TUCKER - THE MAN AND HIS DREAM: Blu-ray (Paramount, 1988) Lionsgate Home Video

In that never-ending Bizarro-land universe of ‘what if?’ scenarios it is rather fascinating to reconsider where Francis Ford Coppola’s career might have gone had it not been for The Godfather (1972); his seminal masterpiece that, not unlike George Lucas’ Star Wars (1977) seems to have colored critical reception to virtually all of Coppola’s latter-age film projects. Coppola’s diversity as a screenwriter/filmmaker is a rarity in present-day Hollywood. That he should have suffered more than his fair share of financial failures since The Godfather, including the implosion of his much-beloved ambition to recreate the enterprise that ‘was’ old Hollywood with his own studio (the ill-fated American Zoetrope) seems perfectly to align him with his subject matter in Tucker: The Man and His Dream (1988) – the story of another visionary under siege from the establishment and fate, destined to deny a great man his true legacy. Under Coppola’s tutelage, Tucker: The Man and His Dream emerges as a lovingly concocted, fondly evoked, vintage Kodachrome homage to Ypsilanti-born/would-be auto manufacturer, Preston Tucker. Tucker’s endowment – cut short by bureaucratic red tape, underhanded political intervention, the shortsightedness of America’s ‘Big 3’ automakers, and, a ridiculously concocted trial, engineered to derail his professional reputation with the public – ended his dream cruise for a stream-lined series of automobiles with a decided thud, though an inheritance for quality to far outweigh and outlast any real plans he might have pursued in life.

Coppola’s affinity for the Tucker automobile evolved from childhood recollections; seeing the Tucker Torpedo prototype and remembering its massive PR campaign launched to promote ‘the car of tomorrow…today’. That this promise would remain unfulfilled only fueled Coppola’s fascination with both Tucker and his fanciful creation.  While in film school at UCLA, Coppola began to evolve the genesis of an idea eventually to become this ‘dream project’ bio-pic. After the box office success and international acclaim of The Godfather Part II (1974) Coppola announced official plans to commence Tucker as an American Zoetrope production, with himself as writer, producer and director, casting Marlon Brando as his man of vision. Purchasing the rights from the Tucker Estate two years later, Coppola next approached Jack Nicholson and Burt Reynolds to partake. Still, nothing crystalized. Even more wildly creative, Coppola had large-scale plans to make Tucker as a weird musicalized hybrid of Citizen Kane (1941), Kabuki theater and the works of Bertolt Brecht; the narrative, ballooning into a multifaceted account of genius denied, with Preston Tucker as its Cartier-styled centerpiece, in a pantheon of other inventor greats, including Thomas Edison, Henry Ford, Harvey Samuel Firestone, Andrew Carnegie and Nikola Tesla.

During this early gestation, Coppola approached luminaries from the musical genre, Leonard Bernstein, Betty Comden, Adolph Green and Gene Kelly. All were enthusiastic for it.  Alas, the fiscal implosion of American Zoetrope, leveled by the epic failure of Coppola’s other elaborate musical, One from the Heart (1982), and, his constant feuding with Paramount over his costly desire to make a musical from The Cotton Club (1984, but emerging as a straight drama, despite Coppola having already shot the musical sequences), forced Coppola to momentarily abandon Tucker. Instead, he took an offer to direct the ill-fated Peggy Sue Got Married (1986) for Columbia/Tri-Star. From here, Coppola’s career entered a fallow period; his chance reunion with dear friend and former Zoetrope alumni, George Lucas on the set of Michael Jackson’s prolonged music video, Captain EO (1986) reviving Tucker, with Lucas to serve as its executive producer. Lucas also offered Coppola a free hand of his film-making companies, Lucasfilm and Industrial Light & Magic. As the musical had since fallen out of favor, Lucas coaxed Coppola to re-envision Tucker as an homage to Frank Capra; the doomed ‘American Dream’ narrative offset by Dean Tavoularis’ candy-flossed production design, Alex Tavoularis’ nimble art direction, Armin Ganz’ finely detailed set decoration and Milena Canonero’s evocative costuming; all of it, exemplars and shown off to their best advantage by Vittorio Storaro’s richly saturated cinematography.

