The titles of 1941, One From The Heart, and Heaven's Gate have become glib punch lines, lazy shorthand for filmmaking at its most comically misguided. Yet the scorn heaped on movies that dive-bomb spectacularly at the box office obscures the fact that they often failed due to a raging surplus of ambition and ideas. In this age of timidity, safety, sequels, remakes, and focus-group testing, such epic vision, however misbegotten or haphazardly realized, should be hailed. Yes, even when it crops up in Gigli. With that in mind, The A.V. Club presents 10 notorious flops worthy of a second chance.
One From The Heart (1982)
What it tries to do: What doesn't it try to do? An undertaking only slightly less crazily ambitious than Francis Ford Coppola's previous film, Apocalypse Now, One From The Heart aspires to reinvent the vocabulary of cinema with its revolutionary blend of theater, music, John Cassavetes-style relationship drama, live television, Tom Waits songs, lurid neon sets, and blatant artifice.
Why it failed: Coppola's insanely ambitious cinematic experimentation and garish Vegas nightscapes tend to overpower the film's intentionally thin plot, a modest love story about a pair of bickering working-class lovers (Frederic Forrest and Teri Garr) contemplating trysts with seductive strangers (Nastassja Kinski and Raul Julia). Not even the vaunted marquee value of a superstar like Frederic Forrest could keep this picture from losing a bundle.
Why it's worth seeing: Especially today, Coppola's mad-prophet ambition remains a wonder to behold. Though it realizes only part of its Herculean ambition, One From The Heart points the way toward a whole new way of thinking about film. Coppola aimed to revolutionize the musical genre, but instead ended up in an exhilarating dead end.
Freddy Got Fingered (2001)
What it tries to do: MTV's The Tom Green Show briefly thrived on outrageous provocation, but Green's debut feature pushes that aesthetic to radical new extremes of anti-comedy. There's something mesmerizingly self-destructive about the whole enterprise, as if Green wants infamy more than laughs, and the result surely ranks among the more curious films ever green-lighted by a major studio.
Why it failed: It takes so long to make a movie—even a cheap comedy like this—that trends that were popular during pre-production tend to be yesterday's news by the time a film comes out. Green's 15 minutes had already elapsed when his film hit theaters, but it would have been a career-killer even if they hadn't. Green's TV pranks were an edgy precursor to tamer MTV fare like Punk'd, but Freddy Got Fingered was like one gigantic prank, a stink-bomb placed under the seats of unsuspecting viewers.
Why it's worth seeing: Freddy Got Fingered may not pass as entertainment, exactly, but it contains scenes that are so singularly offensive, they must be seen to be believed: Green swinging a newborn baby around by its umbilical cord, covering the mother and the hospital walls in blood; Green satisfying his disabled girlfriend's fetish by rapping her legs with bamboo reeds; and a triumphant finale where Green and his father (Rip Torn) are showered in elephant ejaculate.
Joe Versus The Volcano (1990)
What it tries to do: Joe Versus The Volcano could be called the original Tom Hanks/Meg Ryan romantic comedy, except that romantic comedies are never brave enough to try something this strange and enchanting. Writer-director John Patrick Shanley attempts to top the whimsical magic of his Moonstruck script with wild flights of fancy, leading Hanks and Ryan (who plays three roles) to a tropical island where the Polynesian-Jewish natives (led by Abe Vigoda!) love orange soda.
Why it failed: Clearly not everyone was enchanted: The New York Times, for one, tagged it as the flattest comedy since Howard The Duck, and other reviews weren't much kinder. Sandwiched between Punchline, The 'Burbs, Turner & Hooch, and Bonfire Of The Vanities, Joe Versus The Volcano appeared during Hanks' biggest losing streak since early in his career, and for all the film's loveable eccentricities, it tends to get lumped in there for posterity.
Why it's worth seeing: If it works on you, the film conveys nothing less than the joy of being alive—it openly fantasizes about breaking the shackles of the workaday world and finding adventure, romance, and beauty that exist beyond the suck-suck-sucking of florescent lights. And only the stone-hearted can avoid being touched by Hanks adrift on the ocean, facing dehydration and certain death, merrily strumming a song on his ukulele without a care in the world.
Heaven's Gate (1980)
What it tries to do: Following up The Deer Hunter, Michael Cimino was given free rein to make his dream project, and he dreamed big. Retelling the story of the Johnson County War, which brought Wyoming cattle barons into conflict with poor immigrants, Cimino spent a then-stunning $36 million attempting to tell the whole story of America by recreating the Old West and shooting an unglamorous epic of moral conflicts, violence, gang rape, and lots and lots of barren landscapes.
Why it failed: The initial release of Heaven's Gate was nearly four hours long, but it was pulled from theaters, then re-released at about two and a half hours. It could be argued that United Artists' lack of confidence did it in. But no, Heaven's Gate is a mess, with confusing relationships, no narrative muscle, and a pace seemingly inspired by a slow breeze blowing through the high grass.
Why it's worth seeing: As an exercise in poetic imagery, it justifies its run time. Cinematographer Vilmos Zsigmond revives the sepia sadness of McCabe & Mrs. Miller, and the cast—including Kris Kristofferson, Isabelle Huppert, Christopher Walken, and many other names of note—looks like it's plugged into some powerful emotional current that the audience must just be missing. It would be nice to claim that the film which drove the last nail into the coffin of '70s cinema and killed United Artists is actually a lost masterpiece. It isn't. But it's got a quality all its own.
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