Word: tucker
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Imagine Clark Gable anchoring one of Frank Capra's psychodrama parables of Americana and you get a hint of Jeff Bridges' performance in Tucker: The Man and His Dream. The roguish, can-do smile looks welded on. No boardroom backstabbing, no political malfeasance can wipe that salesman's grin off his face. It is the smile of a cockeyed optimist whose tragic flaw is that he refuses to believe anything can go wrong. And it is attached to a mind racing with ideas and a mouth that motors even faster. Bridges' Preston Tucker is a man in perpetual motion -- gesticulating...
Could anyone else play this role with the unforced authority that Bridges, 38, brings to it? Maybe, a decade ago, Jack Nicholson; he was Coppola's choice in 1977, when Tucker was on its first drawing board. But Nicholson, or virtually any other actor, would excavate demons of compulsion and desire. The Bridges version is splendidly driven, maniacally uncomplicated. The performance is also true to the prototype. The actor spent hours studying Tucker home movies; on the set, he wore the man's black pearl cuff links. "He's got it all," says Tucker's son John...
...producer, have been together since 1975. They live with their three daughters in Santa Monica and on a ranch in Montana. "What's so terrific about our marriage is Susan's support of my work," Bridges says. "Her name should be up in the credits along with mine." After Tucker, Susan may be demanding an even bigger screen credit. The movies' most reliable leading man is about to become a white-hot Hollywood star...
...Preston Tucker (Jeff Bridges, in the performance of his life) knows better. He just nods sober agreement with Hughes. He is in the process of creating a utopian automobile that will get no further off the ground, commercially speaking, than the Goose did. But who cares? He is not in the business of building empires; he is in the business of building dreams. And for him, as for Hughes, it is necessary to reproduce his fancy only once in reality to achieve fulfillment. Indeed, after seeing Francis Coppola's marvelous Tucker, one believes that if the inventor had been forced...
Failure rescued Tucker from that dismal fate. He has passed into popular history as a more interesting figure, at once heroic and cautionary: the little guy who dared to buck the big guys and got squished in the process. It is easy to see why he appealed to Coppola, who has been trying to put Tucker's story on the screen for something like a decade. It is not just simply that as a child Coppola was knocked out by a glimpse of the Tucker Torpedo at an auto show in the late '40s. It is rather that...