Word: tuckers
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...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...
...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...