Document View

Welsch discusses director Francis Ford Coppola's motion picture "The Cotton Club." The film draws on the organic, instinctual music making of the folk musical tradition and that music's function as the legitimate self-expression of a community rooted in nature. However, Coppola was under substantial pressure from the film's financiers, studio and producer to make "The Cotton Club" as "The Godfather with music."

Enlarge 200% Enlarge 400%

Enlarge 200% Enlarge 400%

fter a visit to the Cotton Club in the 1920s, actor Jimmy Durante named one of the Harlem speakeasy's chief appeals: "It isn't necessary to mix with colored people if you don't feel like it. You have your own party and keep to yourself. But it's worth seeing. How they step!" (Haskins 37).' The infamous Harlem nightspot was a watering hole for the "glitterati" in the 1920s; it was staffed entirely by African American entertainers and waitpeople. The combination of the black performers at the Cotton Club-Duke Ellington, Cab Calloway, and Lena Home, among others-and the white gangsters who frequented it (including Dutch Schultz, Lucky Luciano, and Owney Madden, the club's proprietor) offered director Francis Ford Coppola an opportunity to splice together the violent realism of the gangster film with the fabulous stylization afforded by the musical film. Coppola's 1984 film release The Cotton Club alternates between telling the story of white musician-cum-gangster Dixie Dwyer and his mob affiliations and focusing on black dancer Sandman Williams and his extended family of entertainers at the club. This narrative strategy curiously reproduces the racial separatism that Jimmy Durante noted approvingly so long ago.

Coppola's film dramatizes the nostalgia that Jim Haskins chronicles in his book on the Cotton Club, which served as the source for the film: Harlem, and the Negro, seemed to embody the primitive and thrilling qualities sought by both intellectuals and socialites. To the intelligentsia, innocence was still alive in America in the Negro. In the Negro was all the sensuousness and life rhythm that white America had lost. To the socialites, Harlem represented a blend of danger and excitement. The exotic jungle rhythms gave intimations of sensuality beyond the wildest fantasies of the sons and daughters of proper New York society. (20) The speakeasies of the 1920s offered white visitors the perfect environment in which to indulge voyeuristic fantasies. Haskins quotes numerous contemporary sources (including a Dutch tourist doing research for a tome called Sinful Cities of the Western World) on Harlem's perceived exoticism:

I beheld brown-skin vamps and other gay colored silhouettes, romp from lantern post to post. I saw white women trot along, prancing and strutting with negroes . . . swarms of people with banjoes and ukes strumming, gurgling sensual music, while from side streets one could almost hear the heavy snoring of dusky inhabitants, sleeping the sleep of the jungle man. (24) As Langston Hughes wrote angrily, the white "strangers were given the best ringside tables to sit and stare at the Negro customers-like amusing animals in a zoo."2

Coppola uses the historic Cotton Club as the site for his hybridized musical gangster film. He appropriates the conventions of the musical, employing its divergent folk and backstage (or "show") traditions, in a way that has striking ramifications for the black entertainers whose stories he tells, to explore the racial differences that have divided and defined the United States in the twentieth century. The syntax of the folk musical provides Coppola with an indigenous, "natural" tradition for the African American Cotton Club performers, which both permits them a primitive dignity and restricts their mobility and power in the gangsters' world, where those freedoms are paramount. Although the folk tradition misrepresents the performers with its nostalgic constructions of history, the family, and racial communities, Coppola sought to use it to praise the creative nonviolence practiced by a minority group living in a violent place (New York City) during a violent era (Prohibition). The show musical's visual emphasis of arranging bodies in patterns suited Coppola's tendency to prefer visual stylization to naturalism.' He also used the characteristic mutability of the show musical's backstage environment to explore concerns of power and violence, which have preoccupied the gangster film since its first appearance.

The splicing of musical traditions in the film bears an analogous relation to the movie's thematic concern with social integration. The two plots intersect briefly at intervals but are more parallel than convergent, like the lives of the (white) gangsters and the (black) entertainers, who operate out of the same space, the Cotton Club, but never fully share it. Just as the two main characters, musician Dixie Dwyer (Richard Gere) and tap dancer Sandman Williams (Gregory Hines), greet each other on a Harlem street one morning and keep walking, so the film's two narratives run on separatebut-equal tracks. The use of paired plots is uncommon in the gangster film, but it is practically indispensable in the musical, where the film's resolution is predicated on the duality finally being erased: for example, the union of an often-warring couple implies the creation or restoration of their community.

