Tucker: The Man and His Dream Essay Questions

What are the parallels between Preston Tucker's story and Francis Ford Coppola's?

Tucker: The Man and His Dream functions well as a parable for Francis Ford Coppola's career in Hollywood. Coppola's American Zoetrope film company, devised to overthrow the existing major studio power structure in Hollywood, can be compared with Preston Tucker's own ambitions to unseat the Big Three automakers in Detroit. The protagonist's trials and tribulations—as well as the end result—might also help us understand Coppola's idea of what achieving a dream means.

Discuss what impact the film's camera techniques and editing have on its story.

It's impossible to discuss latter-day Coppola movies without addressing the biggest criticism lobbied against him: that his films became all style and no substance. Tucker represents a particularly fair balance between the two. You can look at how specific camera angles or editing juxtapositions are used to shape how the audience feels about the characters on screen, and perhaps it's helpful to draw parallels to Orson Welles's camerawork in Citizen Kane here. Likewise, you can look at the lightning-fast pacing of the film to describe how the story develops onscreen.

Explore the role of masculinity in Tucker: The Man and His Dream.

This story is very much one of a man pursuing the American Dream, and all of the other men that help him or stand in his way. Women barely figure into the picture much at all. The only female characters, really, are Tucker's wife and his secretary. You could draw from feminist film theory to explore the ways we are driven to identify with our male protagonist. You can also analyze the ways that male camaraderie is contrasted with survival-of-the-fittest competition between alpha males like Tucker and Senator Ferguson. The father/son dynamic between Preston and his son may be relevant too.

What relationship does this film have to Classical Hollywood?

It would be interesting to explore Coppola's pre-production talks with Frank Capra and to compare Tucker to Capra's classics like It's a Wonderful Life, Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, or It Happened One Night. You can also talk a bit about the primacy of artifice here, influenced by Technicolor musicals made by the likes of Gene Kelly. If you plan to delve into musicals, be sure to address Coppola's early ideas to make the Preston Tucker story into a musical.

Explore the historical contexts for Tucker, in comparison to both Ronald Reagan's 1980s when it came out, and the post-war period in which it's set.

Part of what makes Tucker such a unique film in Coppola's oeuvre is how optimistically it portrays certain aspects of American culture, such as the nuclear family, the spirit of innovation, and the vibrancy of the American dream. It paints a particularly pessimistic picture, though, of corporate America and the US government—two forces that benefitted from each other's success quite a bit both in the post-WWII era and the 1980s. Explore the specific political and economic contexts of those eras through the lens of the film's portrayal of such factors, such as Tucker's interactions with the federal government, his campaign against the Big Three automakers, and his trial.