Summary
Vera and one of the kids are sticking pins on a map to mark all the places in the country from which they have received a letter, when Preston walks down the stairs and announces that Abe should have been at their house by now. As he steps outside, he's met by an air force cadet in uniform who starts pitching Tucker a redesign of his car to make it more aerodynamic. This is Alex Tremulis. Tucker seems to bristle at the way he designed the doors, but offers the cadet a job on the spot, telling Alex that he won't just work for the design department: he'll be the design department.
When Abe arrives, Tucker introduces him to his engineer, Jimmy Sakuyama. Abe pulls Tucker aside and seems distressed: didn't they put all the "Japs" in camps? Tucker tells him Jimmy's not a "Jap" but an engineer, and if it makes Abe feel any better, the government put the rest of his family in a camp. Inside, Abe shows the Tucker family different pictures of manufacturing plants that they could acquire. When Tucker hears that the old Dodge plant in Chicago is the biggest building in the world under one roof, his face lights up and he says it's perfect. We cut to the Tucker family and Abe touring the factory, and Abe says he set up a meeting with the federal government, who will lease the factory to Tucker. Preston demands that it be a lunch meeting where they serve roast beef.
And that's exactly what he gets. While the bureaucrats are sitting around eating, Tucker gives a gory slideshow presentation showing off photos of traffic accidents. While he's going on about how the safety features in his car can prevent these gruesome deaths—like his headlights, windshield, and seatbelts—the room empties, the men in the meeting sickened. Despite Abe trying to shush him, Tucker starts a rant about how the Big Three automakers don't care about safety and people, but only profit. He says the entire Big Three is guilty of criminal negligence. An assistant to the administrator (whatever that means) invites Tucker for a meeting the next day, but Abe plays the foil to Tucker's unbridled optimism and swears that Tucker flopped and that he's being set up for something.
Over the phone, Preston and Vera lie to each other about their progress: Preston says he had the people at the meeting eating out of his hand and Vera says the bank is going to consider the loan. They call each other on their BS in an affectionate way. At the next meeting, the bureaucrat informs Preston and Abe that the committee has voted to lease the factory to Tucker on the condition that they produce 50 cars within the first year. Tucker and Abe are shocked, but they thank the man and promptly get out of his office. While Abe is on the phone with a PR agent and Preston talks to his wife, Preston reveals to Abe that they don't have a prototype of the car yet and all the color drains from Abe's face.
At the Tucker residence, Abe informs Preston and his team that they need to have a prototype ready in 60 days—in time for the factory opening—so that they can attract investors. It's a rough timeline, but they commit to it. Just before getting started, Preston's son Preston Jr. tells his dad that he's going to turn down his admission offer from Notre Dame and stay to learn from his father about building cars. With that, he joins the team. A montage starts of Abe promising certain features to dealers as the engineering team quickly redesigns everything that Tucker promised the public that's actually impractical. Alex, for example, has to design away the fender that turns with the wheels since it's incredibly dangerous, substituting a turning third headlight instead.
When Tucker and Abe go to RJ Bennington's office to try to convince him to join their board, Tucker bristles at the possibility of giving someone else control of the company, and Bennington bristles at the fact that there's no car to show yet. After all, the unveiling is just a week away. At Preston's first meeting with the board, he tells them that Detroit is preventing him from getting steel for the car, so he tells them he arranged a meeting with Michigan senator Homer Ferguson, and everyone in the room is taken aback. He represents Detroit, and they're trying to build a car in Chicago.
Ferguson blows off their meeting when they arrive, instead inviting them to talk to him out of the building. He mainly says a bunch of nonsense, but manages to squeeze in a few insults about Tucker's business. He leaves by repeating Tucker's line about the Big Three getting convicted for manslaughter, and Abe tells Tucker it means that Ferguson wants them to stay out of the car business. Back in Ypsilanti, one of Tucker's engineers, Eddie, tells him that they won't be able to work a fuel-injection system into the engine. Tucker lashes out and says "Where's my car? What's left of it?"
Analysis
This segment of the film contains the most dazzling moving camera work seen in the entire film. Momentum carries us through sequence after sequence, only grinding to a halt in that moment when Senator Ferguson passive-aggressively insults Tucker on the steps of the Senate building in Washington. Note here Coppola's masterful use of the crane, which lets his camera circle around tables or sweep through space into a close-up. We see a few of these used to frame Abe, once when he's showing the Tucker family pictures of factories, once when he's in the midst of selling the prospective Tucker car to a used car dealer. As the camera cuts through scenes to make him the center of focus, his character starts to really come to the center of the action. It drives our association and sympathies with him too.
With this use of the crane, Coppola shows off his virtuosic bent, bringing to mind filmmakers like Alfred Hitchcock who used the crane to help the viewer peer through windows in Psycho, and Orson Welles who used the tool to either showcase grandiose dreams in Citizen Kane or emphasize bureaucratic sprawl in The Trial. The difference between Coppola's use of the crane and these other directors', though, is that Coppola often seems tempted to indulge for indulgence sake. There seems to be little narrative utility to these sweeping crane shots in a lot of cases, and it's clear that Coppola is much more interested in dazzling the viewer. He seems to be saying, Why keep the camera on a tripod when you can make it fly?
His use of editing tricks in this segment of the film toes a similar line. For example, when a picture of the Tucker company's board of directors flies off the bed as Preston and Vera fall on it in a lover's embrace, Coppola uses it to fade into a shot of the board arranged around the table in the exact same way. First off, it doesn't really make sense that there would be a picture of the company's board of directors on the couple's bed and, second, why would we possibly need a smooth transition from a love scene into the boardroom?
Nonetheless, Coppola does a successful job creating an atmosphere out of artifice here. Much like in a classic screwball comedy, all of the characters are one-note and keyed up, with background characters providing weird, wooden comic relief. Take the government bureaucrat fiendishly stamping away at papers, or Senator Ferguson's secretary nodding in enraptured approval as the senator tells her to write all of his appointments on a single sheet of paper. Coppola does a great job maintaining a light tone in a segment of the movie when the drama is ratcheting up, even if it means we feel a little ungrounded by the film's formal elements.
