Tonight for Sure (1961) Reviews

Every filmmaker has to start somewhere, and in 1961, years before making The Godfather, The Conversation, or Apocalypse Now, Francis Ford Coppola was a UCLA film student looking to get his foot in the door. He took footage from a short nudie film he'd made called The Peeper, added material from an unfinished Western set in a nudist colony, and threw in some sequences filmed by Jack Hill. The result was Tonight For Sure, a nudie-cutie comedy about a pair of hypocritical blue-noses who want to shut down a local burlesque house, even though they're secret smut enthusiasts. Many scenes are presented as dreams or flashbacks in order to give the disparate sequences a sense of continuity. The film features a score by Carmine Coppola, Francis' father, who also wrote music for many of his later films; the cast features Playboy model Virginia Gordon. ~ Mark Deming, Rovi