Francis Ford Coppola’s four favourite movies of all time
Francis Ford Coppola is a curious man. He is clearly capable of greatness, having given the world Apocalypse Now, The Conversation, and The Godfather trilogy. However, nobody gets it right every time, as he has proven with Jack and Twixt. There’s also the not-so-small matter of Megalopolis, a flop so monumental that it deserves its own independent discussion.
He might have a reputation as a weird old man these days, but the patriarch of the Coppola dynasty is still crucial to the story of mainstream cinema. Evidence for this can be found on the life-ruiningly addictive film social media website Letterboxd. Three of Coppola’s films are included in their fabled ‘Top 250 Narrative Feature Films’ list, while The Godfather has the 24th spot for the most fans of any film on the entire site. You can understand why Letterboxd were so keen to get the living legend’s own opinions on what makes a movie great.
As part of their long-running Four Favourites series, Nicolas Cage’s uncle was asked for his top four movies of all time. “I have 400 favourite films,” he said in a typically ‘director’ sort of way, “It depends on which day you ask me.” After getting this incredibly unhelpful answer out of his system, he finally relented and gave the team something they could actually use.
“One of my favourite films is Renoir’s French Cancan,” he admitted. Directed by Jean Renoir, son of legendary painter Pierre-Auguste Renoir, the film was released in 1955. This musical comedy marked the first time Renoir had made a movie in France since he fled the country during the Second World War. It is a beautiful and colourful celebration of the French tradition of dance and theatre, of which Renoir was a lifelong fan. Considering that colour cinema was in its relative infancy at the time of its release, French Cancan is nothing short of a technical marvel.
“I also enjoyed very much von Sternberg’s Shanghai Express,” Coppola continued, “which I just saw recently.” Starring Marlene Dietrich, a frequent collaborator of director Josef von Sternberg, Shanghai Express is set during the Chinese Civil War and depicts a train full of tourists being hijacked by a band of rebel soldiers. At just the fifth ever Academy Awards ceremony, the movie was up for three prizes, including ‘Best Picture’ and ‘Best Director’. Though clearly hampered by the social conventions of the time, the movie is remarkably progressive when it comes to issues of race and gender.
Coppola then hilariously aged himself by calling Midnight Cowboy one of the “modern films I like a lot”. It came out in 1969. “I sort of feel bad about Midnight Cowboy, because I was offered to write the screenplay… I was young and I really didn’t understand the book,” he expressed. “When I saw the film, I thought it was so beautiful. And I finally met the director, John Schlesinger. And he was the most wonderful man, and so helpful… then I went and saw all his other films and I thought they were all beautiful.”
Once the auteur was done extolling the virtues of Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger, who are also favourites of Martin Scorsese, he named Black Narcissus and The Thief of Bagdad amongst his favourites. And, because Letterboxd are so kind—and possibly because the crew just wanted to go home—they let him have both.
