As a rule, Hollywood—the dream factory—doesn’t make movies about the American dream being a fraud, which is one reason why this film isn’t easily forgotten. In Tucker, the better product is smothered and banished so that the continuing profits of fat corporations can be safeguarded. If Coppola had chosen to tell this true story as an earnest message picture, the results might have been unrelentingly depressing and disheartening. Instead of falling into this miring trap, he made a film that’s informed by post-war enthusiasm and possibility, set to a jitterbugging background score and photographed with all the saturated color and glamour associated with escapist movies of the period. Tucker the movie reflects Tucker the car: both are sleek, streamlined, impeccably crafted, and have real “drive.” The troubling points about our free-enterprise system are not swallowed up by Coppola’s dazzling technique, but, rather, emerge with clarity in a film whose buoyancy keeps audiences attuned to what it has to say. If the ending seems too determinedly upbeat, well, it isn’t unjustified: Tucker does make his wonder car, and it’s everything he said it would be. The film chooses to find optimism in the fact of the Tucker itself—the actualization of a dream—even though only 50 cars were produced. Tucker celebrates personal achievement and refuses to diminish its central character because he wasn’t able to reap the benefits his invention merited. The losers are the American people, denied the best that’s available to them so that Big Business can thrive unchallenged. It’s a tricky balancing act for Coppola to deal honestly with downbeat themes while delivering a spiffy entertainment, but he succeeds. Tucker is gorgeous to look at, swiftly paced, and still strikes all the right nerves.

excerpted from John DiLeo’s
Screen Savers: 40 Remarkable Movies Awaiting Rediscovery
© 2008 Hansen Publishing Group. All Rights Reserved

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