Summary
A phone crashes against a door. Tucker has flown into a full-on fit of rage over Bennington. But just then, the phone in the next room over starts to ring. Tucker's son says it's Howard Hughes, and Tucker's demeanor changes instantly as soon as he realizes it's true. Preston and Preston Jr. fly out to meet Howard Hughes in the hangar where his infamous Spruce Goose resides. Hughes offers the two pistachios that he scoops out of his jacket pocket, and they're remiss to turn him down. Hughes has invited Tucker out because he also has a grudge against Senator Ferguson and wants to tell Tucker about a failing helicopter company in Buffalo with a big cache of steel unregulated by the government a good design aluminum engine.
At the old Tucker shop in Ypsilanti, the engineering crew look over the helicopter engine, and Jimmy says he'll try to convert it to a water-cooled engine so it can run in a car. Tucker advises that they'll have to construct the engine in that shop, hidden from Bennington. They have one night to make it work. In the morning, they have trouble starting it up. Is this engine dead in the water? As soon as Jr. grabs a new battery for it, the engine is going. It's the first real win the Tucker camp has had in a while.
The Tucker team goes to a race track to drive the car with the new engine for 24 hours straight to see how it holds up. Upon nightfall, the private investigator who we encountered at the unveiling event calls Senator Ferguson to tell him the car is running. Ferguson is enraged and calls someone in Detroit to report that Tucker successfully built the car. But don't worry, says the senator, Tucker can still be stopped. It doesn't seem that way at the race track, though. We watch the car flip over as it rounds a lap and the team flocks to the wreck to pull Eddie out. But Eddie is fine and he notes that the windshield popped out, just like they said it would. Eddie says he bets the car will still start, and sure enough it does. "Hell of a car!" Eddie exclaims.
Bennington storms into the engineering workshop in the factory when he hears that Tucker has resumed production on the rear-engine car. Preston informs him that his lawyer said Bennington signed up to built the original Tucker, so that's what they'll build. Bennington says Tucker will soon hear from his attorney, and storms right back out. Next, we watch Preston reviewing a commercial that was shot for the car, where a gas station attendant is shocked by the luggage under the hood and the engine in the trunk. Preston wants Abe to see the ad, but Abe lures Tucker away.
They step outside the Tucker plant and tells him that the plant is wired. Abe continues: every since Tucker road-tested the new car, 40 FBI agents have been following him around the clock. Tucker says it doesn't matter, since in two weeks, they'll be producing 100 cars a day. Abe responds that in two weeks, Preston will be dead and buried by the Big Three. This is when Abe submits his letter of resignation to Preston, which Tucker takes as some sign that Abe is trying to hustle him. But Abe admits that he did prison time for bank fraud, and would prove too great a legal liability to the company going forward.
Right before Abe departs, he says that if Tucker wants to hear how they'll finish him off, then listen to Drew Pierson the next night on the radio. Indeed, Tucker, his family, and his crew gather around the radio the next night to learn that the SEC is going to come after the Tucker company for perpetrating a fraud on the American people. The broadcaster says that the Tucker car is assembled from junkyard parts and includes none of the futuristic features originally promised. Senator Ferguson will be raising a congressional probe to find out what happened to the $26 million Tucker raised.
Preston walks into his office the next day with his staff reading about the investigation in the papers. He asks if the feds were in to take the files last night, and his secretary says nobody took anything. Just when Preston is about to call the paper's editor to tell him that they reported incorrectly that his files were confiscated, the feds come in and take his files. He calls the editor of the Chicago Tribune and says that this is the first newspaper he's ever seen that prints the news before it happens.
Analysis
George Lucas is perhaps the man most responsible for this film getting made. At the request of Coppola, Lucas gladly agreed to produce the film, turning it from a dream project of Coppola's into reality. Both men have said that Lucas remained relatively hands-off with the actual making of the film, but that he guided its development. It was Lucas who suggested that Coppola make this an optimistic film or, to put it another way, Disney-fy it a bit. Coppola gladly agreed, since he figured that his old buddy George knew exactly what it took to make something successful at the box office. Well, Tucker wasn't really successful at the box office, but it does bear Lucas's mark.
The scene with Howard Hughes is a great example, and it makes you wonder if Lucas had a little more say when they were shooting it. First off, we see Hughes's gigantic Spruce Goose airplane, a weird resonance with the massive spacecraft that often fill the screen and overwhelm the characters in the Star Wars films. Secondly, the dress, lighting, and camerawork in this Howard Hughes scene is really reminiscent of the first two Indiana Jones vehicles, which were Lucas's other gargantuan hit films in the 1980s. But the atmosphere in this scene is all Coppola, with the misty air lending a secretive tone to Hughes's and Tucker's conversation, and the weird pistachios aside providing a subtle and satisfying comedic foil.
In some ways, Tucker: The Man and His Dream is ahead of its time. Tucker tends to feel a lot like it was made for kids, certainly as a result of Lucas's urging that this should be a family-friendly film. But the 1980s were not a time when mainstream fare by big-name directors was necessarily family-friendly. In fact, it wouldn't really be until the 21st century when just about all of the films that major studios put out would be vehicles intended to satisfy viewers of all ages, to maximize the number size of the target audience. Today, most of what we're served are superhero movies and romantic comedies, and it's pretty rare that a studio throws serious money into a R-rated film unless it's a horror flick.
Tucker, if anything, would make a lot more sense in this current landscape than during a period when films like Platoon (1986) and Fatal Attraction (1987) were critical and box office smashes. But then again, Tucker really exists as a strange film that could never make sense in any time period. Bridges' constant quips and mugging are fitting for a screwball comedy from the 1930s or '40s, but this film feels significantly more sanitized that screwball classics like Bringing Up Baby (1938). While the way that Tucker responds to the SEC men and the editor of the Chicago Tribune is cute in a way, it really comes off as awkward, and perhaps this speaks to a more broadly awkward move over all: Francis Ford Coppola making a family-friendly film. After all, his most famous films are known for their violence and brooding atmospherics.
