I suppose every decade gets their "I'm just an average white boy who is really pining for the perfect-looking girl, but, this other girl who looks a little more off kilter, but still pretty, who's pining for me not too secretly, will be the one I'll end up with, after all" movie, and as it turns out if you happen to be one of the few humans on earth that watches Coppola's version of this the same week as you watch the John Hughes scripted Some Kind of Wonderful, it's quite remarkable how much better John Hughes did it than Coppola. I won't rehash my thoughts on that more, but I'll just say it helps a great deal when you make the characters in your story feel like... actual people and not just pieces to shuffle around as you go about aping Richard Lester and those big Italian 60s comedies.
What makes You're a Big Boy Now an early misfire for the Coppola, who would almost immediately jump meteorically into being a COPPOLA in capital letters (I haven't seen Finian's Rainbow, but the run from The Rain People to Apocalypse Now is tremendous), are two things: first, that the film is awkwardly cast when it comes to the leads. Peter Kastner didn't do a lot of work in film after this, some scattered roles in independent productions and TV, and there's just nothing all that remarkable about him. It's talked about a lot in film history how unique at the time it was for Mike Nichols to cast Dustin Hoffman in The Graduate, and I can't assume he knew what someone like Coppola had going on here (which was ultimately his Thesis film at UCLA, wow), but it's a useful comparison to see what happens when you cast someone as a fumbling, vanilla dope in the lead role.
I think what I mean to say is that you want to *root* for Bernard in his (mis)adventures, even when he stumbles and is a comic buffoon you want to like him, but there's nothing all that likable here, nothing endearing, which is what Nichols must have seen in Hoffman and what made that film work on a fundamental level. That's one problem for Coppola, but another is that (according to the trivia) he cast against type for his two female leads, with Karen Black as the warm-hearted Amy (the girl who went to school with Bernard and, for some reason that is left for us to decipher, has always liked him and now likes him more, ie "come up to my place Bernard" and such) and Elizabeth Hartman as the Go-Go dancing super-hip Barbara Darling.
Maybe he thought he'd try to work against the types, but he should've steered into them: Black would be much better suited (and probably find a lot more comedy to mine with Kastner) as Barbara, and Hartman would be fine as the "Good Girl" Amy. As it stands, we don't have enough time between Bernard and Amy to understand why she'd want him in the first place - not least of which that comment he makes when she's about to get on the bus "You used to be ugly... then" - and the obsession with Barbara Darling is one of those Movie contrivances where he's over the moon for her (Virgin as well), and she treats him like a garbage buffoon... which he is, but still. This is all to say the actresses try their best, but they're at the mercy of a director who is more interested in DIRECTING at this stage than in creating honest portrayals of people, even those in over their heads.
That leads to the second problem, which is that the movie is something I don't criticize too often, but is warranted here: it's Over-Directed. Or Over-Edited, or a combination of the two. Coppola is intoxicated with what he can do with the camera, how he can leap and bound and does his darndest to make visual comedy with the hyper-active mis en scene he's got going on, and only occasionally does it work (I did chuckle during the scene where Bernard's dad played juicily by Rip Torn gets stuck in a vault filled with sexy paintings with a woman who is not having it at all, and his camera and editing tricks work well there). But it feels often like he and his editor aren't all that disciplined to make something more clever out of what they're showing. In other words, I wouldn't mind the direction being so Running Jumping Sitting Standing Still et al, I only wish it wasn't there in such obnoxious dimensions.
This isn't an inherently bad premise for a film, there's some fun New York City street photography and a jaunty bit when Bernard tries to fetch a wayward kite, and a couple of the Lovin' Spoonful songs are fun. But this never coheres into anything that enjoyable and I wanted it to end before it did. Coppola would just a few years after the movie came out (and bombed, even on a million dollar budget) call it "really awful," so I don't think I can be harder on it than he was on himself. But it now stands more as a curiosity, of how you can see a director learning from mistakes - ie calming down, not miscasting, finding the truth in a scene - and that, again, other filmmakers would ultimately do this kind of material better in subsequent decades anyway.
What makes You're a Big Boy Now an early misfire for the Coppola, who would almost immediately jump meteorically into being a COPPOLA in capital letters (I haven't seen Finian's Rainbow, but the run from The Rain People to Apocalypse Now is tremendous), are two things: first, that the film is awkwardly cast when it comes to the leads. Peter Kastner didn't do a lot of work in film after this, some scattered roles in independent productions and TV, and there's just nothing all that remarkable about him. It's talked about a lot in film history how unique at the time it was for Mike Nichols to cast Dustin Hoffman in The Graduate, and I can't assume he knew what someone like Coppola had going on here (which was ultimately his Thesis film at UCLA, wow), but it's a useful comparison to see what happens when you cast someone as a fumbling, vanilla dope in the lead role.
I think what I mean to say is that you want to *root* for Bernard in his (mis)adventures, even when he stumbles and is a comic buffoon you want to like him, but there's nothing all that likable here, nothing endearing, which is what Nichols must have seen in Hoffman and what made that film work on a fundamental level. That's one problem for Coppola, but another is that (according to the trivia) he cast against type for his two female leads, with Karen Black as the warm-hearted Amy (the girl who went to school with Bernard and, for some reason that is left for us to decipher, has always liked him and now likes him more, ie "come up to my place Bernard" and such) and Elizabeth Hartman as the Go-Go dancing super-hip Barbara Darling.
Maybe he thought he'd try to work against the types, but he should've steered into them: Black would be much better suited (and probably find a lot more comedy to mine with Kastner) as Barbara, and Hartman would be fine as the "Good Girl" Amy. As it stands, we don't have enough time between Bernard and Amy to understand why she'd want him in the first place - not least of which that comment he makes when she's about to get on the bus "You used to be ugly... then" - and the obsession with Barbara Darling is one of those Movie contrivances where he's over the moon for her (Virgin as well), and she treats him like a garbage buffoon... which he is, but still. This is all to say the actresses try their best, but they're at the mercy of a director who is more interested in DIRECTING at this stage than in creating honest portrayals of people, even those in over their heads.
That leads to the second problem, which is that the movie is something I don't criticize too often, but is warranted here: it's Over-Directed. Or Over-Edited, or a combination of the two. Coppola is intoxicated with what he can do with the camera, how he can leap and bound and does his darndest to make visual comedy with the hyper-active mis en scene he's got going on, and only occasionally does it work (I did chuckle during the scene where Bernard's dad played juicily by Rip Torn gets stuck in a vault filled with sexy paintings with a woman who is not having it at all, and his camera and editing tricks work well there). But it feels often like he and his editor aren't all that disciplined to make something more clever out of what they're showing. In other words, I wouldn't mind the direction being so Running Jumping Sitting Standing Still et al, I only wish it wasn't there in such obnoxious dimensions.
This isn't an inherently bad premise for a film, there's some fun New York City street photography and a jaunty bit when Bernard tries to fetch a wayward kite, and a couple of the Lovin' Spoonful songs are fun. But this never coheres into anything that enjoyable and I wanted it to end before it did. Coppola would just a few years after the movie came out (and bombed, even on a million dollar budget) call it "really awful," so I don't think I can be harder on it than he was on himself. But it now stands more as a curiosity, of how you can see a director learning from mistakes - ie calming down, not miscasting, finding the truth in a scene - and that, again, other filmmakers would ultimately do this kind of material better in subsequent decades anyway.