What Francis Ford Coppola’s favourite musical says about his filmmaking
Even though a very strong argument can be made that musicals and Francis Ford Coppola definitely don’t mix, the influence that his own personal favourite entry in the genre holds over his filmography runs far deeper than the director making a couple of his own.
Coppola didn’t wait very long to dip his toes into all-singing and all-dancing waters, with 1968’s Finian’s Rainbow his third feature. The recipient of two Academy Award nominations and five Golden Globes, including ‘Best Picture – Musical or Comedy’, the stage adaptation was a solid start for the filmmaker’s maiden foray into the medium. Unfortunately, it would turn out to be his only successful one.
The mastermind behind The Godfather and Apocalypse Now funnelled so much of his own money into 1982’s One from the Heart that it came close to bankrupting him after the over-budget and over-schedule folly yielded a catastrophic box office flop, although Coppola displayed no shortage of musical virtuosity in a movie that’s gradually gaining acceptance as an unfairly-treated gem.
Apparently learning absolutely nothing from the experience, Coppola’s next musical The Cotton Club again went vastly over-budget, took half a decade to complete from conception to release, while once again showcasing through its energy, orchestration, and execution that the director definitely had it in him to unleash a top-tier musical upon the world were he not so prone to his own self-indulgences.
Once he made his name as one of Hollywood’s foremost auteurs, there was no chance that Coppola wasn’t going to make a musical of his own, if only because Singin’ in the Rain was named by the man himself as one of his favourite movies. There’s more to it than that, though, with several recurring thematic motifs from Gene Kelly and Debbie Reynolds’ classic working their way into his oeuvre in different guises.
For one thing, the narrative hinges on a pivotal moment in cinema’s evolution, where the silent age gave rise to the talkies. Coppola’s career has seen him both embrace and decry the artform’s constant state of flux, whether it’s his distaste for modern blockbusters, betting it all on himself to fund Megalopolis, emulating the classical style of German Expressionism in the French New Wave in Rumble Fish, or disregarding the studio system altogether during the experimental era that spawned Youth Without Youth, Tetro, and Twixt.
Virtually every principal character in Singin’ in the Rain is out to protect their reputation in one way or another as seismic shifts in the industry threaten to leave them on the outside looking in, and while Coppola has never been one for hagiography, he’s taken those themes to heart in a different way by not caring in the slightest what anybody thinks in favour of blazing a trail that’s nothing but his.
There may well be a heavy element of nostalgia at play, considering Singin’ in the Rain first hit cinemas when Coppola was only 13 years old, but whether it was intentional or subconscious, it influenced his filmmaking in more ways than one.
On a surface level, he’s mounted several ambitious musicals of his own to varying degrees of success, while he’s steadfastly remained an island unto himself regardless of how many times the landscape has shifted during the course of his career, not entirely dissimilar to the story straddling the divide between two different eras while focusing on the performers desperate to make it in both.
