The New Biographical Dictionary of Film: Completely Updated and Expanded (86 page)

The early 1940s saw him in
The Westerner
(40, William Wyler);
North West Mounted Police
(40, De Mille); opposite Barbara Stanwyck in
Meet John Doe
(41, Capra) and
Ball of Fire
(41, Hawks); and winning an Oscar for his portrayal of
Sergeant York
(41, Hawks), a pacifist rewarded for killing. He then played Lou Gehrig in
The Pride of the Yankees
(42, Sam Wood); Robert Jordan in
For Whom the Bell Tolls
(43, Wood);
The Story of Dr. Wassell
(44, De Mille); and
Along Came Jones
(45, Stuart Heisler).

His work was now more variable. The strain of action on moral conscience grew into one of the most affecting, troubled sights of postwar films:
Saratoga Trunk
(46, Wood) was a slow romance with Ingrid Bergman, but Fritz Lang’s
Cloak and Dagger
(46) has all the subtle dilemma of the director’s best work and makes Cooper credible as a nuclear scientist caught up in espionage, a decent man faced by the danger implicit in his own work;
Unconquered
(47) was the last of De Mille’s epics.
Good Sam
(48, Leo McCarey) dragged. But
The Fountainhead
(49, Vidor) is a beautiful film, with Cooper as the “creative force” revealed in an architect. Ostensibly beyond his intellectual means,
The Fountainhead
thrives on Cooper’s undaunted naturalism. He was now at Warners and in the doldrums: briefly at a bar saying “Yup” in
It’s a Great Feeling
(49, David Butler);
Task Force
(49, Delmer Daves);
Bright Leaf
(50, Michael Curtiz); in
Dallas
(50, Heisler);
You’re in the Navy Now
(51, Hathaway); and Raoul Walsh’s
Distant Drums
(51). Then came
High Noon
(52, Fred Zinnemann), an obvious, surface-deep suspense Western, with McCarthyist allegory, but dignified by Cooper’s own identification with the lone sheriff. There are few clearer instances of an actor’s taking over the personality of a primed but unintelligent movie. It won Cooper a second Oscar and defined his last years.
Springfield Rifle
(52, André de Toth) had him as the victim of treachery.
Return to Paradise
(53, Mark Robson) is the film seen in
Lola. Blowing Wild
(53, Hugo Fregonese) is an offbeat gem, with Stanwyck again.
Garden of Evil
(54, Hathaway) and
Vera Cruz
(54, Robert Aldrich) are standard Westerns. But in
The Court Martial of Billy Mitchell
(55, Otto Preminger) Cooper suffered again for his foresight. In
Friendly Persuasion
(56, Wyler) he was a Quaker drawn reluctantly into war, and in
Love in the Afternoon
(57, Billy Wilder) and
11 North Frederick
(58, Philip Dunne) he played men in love with much younger women.

Man of the West
(58, Anthony Mann) is his final masterpiece, as an ex-outlaw forced to destroy his former colleagues through the violence he had hoped to expunge from himself. Now clearly old and ill, Cooper’s personal agony brought emotional drama to Mann’s immaculate direction. In his last years, Cooper made minor films:
The Hanging Tree
(59, Daves);
They Came to Cordura
(59, Robert Rossen);
The Wreck of the Mary Deare
(59, Michael Anderson); and
The Naked Edge
(61, Anderson).

Merian C. Cooper
(1893–1973), b. Jacksonville, Florida
There were two distinct phases in Cooper’s idiosyncratic movie career, since his effective work as a producer was done with only two directors: Ernest B. Schoedsack and John Ford, primitives both, but one striving for the authentic, the other garrulously mythmaking. Cooper graduated from Annapolis and worked on sailing ships before war service as a flier, latterly as part of the Western intervention against the Bolsheviks. It was while a roving journalist that he met Schoedsack and collaborated with him—as producer and director—on a series of actual-location films:
Grass
(26);
Chang
(27); and
Rango
(31). But Cooper seems always to have had a more entrepreneurial turn of mind, since he wedded Schoedsack’s interest in ethnographic cinema with Lothar Mendes’s story flair in
The Four Feathers
(29). After a spell as an aviation executive, Cooper joined RKO at the behest of David Selznick and produced
The Most Dangerous Game
(32, Schoedsack and Irving Pichel) and
King Kong
(33, codirected with Schoedsack). Not only was
Kong
Cooper’s original idea, but he chose to film it in the studio, opting for the ingenious tricks of Willis M. O’Brien rather than the more natural wonder of Schoedsack.

