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From the fits of murderous rage (the scene of killing the city fire inspector in the novel mirrors the killing of Flynn the movie) to the reenactments of his own murder, from the tyrannical interactions with associates and subordinates and enemies to the arrogance and insecurity and brutality in dealing with women, the novelist and the filmmaker are right on the same pages of psychobiography and pop history. For all the glamour, color, jazz, and upbeat excitement of the Cotton Club, for all the elegance of the dancing, the extravagance of the production, and the glitter of the age, the vision of America in the Jazz Age that Coppola has brought to the screen is unremittingly dark.

Could E. L. Doctorow's Billy Bathgate (1987) be what it is had Francis Coppola's Cotton Club (1984) not preceded it?

Credits for the screenplay include Coppola, along with William Kennedy and Mario Puzo. A triumvirate of talent triumphantly mines material from historical, journalistic, and legendary sources to produce a highly original and, as realized by Coppola, supremely stylized fiction. Doctorow presumably accessed the same sources for a more detailed treatment of the Dutch Schultz saga, but his eponymous narrator says, "in some respects my account differs from what you will read if you look up the old newspaper files." In my reverie, what matters are the respects in which Doctorow's account accords with Coppola's as well as differs from it.

Doctorow's Owney Madden, for example, called "a gentleman" and "a class guy," matches Coppola's character (Bob Hoskins), though given neither the prominence nor the opportunity for broad comedy as in the vaudeville-like turns of Hoskins with Fred Gwynne playing Madden's associate Frenchy. Perhaps a better example is Vincent "Mad Dog" Coll, whose name was changed for Cotton Club to accommodate an invented brother, the protagonist Dixie Davis (Richard Gère). Nevertheless, the "rnick...child-killer" described in Doctorow is very close to the Coppola character, and the detailed description of his death in a phone booth could be a "novelization" of Coppola's scene.

Even where a character has undergone radical metamorphosis, certain essential elements may be seen to carry over. For Doctorow's Billy, Abbadabba Berman is a wise mentor, one who enjoys playing games and working puzzles of an intellectual and instructive kind. The antithesis of Dutch's primitive violence and passionate immediacy, Berman is a man of consistent cerebration, for whom every judgment carries an object lesson with immediate results overbalanced by long-range projections. He may be harsh, cruel, and murderous, but never without reason. Coppola's Berman (Alan Garfield) is also a gameplayer, but carelessly, self-indulgently, and lecherously so. Billy's Abbadabba is a sometime smiler, Coppola's a habitual giggler. Yet both work their essential magic with numbers, and the scheme to protect the organization from the outside chance of their numbers racket sustaining a loss on any given day-by controlling the parimutuel handle at the designated racetracks-is identical. Again, Doctorow could have written the scene from a screening of Coppola.

The character in Doctorow that most closely resembles the Cotton Club portrayal (James Remar) is Dutch Schultz himself. From the fits of murderous rage (the scene of killing the city fire inspector in the novel mirrors the killing of Flynn the movie) to the reenactments of his own murder, from the tyrannical interactions with associates and subordinates and enemies to the arrogance and insecurity and brutality in dealing with women, the novelist and the filmmaker are right on the same pages of psychobiography and pop history. Paradoxically, this is where I am least convinced of a connection. Coppola and Doctorow are indeed reading from the same text, and it is the book of common knowledge. Any departure therefrom would be significant, but that they have both presented a figure that is conventional, a received legacy of iconographie legend, is as noteworthy as a Tarzan who swims, and Earp who shoots, or a Dido who weeps.

The cognitive processes at work in the association of the details set down above could well have caused my reverie to evaporate. But my readings of novel and film have taken me to a deeper functioning where I have recognized two essential connections between Doctorow's work and Coppola's. Whether one derives from the other remains unanswerable, but the essential structure of Billy Bathgate preexists in Cotton Club, and so does its essential vision.

Billy's story is made possible first, because Dutch Schultz has recognized his talentjuggling-and is amused by it, appreciates his qualities of quickness and alert innocence, and wants to make use of him; and, second, because he assigns Billy to look after his girlfriend. In Cotton Club, the Dixie Davis plotline (arguably the main story) is made possible first, because Dutch Schultz has recognized his talent-playing cornet-and is amused by it, appreciates his qualities of quickness and alert innocence, and wants to make use of him; and, second, because he assigns Dixie to look after his girlfriend. I am less moved by the coincidence of incidents, like escorting the girl back home the first time and glimpsing her naked, than by the narrative possibilities, inevitabilities really, that are suggested or dictated by this structural device.

Finally, it is the essentially unprovable point about vision that persuades me about this film-into-fiction transmutation. For all the glamour, color, jazz, and upbeat excitement of the Cotton Club, for all the elegance of the dancing, the extravagance of the production, and the glitter of the age, the vision of America in the Jazz Age that Coppola has brought to the screen is unremittingly dark.

If there are a thousand points of light in this film, they are mere specks along a darkling plain. The American Dream is a somber nightmare here, where armies of ignorance and racism do violence by night, and popular entertainment can make hypocritical production numbers of anything, no matter how foul. And that is why the hero is the man who turns his back on the world of violent crime in order to mock it in the movies. He's the idol because he has idealized what he couldn't bear to live.

For all the brightness of Bathgate in the age of Dutch Schultz, Doctorow has Billy uncover the same grating roar of its corrupt reality. If sentimentality breeds decadence in Billy's descent, we find him emerged, hardened in that crucible, and prepared to brighten his world and worldview by telling his story. The design of Doctorow's book is brightness itself-ample margins, generous spacing, a boldness and starkness of typeface-as if graphically to demonstrate its irony. Billy's story is a production number as fiction, shallowly masking the dark vision of Billy's-Dutch Schultz's-world. Billy's American Dream is an Ishmaelite one. He has survived not only to tell his story but because he can put a glossy glitter upon it as the secret beneficiary of Dutch Schultz's sociopathic greed.1