'YOU'RE A BIG BOY NOW'.....A YOUNG COPPOLA'S COMING-OF-AGE.....

You're A Big Boy Now (1966)    27 year old Francis Ford Coppola was already entrenched in Hollywood as a contract screenwriter for mega-producer Ray Stark......

               In a typically bold, ballsy Coppola move, he bought the exclusive rights to an obscure little novel as a ploy to insure he'd be the one to direct his screenplay adaptation of it. 

               And a studio fell for it, hence "You're A Big Boy Now", a frantic coming-of-age farce that also served as a coming-of-age for Coppola as a fledgling filmmaker. 

               Heavily influenced by director Richard Lester's frenetic cinematics of "A Hard Day's Night" and "The Knack....and How To Get It", the film presents a gallery of supposedly funny caricatures swirling around  a virginal 19 year old New York City naif  (Peter Kastner) trying to find his place in the world.....and true love. 

                 Big problem here - this movie only accentuates Coppola's weakest abilities as its writer-director. Comic writing is not in his skill set and he shows no talent for the kind of spontaneous visual slapstick that Richard Lester made into his signature style. 

                So the movie never really takes flight, it plays like desperate skit by an overacting, unfunny improv group. 

                But it does include one hell of a quality cast.......Rip Torn and Geraldine Page as Kastner's blustering and addled parents, Julie Harris as his high strung landlord and two remarkable talents as the opposing girls in his life.

                Here's where Coppola did favor the film with a stroke of casting brilliance.  For the manic-pixie-dreamgirl/borderline psycho, he chose the normally sweet shy Elizabeth Hartman (who so poignantly played the abused blind girl opposite Sidney Poitier in "A Patch Of Blue").  And the role of Kastner's lovely apple-pie true love went to Karen Black, whom you'd normally think of as more suited for manic-pixie craziness........

               And with the exuberance of a young filmmaker, Coppola takes his cast and crew all over the New York City of the mid-1960's, making this one of the last films that would photograph the city so attractively......(it wouldn't be long before subsequent films shot in NYC would depict it as  violent, crime-ridden hell on earth.....)

                The film does move along, mostly due to Coppola's imitating Lester's choppy editing and the actors here are always interesting to watch.......but overall it's a limp example of the kind of "hip" filmmaking that directors embraced in pursuit of a younger movie audience.   Best for Coppola completists but for everyone else, hardly worth the time......1 & 1/2 stars (*1/2).