When Selznick left RKO, Cooper was in charge of production for a while, but illness led to independence:
The Lost Patrol
(34, John Ford);
She
(35, Pichel);
The Last Days of Pompeii
(35, Schoedsack); and
The Toy Wife
(38, Richard Thorpe). During the war, he was in the U.S. Army Air Corps at high ranks serving in China. But afterwards, he formed a production company with John Ford that was to produce that director’s best and most appalling films. On all of them, Cooper was coproducer with Ford:
The Fugitive
(47);
Fort Apache
(48);
Three Godfathers
(48);
She Wore a Yellow Ribbon
(49);
Wagonmaster
(50);
Rio Grande
(50);
The Quiet Man
(52);
The Sun Shines Bright
(53); and
The Searchers
(56). The cavalry trilogy,
Wagonmaster
, and, above all, the long, drawn-out pursuit of
The Searchers
are entertaining films, notable for the novel characters they offer Wayne.
The Fugitive, Three Godfathers
, and
The Sun Shines Bright
are among the most depleting movie experiences. While working with Ford, Cooper also produced
Mighty Joe Young
(49, Schoedsack) and
This Is Cinerama
(53, Ruth Rose and, uncredited, Schoedsack). Cooper died, coincidentally, on the weekend that saw the death of Robert Armstrong, who had played the “hero,” Carl Denham, in
King Kong
. Of course, not many could put a face to Armstrong’s name, whereas Kong’s furious innocence stares into all our dreams, Cooper’s most potent bequest.

Francis Ford Coppola
, b. Detroit, Michigan, 1939
1962:
Dementia 13
. 1967:
You’re a Big Boy Now
. 1968:
Finian’s Rainbow
. 1969:
The Rain People
. 1972:
The Godfather
. 1974:
The Conversation; The Godfather, Part II
. 1979:
Apocalypse Now
. 1982:
One from the Heart
. 1983:
The Outsiders; Rumble Fish
. 1984:
The Cotton Club
. 1985:
Rip Van Winkle
(TV). 1986:
Captain Eo
(s);
Peggy Sue Got Married
. 1987:
Gardens of Stone
. 1988:
Tucker: The Man and His Dream
. 1989: “Life Without Zoe,” an episode from
New York Stories
. 1990:
The Godfather, Part III
. 1992:
Bram Stoker’s Dracula
. 1996:
Jack
. 1997:
The Rainmaker
. 2000:
Supernova
(uncredited). 2001:
Apocalypse Now Redux
. 2007:
Youth Without Youth
. 2009:
Tetro
.

He is multitudes: Coppola, Francis Ford Coppola, “Francis,” a Don to would-be filmmakers, Renaissance man, winemaker, visionary of electronic cinema, and sometimes St. Francis of the Troubles. He tries to be everything for everyone; yet that furious effort may mask some inner emptiness. For he is very gregarious
and
very withdrawn, the life and soul of some parties, and a depressive. He is Sonny and Michael Corleone, for sure, but there are traces of Fredo, too—and he is at his best when secretly telling a part of his own story, or working out his fearful fantasies. His reputation has fallen a good deal as a filmmaker in the years since
Apocalypse Now
(a chaos of ideas and hopes, crippled by indecision and the urge to take flight in drop-dead scenes). But no American career has had such endless, entertaining turmoil, or says as much about making movies in America now. No one retains so many jubilant traits of the kid moviemaker, or has inspired darker comments. Robert Evans, his colleague on
The Godfather
and
The Cotton Club
, has recently said of Coppola: “He’s an evil person … a direct descendant of Machiavelli’s prince. He is so seductive, so brilliant [at] bringing people in[to] his web, he makes Elmer Gantry look like Don Knotts.”

