You’re a Big Boy Now (Blu-ray Review)
- Review Date: Oct 03, 2024
- Format: Blu-ray Disc
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Director
Francis Ford CoppolaRelease Date(s)
1966 (May 14, 2024)Studio(s)
Seven Arts Productions/Warner Bros. (Warner Archive Collection)- Film/Program Grade: B-
- Video Grade: A
- Audio Grade: A
- Extras Grade: D
Review
Francis Ford Coppola’s early career was nothing if not diverse. While still a 20-something student at UCLA Film School, he got into the nudie-cutie softcore porn business, cobbling no-budget productions together, sometimes adding scenes to then-racy European films for the American smut market. He also became assistant to producer-director Roger Corman, re-editing and dubbing the Soviet-made sci-fi film Nebo zovyot into the more marketable (barely) Battle Beyond the Sun, and working as one of the many uncredited directors of The Terror.
On a budget of just $40,000, Coppola next directed his first mainstream feature, Dementia 13 (1963), a pretty good Irish-flavored Psycho imitator. Later in the decade, he directed Finian’s Rainbow, a sometimes evocative, frequently embarrassing old-fashioned movie musical starring Fred Astaire, and he co-wrote the epic all-star war movie Is Paris Burning? and Patton. He also directed the acclaimed but financially unsuccessful The Rain People.
In the middle of all this, as his Master’s Thesis (!) for UCLA, Coppola also directed You’re a Big Boy Now (1966), a satirical romantic comedy based on David Benedictus’s 1963 of the same name. The film follows 19-year-old Bernard Chanticleer (Peter Kastner), a nerdy assistant librarian working the stacks (on roller skates) at the New York Public Library. Dominated by his overbearing father (Rip Torn) and overly protective mother (Geraldine Page), they move him into an apartment building owned by spinster Nora Thing (Julie Harris). Sweet Amy Partlett (Karen Black, who gets an “and introducing” credit) loves him, but he’s obsessed with Barbara Darling (top-billed Elizabeth Hartman, red-hot following A Patch of Blue), a self-absorbed, manipulative aspiring actress and go-go dancer.
The picture is aggressively, even oppressively stylized, falling somewhere between Richard Lester’s Beatles films and Mike Nichols’s The Graduate, released the following year. The stylistic innovations Lester crystalized in A Hard Day’s Night and, more so visually, in Help! (otherwise the lesser of the two films) worked in tandem with the Beatles’ music and playful anarchy, but by the time Lester made A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum, that frantic style, particularly creating comedy through the cutting, cinematically stepped on all the jokes; distracting and calling attention to itself without relief, Lester’s direction smothering the effectiveness of the great source material.
Likewise, Coppola’s direction of You’re a Big Boy Now has much the same impact. For all his visual wizardry and film student-like experimentation, it plays like a talented filmmaker trying to show off, more like a demo reel for Coppola’s resumé than a filmmaker dedicated to best serving the material. Coppola’s partner in this mayhem was the talented editor Aram Avakian, whose diverse credits included co-directing the great Jazz on a Summer’s Day and, later, the much-underrated Cops and Robbers.
That said, the picture is way more tolerable than like-minded, self-consciously hip movies of the period like the badly dated What’s New, Pussycat? or the insufferable The Bliss of Mrs. Blossom. The main draw are the performances and Coppola’s excellent use of New York locations, from Central Park and Times Square with all its big and little movie theaters—Khartoum, in Cinerama!—to an Automat and, inexplicably at the end, a pretzel factory. (Though flawed, it’s one of the great New York City movies a la Avakian’s Cops and Robbers, the original The Taking of Pelham One Two Three and Manhattan.) Good music by The Lovin’ Spoonful adds to the fun.
Had You’re a Big Boy Now clicked with audiences, Canadian Peter Kastner might have had a career comparable to Dustin Hoffman; he has the same basic appeal, though in some ways Bernard is as much Norman Bates as Benjamin Braddock. Instead of capitalizing on the good reviews he earned, he unwisely starred in a disastrously received sitcom, The Ugliest Girl in Town, and his starring career was effectively kaput overnight. After years of mental illness, including an odd, obsessively bitter relationship with his own, real-life mother, he died at 64. Elizabeth Hartman likewise suffered from years of depression; after a flurry of promising roles in the second-half of the 1960s, she made few films and fewer TV appearances after the early ‘70s, and committed suicide in 1987 when she was barely 43.
Hartman’s fine but the standout is Karen Black, virtually unknown then, she must have had legions of male filmgoers fall for her sweet-natured Amy, who puts up with a lot of crap from oddball Bernard, and who has the patience of a saint. Page and Harris are also good in eccentric, showy parts, though a subdued Rip Torn seems out of place and too young to be playing Bernard’s pop.
“Youth comedies” were in dire shape, AIP’s fun but crudely-made and at times exasperatingly dopey Beach Party series playing drive-ins making the biggest impact. Coppola captures the New York scene with its record stores and adult book shops but really hasn’t a clue where to place Bernard within this rapidly changing environment, giving him a big fluffy sheepdog while also having him almost killed by a striptease “loop” at a peep show emporium. Relatively few scenes are downright embarrassing at a time with other allegedly “with it” Hollywood comedies were embarrassments from start to finish. Particularly awful is Bernard’s encounter with racist graffiti that somehow segues to footage of a black man in full Scottish regalia playing the bagpipes.
Unusual for the label, Warner Archive’s Blu-ray of You’re a Big Boy Now was restored and remastered not by them but by Coppola’s own Zoetrope company. Presented in 1.85:1 widescreen, the image has been maximized throughout, with bright, accurate color and good blacks and contrast, and 2.0 mono DTS-HD Master Audio, supported by optional English subtitles. No You’re a Big Boy Redux here. The lone extra is a trailer, as clueless how to the sell the picture as Sgt. Friday was admonishing TV-imagined hippies.
You’re a Big Boy Now has many good points, but also an equal number of exasperating, ineffective and severely dated ones. However, a must-see for Coppola completists.
- Stuart Galbraith IV