John Chard
And all - that - jazz!
Far better than its iffy reputation suggests, The Cotton Club is guilty of being stuffed to the gills, but it also contains mighty fine film making that shows craft both behind and in front of the camera.
Set in late 1920s Harlem, the pitch is an area of New York rife with swinging jazz, racism, crooks and gangsters. Prohibition and the depression fill the air just as the talkie movie bursts out of the silver screen. The Cotton Club of the title is the focal point for many of the key character's lives, so Francis Coppola, who stepped in at the eleventh hour of the troubled production, has many threads to juggle. He drops the odd one, but never to the detriment of the verve and swagger of the pic. Violence comes ...