Something to watch tonight: Thursday 30 January

One from the Heart (Coppola, 1982)

One from the Heart is a pretty notori­ous film for such a charm­ing and lovely story.

Its notori­ety largely comes from being the second or third time that Francis Ford Coppola bank­rup­ted him­self in order to fol­low his own idio­syn­crat­ic vis­ion. In this case he fin­anced the film inde­pend­ently through his American Zoetrope stu­dio and lost some­thing like $30m in the process.

He’s now revis­ited the film and pro­duced a new director’s cut which he calls One from the Heart Reprise. (He recently did some­thing sim­il­ar with Godfather Three which was sim­il­arly reviled on first release).

This recom­mend­a­tion isn’t for the Reprise ver­sion because I haven’t yet seen it (and may nev­er). But the great thing about the Reprise being giv­en a 4K UHD disc release is that the pack­age includes a second disc with a beau­ti­ful DolbyVision mas­ter of Coppola’s ori­gin­al cut and that was what we watched last night.

An ordin­ary couple liv­ing and work­ing in Las Vegas (she is a travel agent and he works in a wreck­ing yard), break up because the spark has gone out of the rela­tion­ship. On the rebound each one meets someone who seems to be the answer to their romantic dreams – he meets a cir­cus acrobat and she a part-time cock­tail pianist.

But over the course of one night they both real­ise that the grass isn’t neces­sar­ily green­er on the oth­er side.

It’s a highly styl­ised, pseudo-musical with some stun­ning theatre-style trans­itions and a total com­mit­ment to its romantic theme. This was my first rewatch since it first came out in 1982 but the soundtrack CD by Tom Waits and Crystal Gayle has been a staple in my col­lec­tion for dec­ades. The editor-in-chief didn’t actu­ally know that Baby-Waits was known for writ­ing actu­ally listen­able music before he went off into the avant-garde, so we have some catch-up listen­ing to do there.

What I wasn’t expect­ing was that it would be so sim­il­ar in style to Coppola’s recent solo effort Megalopolis, even to the extent of his fas­cin­a­tion with Ancient Rome. I mean, look at this photo of Frederic Forrest as Hank. He’s wear­ing a bed­sheet like a toga and you can’t quite make out that his hair­cut – before the makeover that he gets after meet­ing Nastassia Kinski – is a clas­sic Caesar.

The cast­ing is also in line with the theme. Forrest and Teri Garr were great act­ors but usu­ally sup­port­ing play­ers, not leads, but by the end of the film they are the stars that their tal­ent deserved. Their glam­or­ous alter-egos – Nastassja Kinski as Leila the acrobat and Raúl Juliá as waiter/pianist Ray – are other-worldly in com­par­is­on. Oh, what we lost when Juliá passed away from stom­ach can­cer thirty years ago.

Coppola fam­ously decided to recre­ate Las Vegas inside a sound stage and the the­at­ric­al­ity is one of the things that provides the film’s charm. In some of the street scenes on the new res­tor­a­tion you can clearly see the painted black ceil­ing of the studio.

This is a great disc to have in the per­man­ent col­lec­tion as there are plenty of extras to help shine a light on this remark­able pro­duc­tion, many of them newly cre­ated for this package.

Where to watch One from the Heart

The con­tent below was ori­gin­ally paywalled.

Worldwide: On 4K UHD phys­ic­al media from StudioCanal or

Aotearoa: Digital rent­al from AroVision

Australia: Not cur­rently available

Canada: Digital rental

Ireland: Digital rental

India: Not cur­rently available

USA: Digital rental

UK: Digital rental