A huge roll of the dice that wiped out Francis Ford Coppola's Zoetrope studio and saw him spending the next decade churning out pictures to pay off the debts the $28m flop left him with, One From the Heart is one of those films I really want to like – to love, even – but which just won't let me. Visually it's a triumph, but the Tom Waits suicide blues score rarely works as a screen musical and as a human drama its kept firmly on the ground by the fact these characters just aren't likable. Coppola seems more interested in his lavish studio settings than what's happening in them, with even the most mundane sequences shot like an imaginatively staged theatrical musical with intricate shifts of lighting and colour, dissolving walls and neon dreams. But perhaps the biggest problem of all is that Coppola doesn't seem to have made this film for the audience but for himself, and so it probably never connects with anyone not on his personal wavelength. The trailers give away a big part of the problem: the 1982 release stresses the Godfather and Apocalypse Now as evidence of Coppola's genius while the 2003 reissue trailer runs off a list of critical superlatives in a sternly unemotional voice: joy isn't on the menu here.<br /><br />That the story is so simple as to be almost invisible – a couple split up over the 4th July weekend and become involved with new partners – needn't be a problem: after all, three sailors on furlough looking for Miss Turnstiles or a backwoodsman convincing his six bachelors to kidnap six local girls to marry aren't exactly complex. With good casting, good writing and good musical numbers, there's no real reason it shouldn't work. Unfortunately it doesn't get them. The argument that kicks off the split is atrociously written and just as badly acted – you've seen more vicious spats on The Dick Van Dyke Show – and because we never buy it for a moment the film is handicapped almost from the start. The fact that either lead can carry a movie, is even more of a problem, leaving you with a film without any heart at its centre: Raul Julia is the only member of the cast who really shines, and he probably has the least screen time of anyone in the picture. The constant crosscutting doesn't help, with Coppola cutting away as soon as one scene starts to gel to focus on an awkward one that never does. Despite input from Gene Kelly (barely noticeable) and Michael Powell (visually very noticeable), it's not even quite a musical – aside from a couple of fantasy numbers it opts Yentl-like to keep the singing as an invisible chorus/underscore not so much commenting as setting the melancholy tone that counterpoints the bright, garish visuals. The film's one promising musical number, where Julia's serenade of Teri Garr spills out onto the streets of Las Vegas, is never allowed to play uninterrupted without meandering shots of Frederic Forrest wandering through the neon streets.<br /><br />Coppola's 2003 re-edit of the film does nothing to improve matters. The revised opening is a little smoother but at the expense of Forrest's character, removing all remaining traces of colour to make him even more of a boring homebody. It's an excellent DVD, however, with everything you could want to know and more and offering some fairly frank insights into the failure of Coppola's attempt to ally the expertise of the old studio contract system with the modern advances of electronic cinema, not to mention the constant financing problems. It's just a shame that the film itself is so damn hard to love.