Viewing Tucker: The Man and His Dream, one is instantly and magically teleported back into the late 1940’s. Were that every movie, set in a different time period from its own, could receive such meticulous attention. Apart from its spectacular use of the widescreen aperture (Cinemascope, and most assuredly Panavision, did not exist in 1948), Tucker just feels like a movie made in the forties and, even more miraculously, in vintage Technicolor, expertly lit and supremely staged with one eye-catching composition layered onto the next. Buoyed by enthusiastic support from Tucker’s children and grandchildren, excitement for the project dampened when screenwriter, Arnold Schulman was forced by the WGA to share co-authoring credit with David Seidler who, by Coppola’s admission, “did not write a single word of the script I actually used to make the movie.” The other snag for Coppola was getting any major studio to fund Tucker, budgeted by Coppola and Lucas at $24 million. Universal, Disney, TriStar and Paramount all balked, urging Coppola to pare it down to $15 million. Distributors also questioned Lucas’ participation after his back-to-back commercial and critical failures: Labyrinth and Howard the Duck (both made and released in 1986). In response, and owing to his lifelong friendship with Coppola, Lucas elected to write a blank check to cover the entire cost himself.  

In hindsight, a sense of family permeates every frame of Tucker: The Man and His Dream. Tucker’s children were interviewed extensively by Coppola for the project, the siblings affording star, Jeff Bridges unprecedented access to home movies of their father; also, the loan-out of Preston Tucker’s black pearl ring and cufflinks to sport as part of his wardrobe. Bridges’ performance epitomizes Tucker’s ebullience and frustrations; a real man’s monumental ability to overcome adversity and emerge, if not victorious – then decidedly, unbowed by the daunting forces conspiring against him. On an entirely different level, Coppola felt an even deeper sense of loyalty towards Tucker’s descendants. His father, Carmine, had been an original investor in the Tucker Corp. and had even owned one of its first cars. Lastly, the director’s dedication “To Gio, who loved cars” proved a bittersweet epitaph for Coppola, whose eldest son was gruesomely decapitated in a Memorial Day boating accident in 1986. Astonishingly, 47 of the 51 Tucker automobiles built in 1948 have survived the passage of time – lovingly preserved by a group of concerted preservationists. Even more ironically, they remain in exceptional working condition – disproving Preston Tucker’s pundits, and, erroneous claims made by the press at the time of his trial he had built his prototypes from a caliginous heap of junkyard scrap. Of these, 21 cars were reunited, on loan from members of the Tucker Automobile Club. Three were actually used to depict the raceway crash in the movie; the rollover stunt performed by a modified Studebaker. While professing to take place across America – including Michigan, New York and Chicago, and to keep costs in line, virtually all of Tucker was shot in California. Eager to secure Coppola’s participation on a third ‘Godfather’ picture, Paramount sweetened the deal by reimbursing Lucas and covering the rest of Tucker’s production costs.  

