You might well have expected that a movie called The Cotton Club would actually be about the Cotton Club. But no. The movie is not so much about it as around and about it. One of the main characters owns the place. A couple of others work there. Others of them go there for entertainment. And the painstaking historical research into this fabled Harlem hot spot has turned up such a doubtful nugget as Charlie Chaplin settling down to a front-row table and launching immediately into his dinner-roll routine, half a dozen years after The Gold Rush and always good for a laugh. But the club itself, or anyway the music it showcased (Cab Calloway doing his "Hi-di-hi-di-hi-di-ho" -- what else?), is strictly second fiddle to the hackneyed gangster plot. The one moment when the music world overlaps the underworld is, in a sense, memorable: a tap dancer in mid-performance neatly kicks the gun out of a gangster's hand without missing a tap. Richard Gere, Diane Lane, Gregory Hines, James Remar, Bob Hoskins, and Fred Gwynne; directed by Francis Ford Coppola. (1984) — Duncan Shepherd
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