Peter Bogdanovich (1973)

I’d seen Paper Moon on its original release but never since.   It’s interesting, at this distance in time, to compare it with Pennies from Heaven, first screened by the BBC five years later in 1978.  The optimism of Depression-era popular songs is, of course, crucial to the whole conception of Dennis Potter’s drama:  his characters mime to 1930s recordings as an expression of their hopes and yearnings; his protagonist Arthur Parker is a travelling sheet music salesman.  Peter Bogdanovich isn’t attempting to give the songs on the soundtrack of his movie – the title number (which plays over the opening credits), ‘Sunnyside Up’, ‘I Found a Million Dollar Baby’, ‘Let’s Have Another Cup of Coffee’ – the same centrality.  Even so, it’s hard not to find Bogdanovich’s use of these numbers superficial – they’re merely charming, part of the film’s texture of vague nostalgia for radio days and the accoutrements of thirties American cinema.   And this lightweight quality isn’t just a consequence of watching Paper Moon in the light of Pennies from Heaven – it’s at odds too with the beautiful starkness of Laszlo Kovacs’ black-and-white images of Kansas landscapes and townscapes in a time of great poverty. The contradiction between the film’s visual depth and its other elements doesn’t feel intentional.

Paper Moon, adapted by Alvin Sargent from a 1971 novel Addie Pray by Joe David Brown, is about the partnership, professional and emotional, of the thirtyish con man Moses Pray and a young girl called Addie Loggins.  She may or may not be his illegitimate daughter.  Addie’s mother has died.  Mose turns up at the graveside and he finds himself driving the girl from Kansas to live with her aunt in Missouri.  Addie turns out to have more aptitude than Mose for swindling.  (We assume that even his name is false:  his main line in grifting is selling bibles to widows, telling them their recently deceased husbands ordered the good books for their dear wives just before they died.)  Paper Moon is famous largely because Mose and Addie are played by Ryan O’Neal and his daughter Tatum, in her film debut and in the role that made her the youngest-ever winner of a competitive Academy Award (a record she still holds).   And she is marvellous – a natural in every sense, with great comic timing.  Ryan O’Neal has to work much harder to be funny and even harder to convince as a loser (he doesn’t really succeed).  Still, he’s a likeable actor and the hard work is part of what makes him all the more likeable here.

Peter Bogdanovich directs Tatum O’Neal with great skill, bringing out the pathos in the character of Addie without Tatum’s seeming to realise she’s expressing it.  There are other good people in Paper Moon – John Hillerman as a deputy sheriff and his bootlegger identical twin brother and, especially, Madeline Kahn as Trixie Delight, the shopsoiled ‘artiste’ who, with her bossed-about black maid Imogene  (P J Johnson), briefly hitches up with Mose, until Addie contrives to get rid of her.  But Kahn is almost too strong for her insubstantial role.  Insubstantial is the word for Paper Moon as a whole, in spite of the talented cast, the well-written dialogue, the excellent cinematography and the film’s undoubted charm.   Once Mose and Addie have stopped scrapping and grown closer, the movie loses its motive force and turns episodic.  Each episode – Addie’s scheme to turn Mose off Trixie, the bootleg whisky bit – goes on a bit too long.   With Randy Quaid as a menacing hayseed.

11 April 2011