Coppola was the son of Toscanini’s flute player, a very ambitious and often thwarted composer, whose music would be too fondly indulged in the son’s movies. But family was always the richest base and the greatest pressure for Coppola. He grew up as the homely, less-than-brilliant younger son in the shadow of his brother, August; their sister was Talia, later Talia Shire and Connie Corleone. Francis had periods of illness and he became a drama major at Hofstra University. From there, he made his way as an apprentice into Roger Corman’s exploitative factory, and he earned a solid reputation as a screenwriter. As a film student at UCLA, his screenplay
Pilma Pilma
won the Samuel Goldwyn Award for 1962.

The early films are not very good. Coppola was more highly esteemed as a writer: he made significant contributions to
Is Paris Burning?
(66, René Clément) and
This Property Is Condemned
(66, Sydney Pollack). He was highly praised for his contribution to
Patton
(70, Franklin Schaffner)—he and Edmund H. North shared the Oscar for adapted screenplay. That he could do nothing to save
The Great Gatsby
(73, Jack Clayton) was not his fault.

But by then, he had made
The Godfather
, his true debut as artist and family confessor.
The Godfather
deserved all its success because it had the nerve to take its 175 minutes slowly. For a young director without a hit, and with Paramount, Mario Puzo, Robert Evans, and Brando breathing down his neck—not to mention the attention of real-life Corleones—it was an achievement to coax that vulnerable dinosaur of a property into such supple, stealthy life. (There are still stories that Coppola needed help in organizing the footage he had shot; but
The Godfather
ended up so comprehensively organized that that was its greatest testament to criminal power and authority.)
The Godfather
is a feast of a movie—you come out of it craving lasagna and meat sauce. It has a calm faith in narrative control that had not been current in Hollywood for twenty years. It was like a film of the forties in its nostalgic decor; its command of great supporting actors; in Gordon Willis’s bold exploration of a film noir in color; and in its fascination with evil. The plot is rooted in the sinister charm of action foreseen, spelled out, and finally delivered: Michael’s use of arms against Sollozo and McCloskey is the perfect example of this, and it is a killing in which we are his accomplices.

In addition,
The Godfather
is deeply reassuring in its rejection of chaos and disorder, and its paranoid insistence on the family as that dark, mysterious home where all strangers are enemies. When family is so strong, so loving, then the Corleones seem to be standing up for an old fine order, no matter that slaughter and graft are their trades. There is a benevolent gravity in the way Brando’s Vito Corleone warns against narcotics as too dangerous to be traded in. No American film in years had been so opposed to destruction, decay, entropy, or change—or so schizophrenically ecstatic about bloodletting and the beautifully timed and shot assassination. The mise-en-scène merged with the delicate finesse of the hit men.

When
The Godfather
measured its grand finale of murder against the liturgy of baptism, Coppola seemed mesmerized by the trick, and its nihilism. A Buñuel, by contrast, might have made that sequence ironic and hilarious. But Coppola is not long on those qualities and he could not extricate himself from the engineering of scenes. The identification with Michael was complete and stricken.

Coppola was suddenly a power. He talked of innovations in production, of a small studio as benevolent as family. He produced the delightful
American Graffiti
(73, George Lucas), doing a favor for one of his best kids, and thereby launching a career that would dwarf his own, and which would make a small, rich kingdom of film in San Francisco and Marin. Coppola himself had no clearer creative character than that of a versatile, adept, but rather soulless student.

He made
The Conversation
on the fruits of
The Godfather
as a more personal and expressive picture. It seems at first more difficult and searching; and it is so dense in its plotting and its layered sound track that it requires several viewings—Walter Murch was the sound designer and he ran postproduction when Coppola had to concentrate on
The Godfather, Part II
.

Wishful thinking can claim that
The Conversation
is a study of Nixonian America, that it is an intricate thriller. Yet it seems to me that the picture is rather more a glorification of what a movie can do with sound (as magic and trickery), and a helpless, collapsing view of solipsism, paranoia, and the self-pity of depression. Harry Caul is left alone, and solitude is a terrible grandeur in Coppola’s mind—see how it takes over Michael Corleone, and Kurtz in
Apocalypse Now
. Is there a more morbid, anal figure in American film than Harry Caul? Or one who so dominates and represses his own film?