Furthermore, the conventions of the show musical provide Coppola with a structural corollary to the gangster's violent change of fortune, thereby presenting options for nonviolent resolutions to the gangland narrative's crucial problem of ambition. In show business, ambition is usually desirable, for it can lead to the best possible performance and (conceivably) a good showing at the box office. In the gangster film, however, ambition is dangerous because only one leader can occupy the top position at a time: Ambition leads only to death. The Cotton Club compares two processes of achievement, individual ambition and communal, clearly preferring the collective endeavor. For the African Americans in the film, though, individual accomplishment is not an option, particularly if it disrupts their community. Competition is unambiguously dangerous: To be alone, to cut yourself off from the community, is, after the manner of the classic gangster film, to die.

The Cotton Club also draws on the organic, instinctual music making of the folk musical tradition-here, the spontaneous jazz dancing and playing by blacks in Harlem-and that music's function as the legitimate self-expression of a community rooted in nature. However, Coppola's film cannot promote a folksy naturalism without reaffirming its unfortunate consequence, the primitivism and exoticism often attributed to African American culture. In the early 1930s, Sterling A. Brown commented on the white writers who flocked to Harlem in the 1920s in search of "the Negro, au naturel":

The figure who emerges from their pages is a Negro synchronized to a savage rhythm, living a life of ecstasy, superinduced by jazz (repetition of the tom-tom, awakening vestigial memories of Africa) and gin.... A kinship exists between this stereotype and that of the contented slave; one is merely a "jazzedup" version of the other, with cabarets supplanting cabins, and Harlemized "blues," instead of the spirituals and slave reels. (345)

Despite Coppola's early versions of the script, the substantial pressure of the film's financiers, studio, and producer to make The Cotton Club as "The Godfather with music" held sway; Haskins's version of Harlem history-which producer Robert Evans derided as "that Harlem Renaissance shit" (343)-was recast in a more conventional mold.4 The earthy, indigenous musical tradition that The Cotton Club celebrates is in the end posed as the only alternative for the Harlem residents, who cannot make it in the world of crime and are barred from "legitimate" enterprises. The film explores the tension between the folk and show traditions within the musical genre, but when it comes to accommodating racial difference the conservative sentimentalism of the folk strain takes precedent.

Enlarge 200% Enlarge 400%

As Rick Altman explains, the folk musical proffers a fancifully nostalgic image of American history: It "plays up the togetherness and communitarianism characteristic of the genre's . . . choral tendencies" (126).5 Inspired by "the traditional music of regional and ethnic America" (Altman 286), the folk musical links the creation of a couple to the parallel and simultaneous formation of a community (309). It celebrates the bonds of the extended family and is typically set in a small town or agricultural community. When the story's events take place in a city, even the urban location is nostalgically construed so that the characters are neighbors whose fortunes are linked. The folk musical, moreover, treats music as "a natural means of expression," "not art but . . . emotion" (287. 286). As Altman writes, "The sounds of nature inspire man to make music and serve as a model for the musical itself" (306). Finally, the folk musical enlarges the community to include the film audience: "Instead of the . . . split between performers and spectators which characterizes the show musical, the folk musical posits a fundamental continuity between performers and audience. It does this by borrowing the interchangeability of role and space characteristic of folk (and especially square) dance" (316).

By adopting the strategies of the folk musical in The Cotton Club, Coppola risks sentimentalizing, even trivializing, the very group whose energy and inventiveness he labors to praise. He portrays black performers as part of a larger, utopian community that nurtures and ministers to its talented members. The white gangsters bond together only to kill rival gangs. Coppola resolutely removes the black characters from the gangster world, leaving them to sing and dance their way to whatever modicum of success is available. Black professionals are the emotional center of the film; they serve both as successful performers and as nostalgic embodiments of folk culture. As is typical in the folk musical, Coppola shows the performers' talent as "natural," that is, the expression of spontaneous emotion, unconstrained by economic need or competition, and inspired by the sounds and rhythms of nature. (The preferred decor at the Cotton Club was in fact a jungle motif, reflecting the era's preoccupation with the so-called primitivism of the African American.6) As Richard Dyer explains, "Musicals . . . imply . . . that the world of the narrative is (already) utopian" (229). He continues,

