Frannie (Teri Garr) and Hank (Frederic Forrest) try to hold on to their love in One from the Heart
ONE FROM THE HEART (Francis Ford Coppola, 1982)
Paris Theater
4 West Fifty-Eighth St. at Fifth Ave.
Monday, September 14, 7:00
www.paristheaternyc.com
New York, New York meets La La Land in Francis Ford Coppola’s romantic musical fantasia, One from the Heart. The film, which famously bankrupted the director and his Zoetrope Studios when it was released in 1982, is screening September 14 in the Paris Theater series “Big & Loud,” for the first time ever in 70mm in New York City. Teri Garr, one of the best actresses of the 1970s and 1980s, stars as Frannie, a woman who works at the Paradise Travel agency with her best friend, Maggie (Lainie Kazan). Frannie lives with Hank (Frederic Forrest), a would-be musician who owns a surreal junkyard, called Reality Wrecking, with his best friend, Moe (Harry Dean Stanton). With their dreams drifting further and further out of reach — note how Frannie works at Paradise and Hank at Reality — Frannie and Hank spend the Fourth of July separately; Frannie is intrigued by local piano player Ray (Raúl Juliá), while Hank has the hots for circus girl Leila (Nastassja Kinski). Fireworks are on the way, just not necessarily what was expected. Written by Coppola and Armyan Bernstein, the film is lushly photographed by Vittorio Storaro, who previously worked extensively with Bernardo Bertolucci and won an Oscar for his cinematography on Apocalypse Now. Storaro drenches the screen in oversaturated blues, reds, greens, and pinks, creating a dreamlike neon atmosphere in which scenes sometimes converge in unusual ways.
Frannie (Teri Garr) gets carried away by Ray (Raúl Juliá) in famous Francis Ford Coppola financial disaster
Tom Waits’s lounge-music score features duets with Crystal Gayle that both enhance the mood and propel the plot, which could use a little help. Coppola re-created the Vegas strip at Zoetrope, with no location shooting; production designer Dean Tavoularis and art director Angelo P. Graham transformed Sin City into a dazzlingly fake place, as if existing only in the main characters’ minds. The film cost $26 million to make and took in less than $1 million at the box office, a disaster that puts it firmly in the pantheon with Cleopatra and Heaven’s Gate. But seen four decades later, One from the Heart is not quite the failure it is usually believed to be. The sets are spectacularly over the top, Storaro’s use of color — on Forrest’s face alone — is otherworldly, and Waits’s songs can serve as a good distraction at just the right times. There are still a whole lot of cringeworthy moments that make no sense — let’s not get started on the airport mess — but, as with Heaven’s Gate, it’s not nearly as bad as legend would have it. And some of it is downright delightful. Garr, who died in 2024 at the age of seventy-nine after a long illness that kept her out of public view and led to her retirement from acting in 2011, owns her role from start to finish, whether putting up a window display or being carried naked through the streets. Keep a look-out for cameos by Waits and Rebecca de Mornay, along with Coppola’s parents in an elevator.
“Big & Loud” continues through September 29 with such other films as David Lean’s Lawrence of Arabia, Robert Wise’s The Sound of Music, William Friedkin’s underrated Sorcerer, and Louis Malle’s crime gem Elevator to the Gallows.
[Mark Rifkin is a Brooklyn-born, Manhattan-based writer; you can follow him on Substack here.]