Reigning his artistic license, Coppola’s reinterpretation of this nearly forgotten chapter in history is basically authentic to Preston Tucker’s life and times, taking liberties only in its compression of time, while using the ambiance of Tucker’s own marketing campaigns to bookend and frame the various vignettes with Tucker’s can-do spirit, simultaneously to omit most of his more privately held hardships. For sticklers who profess a love of film, only to deconstruct it and count the mistakes, historical inaccuracies do exist. For instance, Tucker had five children. We only see four in the movie. The real Tucker never had an assembly line. The movie’s condensed timeline takes place over one heady year of meteoric highs and disastrous lows. In reality, Tucker’s odyssey took four years to implode. The Tucker Company’s president, Robert Bennington was actually on the creator’s side. As Coppola felt the movie needed a more concrete villain, Dean Goodman’s reincarnation of Bennington became sly, enterprising and in cahoots with the dark political forces about to unravel Tucker’s organization from the inside. Conversely, the real Alex Tremulis (on screen played by Elias Koteas), and who also served as this movie’s historical consultant, was the Tucker Torpedo’s stylist, not its chief engineer, the contributions of fellow designer, Philip Egan, totally ignored. While one may argue against such alterations as slander to the reputations of certain real-life participants, it is pretty hard to ignore or under-appreciate how Coppola’s ‘finessing’ of the truth has crystalized Tucker’s sheer entertainment value. This Tucker is a glowing/flowing tribute to the cockeyed optimist in all of us.

Tucker: The Man and His Dream begins earnestly with a prologue loosely based on one of the Tucker Corp.’s newsreels. We find Detroit engineer, Preston Tucker (Jeff Bridges) a bon vivant in the best tradition of the ostentatious and uniquely American visionary. He races through the country byways in his military-styled armored tank, merely to take his family on a trip into town for ice cream, and, brings back a litter of full-grown Dalmatians overflowing from the backseat of his new convertible.  Despite the War Department’s rejection of his tank – as being ‘too fast’ for modern warfare – Tucker has made a mint, building gun turrets for the U.S. Air Force inside his modest ‘barn/laboratory’.  The Tuckers are inspired to succeed by their patriarch; Pres’ ever-devoted wife, Vera (Joan Allen) and their eldest son, Preston Jr. (Christian Slater) thoroughly entrenched in whatever adventure he plans to indulge. And what an adventure it will prove to be.  At war’s end, Tucker proposes going into business building ‘the car of tomorrow…today’; the Tucker Torpedo – revolutionary in its rear-engine design and safety features, including seat belts, disc brakes, swivel head lamps, and, pop-out shatter-proof windshield. Aside: virtually all of Tucker’s innovations – then denounced by his competition as scatterbrain – have been implemented into modern-day automotive design.

To envision such an automobile is one thing, to build its prototype, quite another. Tucker will need more than a dream to will his plans into a reality. So, he hires designer, Alex Tremulis, newly discharged from the army. Tucker also enlists New York financier, Abe Karatz (Martin Landau) to work out the contracts and money. Tucker can overlook Karatz’s past – he has a prison record for embezzlement. Raising the necessary funds through a stock issue, Tucker and Karatz acquire the idled Dodge Chicago Plant and rechristen it their hub for manufacturing. Abe also hires Robert Bennington as President of the newly amalgamated Tucker Corporation. Bennington’s participation will be fraught with inner-office conflict as his alliance with the company’s aged Board of Directors results in an outright rejection of Tucker’s original blueprints. While Bennington would have Tucker believe his dreams are too impractical, the implication is Bennington has already been bought and paid for in some way by political and business interests conspiring to do in the Tucker Corp. even before it can get off the ground.

Nevertheless, Tucker marches headstrong into this quagmire, going over Bennington’s head and whipping up mass hysteria through clever marketing and a nationwide tour to promote an automobile he has yet to actually build. Working around the clock to meet the official debut of the Tucker Torpedo, last-minute setbacks, including leaky oil valves and a small gasoline fire backstage, narrowly threaten to derail the big day. The press sneak backstage and capture this chaos for posterity, eager to emasculate Tucker’s big moment with their downright contempt for both the man and his automobile.  Their point is moot because the public in attendance that afternoon absolutely goes wild over what they see. Despite all of the setbacks that led to this glorious moment, and the flaws still inherent in the design of his dream car, the Torpedo is a massive and instant hit with the public. Still unsure of Tucker’s ability to pull off the technical and financial specs of his campaign, but also quite certain they want no part of his planned evolution in automotive engineering – especially if it succeeds – Detroit’s Big Three automakers engage Michigan Senator Homer S. Ferguson (Lloyd Bridges) to keep a watchful eye on the upstart in their midst; also, to set up every possible legal roadblock to further delay and even prevent Tucker from achieving his dream.  Mercifully, during this stalemate, visionary recluse, Howard Hughes (Dean Stockwell) embraces Tucker, sending his private plane to bring him and his youngest son, Noble (Corin Nemec) to his aircraft manufacturing site for a quirky consultation. Hughes gives Tucker several solid pieces of advice: first, to purchase air-cooled motors that can sustain the steel Tucker needs; second, to employ small but powerful helicopter engines to refuel his power plant.

