The Essentials: The Films Of Francis Ford Coppola

“The Rain People” (1969)
A good starting point for those who want to trace Coppola’s emerging storytelling strengths, “The Rain People” is visible as the work of same Coppola who would only a few years later start crushing all those who stood before him in the American film industry with an onslaught of masterpieces… the very same Coppola we desperately wish was still around today. The behind-the-scenes stories behind this picture have almost become larger than the picture itself, most notably one about how George Lucas was hanging around on set and filming a making-of documentary called “Filmmaker” (currently, sadly, unavailable) which Coppola would later call better than his own movie, so it’s easy to forget how tall “The Rain People” actually stands on its own two feet. One of Coppola’s only original screenplays, the movie is an insightful depiction of a commitment-phobic housewife who undergoes something of an identity crisis as she’s on the verge of becoming a mother. Shirley Knight plays the protagonist in question, Natalie, who on her path through self-discovery picks up James Caan’s brain-damaged hitchhiker and gets in turn picked up by just plain damaged road cop Robert Duvall. No doubt it’s rough around the edges and the abrupt ending concludes Natalie’s arc rather flippantly, but with a hungry cast of such caliber and a pretty original theme for its time, we’d give “The Rain People” two assured thumbs up. If for nothing else, watch it as an example of the only way flashbacks should be used in movies, and an exercise in building an intimate atmosphere. [B]

“The Godfather” (1972)
Were Hollywood to construct some sort of quasi Mount Rushmore of unimpeachable studio classics, surely “Citizen Kane,” “Casablanca” and this massively successful epic gangster melodrama would take up three of the four slots. Riding high after winning his first Oscar for co-writing 1970’s “Patton,” Coppola had enough cachet to be considered by Paramount —though he wasn’t the studio’s first choice— for its big-budget take on Mario Puzo’s bestseller. Though an early hurdle was the filmmaker’s own slight reluctance: Coppola himself wasn’t dying to make the picture, but when he found a personal thematic entry point, he took it on anyway. And thus he delivered the epic saga of the Corleones, who will no doubt sit forever at the head of the table of cinema’s legendary criminal families. And for good reason. Though some smart critics have argued valiantly for a revisionist, much-less effusive take on “The Godfather,” its legacy will endure for many reasons, chief among them Marlon Brando‘s endlessly imitated, late-career-defining presence, but also because it’s a such a rarity in studio filmmaking: made for adults but accessible to all, artfully constructed on every single level of production, epic and yet deeply personal, both of its time (the time it was made, and the time it is set) and utterly timeless. It’s a shame that by the end of the auteur-driven 70s Hollywood had started to focus more intensely on finding the new “Star Wars” instead of creating the conditions that would bring about the next ‘Godfather’, but blockbuster success though “The Godfather” was, little could compare to Lucas’ space western in terms of box office take, and thus goes film history. No matter what, we’ll always have this masterpiece, carved into the Mount Rushmore of film history. [A+]

“The Conversation” (1974)
Intelligent, electric and deeply, deeply unsettling, “The Conversation,” though it’s rarely the first title anyone mentions in connection with Coppola, is surely on a par with the first two “The Godfather” movies, making it therefore one of the greatest American films of the 1970s. Which in turn makes it one of the greatest American films of all time. It’s not only an extraordinary performance piece, featuring a central turn by Gene Hackman as the (increasingly justifiably) paranoid protagonist that ranks among the actor’s finest moments, but a crackling high-tension conspiracy film given added resonance by the then-recent Watergate scandal, finding that elusive connection between magnetic tape, personal morality and political power-playing. It’s so many other things as well, not least a homage to Michelangelo Antonioni’s “Blow Up” (which would later similarly inspire one of Brian De Palma’s best films “Blow Out” which also took a sonic slant on the visual puzzle of the original). But what’s amazing and utterly timeless about “The Conversation,” is how it is all these things, containing layers and intricacies and uncanny, creepy nooks and crannies. Yet it is such a sparse, elegant film, in everything from its look, to its reduced cast, to its pared-back, utilitarian dialogue, that it amounts to the opposite of the sprawling, textured, multi-generational mafia epic with which Coppola had just made his name. Yet because it’s so different from “The Godfather” and its sequel and even from the enormous ambition and operatic scale of “Apocalypse Now” it’s “The Conversation” that really underpins Coppola’s claim to greatness: only a real visionary could possibly have turned in such utter classics in such wildly disparate registers. Featuring terrific support from John Cazale, Harrison Ford and Robert Duvall, and stellar sound and picture editing from master editor Walter Murch, “The Conversation” won the Palme d’Or, yet lost the Best Picture Oscar to “The Godfather II.” But as a meditation on the fraught relationship between technology and truth, and a superbly crafted slowburn masterpiece of controlled, furious filmmaking, it is unsurpassed in Coppola’s canon, and in pretty much everybody else’s. [A+]