The commonest procedure . . . is removal of the whole film in time and space . . . to places where it can be believed (by white urban Americans) that song and dance are "in the air," built into the peasant/black culture and blood, or part of a more free-and-easy stage in American development. . .. Most of the contradictions developed in these films are over-ridingly bought off by the nostalgia or primitivism which provides them with the point of departure. (231)

Not only does The Cotton Club cloak its utopianism in a return to the colorful, exotic, pseudo-African playground nostalgically remembered as Prohibition Harlem, but it also indulges freely in impromptu performances. For example, the (black) Williams family, shown at home eating breakfast, engages in a lively discussion about the upcoming dance audition that Sandman and his brother Clay (Maurice Hines) have scheduled at the Cotton Club; they tease their younger sister into doing a few steps for them, and suddenly Mrs. Williams jumps up and joins in, claiming that she knows how to step to be noticed at the prestigious club. Later, as the Williams brothers head to the audition, Sandman begins a tap dance on the street: He is so full of high spirits that he cannot keep still; as another hoofer sang in another film, he's "gotta sing, gotta dance."

The impromptu performances create an impression of spontaneity characteristic of the folk musical. "The myth of spontaneity operates," Jane Feuer notes, "to make musical performance, which is actually part of culture, appear to be part of nature" (335). Few types of performance have been so determinedly ascribed to nature as that of the African American dancer. The impromptu dance routine that becomes a source of income, as in Sandman's transformation of a joyous street improvisation into a masterly solo tap number performed at the film's climax, also links The Cotton Club to early backstage musicals, in which the performers are professionals for whom acting, singing, and dancing are serious economic propositions. Often in such films the proposed cancellation of a show threatens the performers' financial security. The Cotton Club is oddly ambivalent about Prohibition era economics, however; despite one mention of bread lines, labor is consistently equated with joyous physical activity. The very idea of a dance "routine" is antithetical in a community where you dance all day for pleasure and all night for pay.' The traditional gangster film also sidestepped the workaday grind by showing the criminal's energetic pursuit of other people's money; the early backstage musicals showed singing and dancing as something to be done for financial security but occasionally portrayed such work as a labor of love: Many musicals end with marriage between the principals. The folk musical, however, consistently dramatized the continuity between work and play, or work and self-expressive performance, by linking the two to nature. If, as Curly sings in Oklahoma! "All the sounds of the earth are like music," then it is no hardship to labor in the fields all day, for nature provides sweet accompaniment.

In such a utopian world, though, competition is damaging: The Williams brothers, who begin their act at the Cotton Club as a duo, part in anger when Sandman finagles a solo number without telling his brother Clay. "You want a solo? You got one-onstage and off," a hurt Clay informs Sandman, his words making a fluid connection between the two worlds of performing and nonperforming. Sandman's underhanded attempt to advance himself damages his relationship with his brother: Although it provides professional success, his ambition estranges him from his family and community. Only when Sandman finds himself in a nightclub where Clay is dancing is Sandman able to repair the rift. Clay stops the show to introduce his brother, who is seated by the stage, as a great star; Sandman returns the compliment by calling Clay "the best tap dancer in Harlem." Other members of the black community encourage the two to dance together, and they perform "Crazy Rhythm," which reprises their first joint performance at the Cotton Club. The song's lyrics replicate the conflict between the brothers: They describe a "highbrow" and a "lowbrow" who cannot get along, culminating in the chorus, "You go your way, I'll go my way. . . . From now on we're through." But as they sing and dance together, the brothers are overcome with emotion, and instead of singing the last refrain "We're through," they stop dancing and embrace. A choked-up Sandman apologizes and tells Clay that he loves him. The rift caused by his self-indulgent ambition is healed through a shared performance, prompted by the community, which reenacts and resolves the differences that caused the original split. The dance is a ritual that can create or destroy connections, depending on how it is employed.