Informed by sorrowful Abe, but Cheshire-grinning Bennington, all of the creative decisions in the Tucker organization are now under his control, Tucker nevertheless modifies a new engine and builds the car he promised the public in his private tool and die shop. This prototype is rigorously tested, deliberately to failure. Even its crash proves successful, as the driver is not thrown, nor even injured in the rollover. Alas, Ferguson now lowers the boom on Tucker. A story is leaked to the press that the Torpedo is an engineering failure, and worse; that Tucker has used government funds secured for the manufacture of his automobile for personal, lavish living expenses. Vera and the family rally to Tucker’s aide, collecting their itemized receipts to prove every last cent afforded the Tucker Corp. by the government has actually gone into the engineering of the car. Nevertheless, Tucker is confronted with allegations of stock fraud by Ferguson and the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission.  Realizing his past will likely be used to discredit the company, Karatz resigns. But Tucker discovers a loophole in the proceedings. If he can provide a minimum of 50 Tucker Torpedoes before the loan is called in he will have met the basic requirements for manufacturing. The SEC cannot take away his company. Having already built 47 at the time of his indictment, Tucker now encourages Preston Jr., Alex Tremulis and his chief mechanic, Jimmy Sakuyama (Mako) to feverishly complete the quota in time in order to save the company.

The press’ jaundiced view of Tucker’s reputation slowly takes hold and taints popular opinion against him. Judiciously defended by his attorney, Kirby (Jay O. Sanders), Tucker watches as the prosecution paints a picture of rank abuse of power and, with even broader strokes, smears Tucker’s name as a man teetering - not on the cusp of genius, but shifty-eyed insanity.  At some point, this tidal wave of unfounded accusations shifts in Tucker’s favor. After the prosecution tries to silence Tucker for speaking the truth, the jury’s foreman (Al Nalbandian) demands the case be heard on both sides to better inform the verdict. Only Ferguson has had the documentation altered so it appears as though Tucker did not meet his quota of 50 cars before the legalities of his deadline were up, thus ensuring whatever the outcome at trial, Tucker has already lost his company. In reply, Tucker orders all 50 Torpedoes to the courthouse on the last day of his trial; proof he never intended to defraud either the government or the public of anything. Against Kirby’s wishes, Tucker stands in as his own defense, making an impassioned speech to the jury about the promise of ‘free market enterprise’. Theoretically, it was put into place precisely to bolster entrepreneurs like him.

Tucker further suggests that if ‘big business’, in an effort to preserve itself, continues to stymie true visionaries, it will eventually stagnate American ingenuity and bring the nation’s best hope for prosperity to a screeching halt. Tucker now speaks of an age when America’s former enemies will dictate its future in consumer goods and services; a message all too ominously to have come to fruition since. The eloquence in stating his ethics to the jury is enough to sway them in his favor. Having lost the war, Tucker has at least managed to preserve his dignity. Ebullient at the outcome of his exoneration, Tucker invites the entirely courtroom to partake of a victory lap in one of his 50 Tucker Torpedoes parked outside. The public line the curb to catch a glimpse of ‘the car of tomorrow – today’.  Even Judge Igoe (Joseph Miksak) is impressed by the sight of so many Tuckers lining the curb. The movie concludes with a re-invigorated Tucker and his family leading this processional of Tucker Torpedoes down Chicago’s Main Street, crowds cheering his personal victory on all sides. In the movie’s epilogue we learn Tucker never achieved his dream of mass producing the Torpedo. His company in ruin, Preston Tucker would die of lung cancer a mere seven years after this exuberant day.

