Admission: $5.00

“It may take years yet for most critics to appreciate how audaciously Coppola reworked the terms of the musical in One from the Heart. After that, they can consider how he modernized the Western. For One from the Heart reinhabits an old favorite of the genre, the ghost town: not just the abandoned site of former revelry and riches (like Bodie or Marietta), but a city inhabited by those not fully alive, and so hitched to imagined futures that they are only movie people. Western building was only meant to endure as long as the winning streak lasted; it's like a street of studio fronts where the camera can go magically in and out, and all the light is artificial. Las Vegas was always a movie set; that was the reasoning which led Coppola to film on a soundstage, rather than in the desert itself. Las Vegas has always been where its inventors chose to put it.
“There amid the sand, the neon and the roulette, battered lives stay loyal to their own romantic West, the future. The new frontier is all a dream of being transported: boat trips to Hawaii, an aircraft frozen in take-off, and a yard of sleeping automobiles. Here and now is as quickly discarded as a waiter forgetting to deliver a meal to its intended customers. The wishful love story is a desperate song of helpless illusion in which the lovers are deliberately commonplace, and the woman is more likely to move on than the man. But she relents, comes back for pathos to her sad hulk of an adventurer in their eerie, dune-like city, where they nearly (but not quite) live. Anyone trained as much in hope as Westerners are is a ghost to actuality, and so you can see through walls, hear yourself singing and know the wheel always stops at ‘happy ending' here in Heart, a city for the lost, in Nevada.” David Thomson