Similarly, on their first date Sandman takes the light-skinned Lila (Lonette McKee) to the all-male Hoofers' Club after she says that she wants to do Broadway (which he pointedly derides as "white show business"). Their brief harmony tapping with the Hoofers paves the way for their permanent pairing and temporarily obscures the racial issues that will divide them again later. This scene is composed in deep focus, and the spectators (other performers) are consistently visible as they watch the dance and await their turns. Each member of the club gets a chance to show his special talent, and no one jostles for position; this is a group based on mutual admiration and respect. Though the members tease each other fondly, they also form a line and compliment one another with practiced pleasure. Moreover, Lila's participation makes it seem as though the black male club members have a fluid, expansive idea of community that is as open and improvisational as their dancing. Like Mrs. Williams teaching her kids at breakfast how to dance for the Cotton Club, the black show-business elders have skills their younger counterparts respect, unlike the gangsters.' However, this romantic portrayal of the black community suggests that problems in the dominant culture are best managed by staying out of that culture; African Americans in the film must be satisfied with forming an alternative community. By relegating blacks to the entertainment plot and by treating them as though there is no diversity but only community among them, Coppola romanticizes African Americans in his film.

The Harlem territory is divided in the film between the poisonously competitive and violent gangsters and the utopianism of the African American extended family. Coppola briefly dislocates a generic feature of the gangster cycle-the criminal's isolation because of his ambition-onto a musical character (Sandman Williams, in his bid for a solo career and his consequent rejection of his brother) to show the poison seeping through the environment. The toxic isolation of the gangster, the result of his determined grasping for personal power, is clearly a foolish choice for the African American Sandman, who has an authentic, even utopian, community open to his participation. He lives in a neighborhood where everyone knows him and has access to communal traditions through the counsel of respected elders.

At the same time, however, the film also suggests that the African Americans are partly responsible for their lack of economic power in other arenas. One subplot in The Cotton Club pits black gamblers against the powerful white mob, as the latter attempt to edge the former out of the numbers racket. At a hasty conference of black businesspeople to determine how best to contain the threat, a black arms dealer offers to sell them the weapons they need to fight "the white invader." Despite the fact that the white gangs are intruding on African American territory, the group elects not to retaliate, saying that they "are not interested in going to war at this time." The gun dealer turns away, smirking in close up as he passes out of the frame: "Then you don't know you already lost the war."

In the context of a gangster story, the black group's refusal to arm and defend its businesses is tantamount to suicide (as well as being a "whitewash" of what actually happened-in reality black gangsters both defended themselves and launched counterattacks). On the other hand, their reluctance to "go to war" to protect their enterprises suggests that the African Americans in Harlem value peaceful solutions over violent ones, which gives them the moral high ground and frames them as a gentle folk who will be wiped out by ruthless "invaders." Either way, they lose, whether as helpless children or as violent adults. What follows is a snazzily edited montage sequence that superimposes images of white gangs destroying black clubs and beating up Harlem residents over the figure of a single Cotton Club singer who croons "III Wind." The song lyrics bemoan the trouble blowing through the "neighborhood" and cry out, "Ain't that a shame?" The juxtaposition of the bluesy lament with the images of black gangsters being attacked and black businesses being trashed across Harlem creates the impression that the singer is speaking for her community. Again the film treats the Harlem residents monolithically and reductively, as one member of the community expresses (here, sings) the anguish of all its inhabitants, and African American experience is once again entrusted to musical performance. Further, the overlay of song on the violent reality takes the sting out, distancing the viewer from its impact. Then, too, the stylized visual technique by which this is presented-itself a filmic anachronism complete with spinning newspaper headlines announcing gang wars, spilling coins, stylized dates pushing each other off the screen, and machine guns blasting at unidentified (African American) targets on the edges of the frame-aesthetically bridges the gap Coppola leaves between the gangsters' violence and its consequences.

