One from the Heart famously bankrupted Francis Ford Coppola and Zoetrope Studios after its budget shot through the clouds and its box office take sunk to the bottom of the ocean. It cost over 25 million (roughly 119 million adjusted for inflation) and took in only a little over 600,000 (roughly 3 million today). One need not have certification as an accountant to see those numbers don't come out the right way and Coppola said most everything he made for the next ten years was about paying back the debts he incurred during production. Watching it 27 years later, removed from the controversy that surrounded it at the time of its release, one sees a movie so simple and basic it's hard to believe it came from the man who made The Godfather movies, The Conversation and Apocalypse Now and even harder to believe it caused any sort of a stir at all. Aside from the controversy it received mainly negative reviews upon its release, negative reviews that might have been averted had one more artistic choice been made. Let me explain.
The production design by Dean Touvalaris is, quite simply, extraordinary. It doesn't recreate the Las Vegas strip as has always been said, it interprets it, reinvents it and comes up with something completely different and wholly original. It's not Vegas, it's a small intimate town, a village that just happens to have a lot of neon lights.
Then there's the great music by Tom Waits. An Oscar nominated song score sung by Waits and Crystal Gayle that brings every scene to life and propels the story.
There's the cinematography by Vittorio Storaro and Ronald Garcia. It captures the set and all of Coppola's visual tricks and theatricalities, like using scrims to mount split-screen scenes in-camera, perfectly and beautifully. The whole film has a gaudily beautiful look of arch falseness about it, one that no one has quite achieved before or since.
But there's a problem. A big one. The actors talk. That's not a criticism of the great actors involved in this movie but of the fatal error Coppola made by giving this film dialogue. From first frame to last, with the beauty and artificiality of the set design and simple story of two lovers, a man and a woman, falling out of and back in love, this film should have been silent. It should have had music and sound effects but no talking. Coppola took a lot of chances with this film but he didn't go that final mile and do what needed to be done: Make a silent movie in 1982. Listening to the Waits score glide through the scenes it's heartbreaking when the actors once again talk and speak dialogue too poor to match the gaudy and beautiful artificiality of what surrounds them. It's not quite realistic enough, not quite phony enough, just bad. And Teri Garr, Frederic Forrest and Harry Dean Stanton all seem to have a difficult go of it, especially Forrest, with dialogue that tends to fit one size too small. In many ways this film took its cue from the silent masterpiece Sunrise with its multiple visual overlays and vibrant city atmosphere providing a backdrop for two people rediscovering their love for each other. But it should have taken one more cue and left the dialogue behind. 27 years later and all one can think is, "One from the Heart: What might've been."
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Here is One from the Heart told in pictures. The opening credits are presented here in a video clip and then stills from the rest of this extraordinary looking film. Enjoy.
