaining myths of old-fashioned popular fiction and the folklore of capitalism. It neither blandly accepts them nor blithely satirizes them. Bridges' portrayal of Tucker is in the same key. In the largest sense, he is fully, honestly committed to his dream. But there are lovely little moments when we feel his love of hype and con for their own sake, and sense that whatever the outcome of his enterprise, he knows he has already lifted...