Enlarge 200% Enlarge 400%

The selection of a famous nightclub as the site for a gangland drama also invites viewers to consider the nature and consequences of violence as they affect creativity. The club's environment is peculiarly mutable, devoted to the presentation of illusions that must continually change to attract business. The club restages and reinvents itself with each new production number and every new show. Furthermore, Coppola stages most of the film's drama in transitional spaces (often hallways and entrance ways), the most important of which is the Cotton Club's backstage area. "Backstage" is by definition a liminal platform: One is waiting either to see or to participate in what is happening onstage. As is conventional in show musicals, numerous scenes in The Cotton Club depict preparations for the onstage productions: We see dressing rooms, musicians tuning up, conversations that are interrupted because one of the participants is needed onstage. The interplay between backstage and onstage space is painstakingly integrated into the film's crime plot. Frequently we see a performance in the background while we listen in on a conversation at a stageside table. Equally, the entertainers occasionally break through the confines of their playing area and overlap with the audience's space, as when Cab Calloway and mobster Dixie Dwyer trade off singing lines from "Minnie the Moocher," one from the stage, the other from the audience; or when Sandman Williams high kicks a gun from an enraged mobster's hand during a dance number he is performing onstage. The performers watch the patrons as much as the patrons watch the acts.

One effect of such a setting is to blur the distinction between spectators and actors, an effect not uncommon in show musicals. Center stage continually shifts position.9 As the maitre d'hotel exclaims in a wonderfully ironic burst of enthusiasm, "What a mobwhat a crowd-what a show! It's all part of the act!" The mobsters are the local celebrities; Coppola's borrowing from the musical genre refocuses our concern with the gangsters as figures of disruption and violence and draws parallels between them and the visiting actors and performers at the club. The Cotton Club here follows a pattern, established early in the gangster film's history, of including figures from the entertainment world as characters in the drama." The entertainer and the gangster, after all, are analogous figures: Each achieves fame and lives in the public eye; each does work that can seem like play. In this film, moreover, Coppola shows a canny intuition that stardom would be to the 1980s what gangsterism was to the 1930s: Both project an image of wealth without work. By conceiving of gangsters as performers, Coppola rehabilitates their classic characterization as fantasy objects." The Cotton Club in fact often makes violence seem like one more production number performed at the eponymous nightclub. The disruption of song and dance numbers by violence is rapidly covered up by the voice of the club announcer or the scurrying feet of the next group of dancers arriving onstage. For Coppola, seeing the gangsters as performers allows him to consider the aesthetic opportunities violence provides, a subject of interest to him since the first Godfather picture.12 It also, however, registers his ambivalence about endorsing violent solutions in a genre predicated on violence.

After the blockbuster success of The Godfather, Coppola worried that he had glamorized gangster Michael Corleone and said ruefully that he planned in Part lI to "punish" him (Pechter 79).3 More than a decade later, in The Cotton Club, the director was still considering alternatives to violence. The most striking example of foregone revenge, or creative pacifism, takes place backstage at the Cotton Club, in a scene that prepares the audience for Sandman's climactic final dance. After discovering the dancer and Lila heading up to the roof, a spot forbidden to employees, a powerful white supervisor (a known racist and lecherous voyeur) goes berserk. The burly man pulls Sandman into the club's kitchen, holds him down on a table, and grabs a huge cleaver, which he slams repeatedly into a head of cabbage next to Sandman's head. He hurls racial insults at the dancer, and Lila is so frightened that she immediately leaves her job at the club. (When we see her again, she is posing as a white dancer at another club; the supervisor has scared her into white show business.) 14

Sandman, outraged, wants justice. He sputters about his vengeance to his friends at the Hoofers' Club, plotting how to kill the supervisor. The central moment of the sequence comes when Bumpy Rhodes, a black racketeer, faces him down: "I'm a pimp and a gambler and a thief. I don't have your talent to dance myself where I want to go.... There's only two things I gotta do in this life: I gotta stay black and I gotta die. The white man ain't left me nothing out here but the underworld, and that is where I dance. Let me ask you something, Sandman: where do you dance?" After a long pause, while they stare at each other, Sandman says decisively, "I'm gonna kill him with my tap shoes." This breaks the tension of the sequence, and the camera tracks back to include the other hoofers, who raise their beer mugs in a toast. As in the dance scene that repairs the rift between Sandman and Clay, a dance-here used both figuratively and literally-restores community. Sandman and Bumpy are no longer framed alone, but within a larger group devoted to artistic (read nonviolent) achievement. The prodigiously talented Sandman will find a creative way to exercise his power. Sandman's rejection of violence bears its final fruit in the film's penultimate scene, in which he tap dances alone, without orchestral accompaniment, at the Cotton Club: He has got so much rhythm that he does not need music. His dance is intercut with the climactic assassination of Dutch Schultz (James Remar) by rival white gangsters at a restaurant hangout. In a steadily accelerating rhythm, Sandman's shoes hit the floor, their clicking matched by the machine gun fire and bullets spraying into Dutch's body. Sandman dances in a circle and up and down a set of prop steps as the assassins stalk Dutch through the restaurant; the dancer's progress around the stage mimicks the gangster's limited room, though not his failing vitality. In fact, Sandman's tapping becomes more energetic, his control more certain, as Dutch is hit by a rain of bullets. "I'm going to kill him with my tap shoes"-the entertainer's vow to "dance" in the way he knows best-becomes, through crosscutting, the equivalent of the best revenge.

