Amazon.com
Rare is the movie that qualifies as both its director's film-school master's thesis and his first project for a major studio (Warner Bros.).
You're a Big Boy Now is also the lone instance of Francis Ford Coppola's attempting an out-and-out comedy--and forgoing future endeavors in that line was a wise career decision. The picture's a grab-bag of zaniness and manic playfulness in imitation of the freewheeling French New Wave films that were all the rage with cinema buffs at the time. The theme is the moving-away-from-home and sexual coming-of-age of Bernard Chanticleer (Peter Kastner), a boyish, going-on-twenty Long Islander with a hyper-neurotic mom (supporting-actress Oscar nominee Geraldine Page) and a pompous pop (Rip Torn), who as Curator of Incunabula at the New York Public Library is also his boss. Bernard is so smitten with Barbara Darling (Elizabeth Hartman), a man-eating, go-go-dancing sylph who¹s part of an avant-garde theater company, that he almost literally can't see the sweet girl (Karen Black in her first role) who works alongside him, and painfully pines for him, at the library. Yet another female grotesque is Bernard's repressed landlady (Julie Harris), whose honest-to-God name, Miss Thing, may be the film's one enduring legacy to American culture. Coppola's talent is apparent even when he's trivializing it, and there are some nice ideas--e.g., a small army of library drones lyrically roller-skating through the stacks, and a meet-cute moment involving the library's pneumatic-tube system that may have inspired the New Wave's François Truffaut in turn (v.
Stolen Kisses). But there's also no end of scampering along the sidewalks and streets of Manhattan for which, again and again, you'll wish Coppola had been slapped.
--Richard T. Jameson
