The story goes that when Francis Ford Coppola’s maligned and misbegotten 1984 film The Cotton Club was still being made, there were concerns from higher-ups that the film’s black cast—chock full of luminaries, among them the real-life, fraternal dance pair Gregory and Maurice Hines—was too much of the focus. They were said to be upstaging the movie’s white storyline, which was headed up by an even bigger crew of notable names: Richard Gere and Nicolas Cage, Diane Lane, Gwen Verdon, Bob Hoskins, James Remar, Fred Gwynne, Tom Waits—even Warhol hunk Joe Dallesandro.
And the director relented. 35 years ago, The Cotton Club was released in mutilated form. Coppola’s lively tale of two upstart entertainers—Dixie Dwyer (Gere) and Sandman Williams (Gregory Hines)—was whittled down to focus more on the Dwyer plot, which involves the young trumpet player taking up a job with a gangster and falling for the gangster’s girl (Lane) as his brother (Cage) dives headfirst into a life of violent crime. It’s a story that takes us through the 1929 crash, to Hollywood and back, and all around Harlem, with a special emphasis on the Jewish and Irish gang conflicts rattling the city.
Yet the scope of the movie, which was co-written by Pulitzer-winning author William Kennedy, isn’t what’s memorable about it. What’s memorable is the near-mythical place of its title. This is a story that makes a point of spending most of its time in and around the milieu of Harlem’s Cotton Club, on which the movie is based, famous for its stunning musical revues that featured the likes of Duke Ellington and Ethel Waters, Cab Calloway, the Nicholas Brothers, and Lena Horne, among many illustrious others. But the audience was all-white by design: black performers were the attraction, but until 1935, they couldn’t even walk through the front door, let alone properly patronize the place.
That has long been the irony of the cuts made to The Cotton Club. The movie didn’t just document this history of segregation: when most of the scenes about black characters were cut from the movie, it became yet another, late-20th-century example of the ways the entertainment world had not changed.
Coppola, who opposed the changes to his original film but ultimately bowed under pressure, is back with a newly restored cut, The Cotton Club Encore, which premiered on October 5th at the New York Film Festival and will get a fuller theatrical run in New York and Los Angeles later this week. Among other things, the great-looking new cut restores the Hines brothers storyline and the stories of the movie’s black characters generally, as well as a good chunk of its show-stopping Cotton Club performances. This was a labor of love, no doubt; funnily, it’s Coppola’s second recut film event of the year. (The first was the release of his Apocalypse Now: Final Cut.)
In line with the director’s turn, in the 2000s, to funding his own projects, Coppola spent roughly half a million dollars of his own money on Encore, which restores 24 minutes of material and cuts 13 minutes from the original theatrical release to balance out its parallel plots. Now, rather than feeling like a phantom limb, the black story line—with its unsubtle but useful parallels in the Gere plot—has a life of its own. Gregory Hines's Sandman Williams is part of a tap dancing duo with his brother, until he falls for the sultry club singer Lila Rose (Lonette McKee), who’s got dreams of making it on Broadway—by passing for white. To the white gangster overlords of the movie’s other half, the new cut restores a sense of the black underworld that worked throughout Harlem, too. To the rise-and-fall of Dixie Dwyer’s career as a cornettist and eventual Hollywood star, the cut restores the rise of Sandman and Lila's successes at large.
And much of this is good. Truth be told, much of Cotton Club was already good, when considered scene by scene, rather than as a full movie. This is a gorgeous, densely rendered period picture, full of virtuosic montages, which purposefully invoke '30s movies, that catapult us through time and history, keeping us abreast of the broader forces shaping the characters' lives, such as the Great Depression. Stephen Goldblatt’s cinematography is of a piece with the shadow-textures of Gordon Willis’s work on the Godfather films, though in many senses it’s much more vibrant, spit-polished and gleaming, loud enough to suit the uptown street glamour, the joyful slumming, of the era. And the violence—the violence! There’s one shocking death that ranks, for me, among the grizzliest (in a good way) in all movies, a brutal bit of revenge involving a carving knife, some guy’s neck, and blood splattering all over Diane Lane’s face.
I wouldn’t say the film is so much of a showcase for the acting talent of its major stars (Gere is good but Cage is shaky; Lane outshines much of the movie) as it is a vehicle for the voluptuous talents of its side characters: hoodlums played by the likes of Hoskins, Remar, Gwynne, and on the black side of things, Lawrence Fishburne, all of them more than just flavor—all of them vibrant enough in their own right to make you wonder if the film might have been better off reducing the showbiz shenanigans and sticking to its boyish but deadly gangland story, in which the Cotton Club would still prove to be a central player.