Peter Bogdanovich directs "Paper Moon", a film which, like his 1971 flick "The Last Picture Show", works best as both an evocation of the past and a love-letter to John Ford. The film's cinematography, by Laszlo Kovac, dazzles.
The plot: Ryan O'Neal plays a con artist struggling to make a living in rural Kansas (and Missouri) during the Great Depression. He meets a tough, adaptable little girl, played by Tatum O'Neal, who may or may not be his illegitimate daughter. The bickering duo go on the road together, conning anyone they can out of easy money.
The film's a nice little adventure, bouncy, funny, swift and pleasing, but one can't escape how lightweight it all is. Bogdanovich's film is less about an era than it is a cosy resurrection of an era's cinematic tropes and artifacts, the director lingering on period details with the loving gaze of an antique salesman.
Still, the film never pretends to be anything other than a comedy, Bogdanovich does acknowledge the presence and subjugation of blacks (something which most of the early Great Depression films – think Chaplin's Tramp movies – didn't do) and he captures the adaptability, intuitiveness and resourcefulness people of the era needed in order to stay afloat. The film's unresolved relationship between Ryan and Tatum is also interesting: she's his offspring in real life, but are they related in the film? Is his fondness for her paternal or selfishly pragmatic? Is their relationship designed to say something about the era (hard times makes everyone blood?)?
The film was part of a wave of gambling and con-man movies, all of which were released in the early 1970s ("Paper Moon", "California Split", "Thieves Like Us", "Bad Company", "Hard Times", "The Sting" etc). These films pushed Hollywood's previous huckster wave ("Butch Cassidy", "The Hustler", "Get To Know Your Rabbit", "The Cincinnati Kid") into more cynical, detached territory. To stay alive, they said, one has to be above morality, have no moral scruples, and be willing to cheat. The heroes of these films are not beaten, and do not go out in the previous decades' blazes of glory, but instead continue onwards in their scheming, which is often shown to be hollow and soul destroying. It's a more inward form of self destruction best seen in Altman's films of this era, which charter the decade's shift from anger and outrage to apathy and selfishness; everyone else does it, so I'll suck it up and play the game as well. This wave ended with the dethroning of Richard Nixon in 1974. With the release of "Jaws" in 75, the zeitgeist changed completely. Everyone was now a shark and nobody knew it.
8.5/10 – Worth one viewing.