Tucker: The Man and His Dream represents Francis Ford Coppola at his extraordinary film-making best. That the picture miserably failed to recoup its outlay upon release – barely grossing $19 million – was perhaps less devastating to Coppola then, as he had weathered many such storms. In hindsight, Coppola’s post-Godfather movies were the victims of critics’ expectations he would simply continue to make more of the same.  Any deviation was judged as somehow inferior. How sad. Today, artistry in film is in very short supply – an absence amplified by Hollywood’s nervous obsession to make nothing but ‘guaranteed hits’. Hence, remakes, sequels, prequels and franchise film-making have taken over the industry, and, at the expense of advancing any project that would even hint of the proverbial gamble. Yet, Tucker: The Man and His Dream is a story about just such a gamble – and, even more ironically – one, never to pay off.

Even so, the picture is about so much more than its budding mogul and his pet project. It is a cause celebre, made by a director old enough to recall, and with fondness, a ‘rose-colored’ affinity for a way of life a ‘once upon a time’ America naively enjoyed without actually appreciating for its uniqueness in its own time. Tucker: The Man and His Dream is a celebration of good ole-fashioned American ‘know-how’, long since replaced in today’s bean-counting business model with complacency, and, most lethally of all, a quaintness to discount the way it was as somehow hopelessly flawed and utterly mistaken in its viewpoint. Under today’s heavy-handed liberalism, cultural diversity has been propped up as ‘the better’ to this heady quest for the best and brightest; a condemnation against any individual can-do spirit, hungry to succeed in life on its own terms; to be bold and attempt something never before tried, or, to actually pursue ‘life, liberty and happiness.’ Tucker: The Man and His Dream is a picture about such an individual: like Ford, or Edison or even Walt Disney – men who knew their own minds and used them for the betterment of all…in spite of ourselves.

Tucker: The Man and His Dream arrives on Blu-ray via Lionsgate in a 1080p transfer that positively glows and, like the movie, is pitch perfect from start to finish. There is really nothing more to add: colors – bold and fully saturated, show off the exquisiteness of Vittorio Storaro’s cinematography. Contrast – absolutely bang-on, with clean whites, pristine blacks and an astonishing level of fine detail revealed throughout. Film grain – looking indigenous to its source and ideally realized. No hints of edge enhancement. No undue DNR applied. In short, a reference quality disc. The audio…hmmm. While I detected no dropouts, there are several occasions where dialogue is presented at such a low whispered hush I could barely discern it at regular listening levels. Also, there are a few instances where music and SFX seem to be competing with, rather than augmenting the dialogue. For the most part, and in 5.1 DTS, it sounds just fine, if hardly extraordinary. Extras include a brief introduction from Coppola, as well as an audio commentary, a rough assembly of stock footage rechristened as a ‘making of’, and a vintage Tucker newsreel to promote the actual car. Virtually all of these extras were part of Paramount’s DVD release in 2004. Aside: it has taken far too long for Tucker: The Man and His Dream to come to Blu-ray. But now it has, and, in a hi-def reincarnation worthy of your coin. A great stocking stuffer for the pending holiday season, suitable for anyone who loves old cars, old movies, geniuses in general or just America itself. God bless and buy with confidence. Now, might we also encourage Paramount to get busy remastering The Greatest Show on Earth, Ordinary People, Six Weeks, The Carpetbaggers Roman Holiday, and many others still MIA from Blu-ray? Bottom line: very highly recommended!

FILM RATING (out of 5 – 5 being the best)

5+

VIDEO/AUDIO

4.5

EXTRAS

3