Friday's Old Fashioned: One from the Heart (1981)

There is something to be said for Damien Chazelle Old Hollywood sentiment with New(er) Hollywood production value by shooting the opening song and dance number to his Best Picture winning musical “La La Land” (2017) on a real Los Angeles freeway interchange, but there is something to be said for pure make-believe too. Francis Ford Coppola originally intended to shoot his 1981 musical “One from the Heart” on location in Las Vegas before changing his mind and filming it entirely on soundstages at his Zoetrope Studio. The effect is not the pre-Disneyland Vegas Robert DeNiro’s character describes in Martin Scorsese’s “Casino” (1995) nor the theme park city that has emerged since the mob and the Rat Pack were run off nor even something in-between. No, it’s something else, a Las Vegas that never quite existed, the way I used to think of Ocean City, MD until I learned that it was not really a gleaming city somehow settled down on the ocean. The wispy clouds of “One from the Heart’s” opening credits dissolve into mounds of sand piled high outside The Sands Hotel and Casino. This shot blew me away because this is exactly how I imagined The Sands as a kid, the same as I imagined The Dunes Hotel & Country Club as literally being inside a sand dune. In Coppola’s rendering, Las Vegas is not a city of sin nor a city of vice, recasting the glittery lights as a city of romance, a sprawling city somewhere across the desert but also over the rainbow.

Of course, it is mandatory to identify “One from the Heart” as boondoggle, driving Coppola deep into debt when the movie proved a critical and commercial failure. That it was is no great surprise. Ostensibly, it’s a story of Frannie (Teri Garr) and Hank (Frederic Forrest) falling out of love and into love and out of love and into love, etc. That would seem to necessitate a description of Frannie and Hank but who they are is pointless; they are barely characters; they are barely archetypes. Coppola is going full art film and employing the characters as vessels for pure emotion. Indeed, if “One from the Heart” is billed as a musical, it is not a traditional musical, with characters singing and singing to one another, but with a soundtrack recorded by Tom Waits and Crystal Gayle that tells us who the characters are and what they are thinking. At the same time, even if Garr and especially Raul Julia as her other love interest Ray occasionally inject some oomph, the actors are incidental. They may as well be beams of light. When Hank takes a sad walk down a jet bridge, it is the green at-the-end-of-the-pier light that speaks to the mood more than anything Forrest is doing. Hit your marks and the aesthetic will do the rest. 

In one breathtaking moment during a dinner at home, cuts between Frannie and Hank reveal wholly different color schemes. Behind him is a deep crimson, behind her is the typical neutral white that defines just about any kitchen, an evocation of dueling fantasy and reality. Without question, Coppola puts his thumb on the scale of the former. If it’s clear Frannie and Hank don’t belong together, if it’s obvious Hank possesses next to no redeeming qualities, if it’s clear she would be so much better off with the suave Ray, well, given what we now know of the mess Coppola had made in his marriage with Eleanor at the time, it’s hard not to read “One from the Heart” as someone who thinks lasting love is only possible in the land of make believe.