The virtuoso editing of this sequence reinforces the opposition between the two characters-white against black, criminal against entertainer-and ends eloquently by showing both men exhausted and still. Dutch, of course, is dead and lies slumped, facing left, over the small bistro table he has laboriously regained-his last bit of territory. Sandman, tired from his exertion, stops dancing just as Dutch collapses and comes to rest in precisely the same position as the gangster, but facing in the opposite direction. The sequence dramatizes Coppola's sophisticated negotiation in The Cotton Club between artistry and violence as opportunities for personal authority. The crosscutting organizes what are actually two independent activities into a unity that displaces responsibility for the killings. Sandman's hands are technically clean, but the associations produced by the crosscutting imply that he has at long last taken his revenge. The film's integration of the gangster and musical genres collapses the final production of the musical plot into the production of getting rid of Dutch. Furthermore, the tapping that Sandman Williams does in The Cotton Club participates in what Dyer calls the form's "extremely complicated history":

In black culture, tap dance has had an improvisatory, self-expressive function similar to that in jazz- in minstrelsy, it took on an aspect of jolly mindlessness, inane good humour, in accord with minstrelsy's image of the Negro; in vaudeville, elements of mechanical skill, tap dance as a feat, were stressed as part of vaudeville's celebration of the machine and the brilliant performer. (223, 226) Only "inane good humor" could encourage Sandman in the belief that he could kill anybody with his tap shoes.

By pairing a dance number with a murder, the latter becomes less chilling, more entertaining; at the same time, Sandman's dance becomes more serious and purposeful. Coppola refashions the actual history of the Cotton Club to redress wrongs: Young female performers at the club were harassed, by patrons and supervisors alike; Dutch Schultz was hunted down and murdered by rival gang leaders as he finished his dinner in a New York City restaurant. But Coppola adds the violence-by-proxy resolution, which appears both to solve the problem of the young performers' powerlessness and to dish out justice to gangland thugs.'5 The musical form offers Coppola the best of both worlds because it empowers such aesthetic solutions. The film's editing and pace are based on song and dance rather than on plot as traditionally framed in the gangster genre. Increasingly, the musical genre gains control over the gangster one: Sandman's dance dictates the rhythm of Dutch's final appearance, despite the fact that the death of the mobster traditionally serves as the crucial event in a gangster film.

Enlarge 200% Enlarge 400%

Ultimately, after addressing the problem of racial difference and American opportunity by representing the history of the famous Harlem nightclub, The Cotton Club romanticizes and trivializes the very issues it confronts. The gangster aspect of The Cotton Club reflects on its ancestry from the vantage point of 50 years, while complicating its parent genre's approach to ambition, violence, and celebrity by refracting those problems through the musical film's rose-tinted lens. Unfortunately, Coppola's use of musical conventions (the happy ending, the elaborate production numbers, the spontaneous performances, and the elided distinction between spectators and celebrities) eclipses the power of the Cotton Club's actual history, demonstrating instead a sanitized view of Harlem and its inhabitants. Mixing genres here functions as a formal proxy for the problem of cultural exchange, especially racial difference, and the director optimistically posits a new generic blend, one that allows blacks to get the upper hand. The musical, however, carries its own ideological and formal baggage; and in the end, African American authority in The Cotton Club is merely aesthetic, form wrenched from content. By using the musical to enable The Cotton Club's nostalgic celebration of Prohibition Harlem's "natural" vitality, Coppola reconstructs the primary mechanism for social advancement open to African Americans during that era-"singin' and dancin"' for the white folk-and suggests that it should be enough. Injustice, violence, the abuse of power-all remain unresolved as the hoofer taps merrily, inanely on.