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“Paper Moon” is so unlike the director’s previous three movies – the first, a taut thriller about a madman who inexplicably begins murdering strangers on the street, another about the sexual exploits of small town Texas, and the last a screwball comedy worthy of the great Hawksian classics. Such a grand exchange of genres is not a normal practice for most mainstream directors, and here Bogdanovich even manages to achieve a depression-era/ comedy/drama/roadpicture altogether in the same film. Not exactly a typical genre to pick, especially when the movie’s main character is a ten-year-old girl. That girl is Tatum O’Neal, in what was to be an Oscar winning performance – and deservedly so – as the recently orphaned Addie, who is taken across the country by a friend of the family to live with long lost relatives. That family ‘friend’ just happens to be Moses Pray (who just happens to be the Tatum’s real-life father Ryan O’Neal) a shifty traveling Bible salesman, who capitalizes on recently widowed women to sell his overpriced bibles.

They set off across the US and pull a few harmless scams out of honest hardworking Americans, and a few satisfying ones on well-to-do frivolous suckers. The film brilliantly sidesteps becoming overly corny or cute when dealing with the tricky comedy-seriousness of Addie’s character, while also sustaining our interest and identification with it’s two morally unsavory lead characters. Most of this film’s success rides on the young shoulders of Tatum O’Neal as she ends up carrying us through the second act of the movie almost single handedly. The Moses (Addie adorably calls him ‘Moze’) character is fairly underdeveloped emotionally and we are forced (through Bogdanovich’s subtle use of subjective camera techniques) to identify solely with the young girl. All credit goes to O’Neal the younger for her constantly enjoyable originality.

Long sequences with uninterrupted takes are something of a tradition with a Bogdanovich film (a talent he acquired from the great filmmakers of the past whom he noticed only cut when absolutely necessary) and “Paper Moon” follows suit. Several scenes play on for nearly an entire reel as the young girl and her assumed father bicker together in the car about the town where they will pull their next scam. Handling this type of fast-paced overlapping dialogue is no easy task (even tougher when a pre-adolescent is driving the scene) and the director takes an enormous risk in not breaking the scene up with cuts. His gamble pays off however, as do several other long uninterrupted sequences, and serve the film with a verisimilitude; an unobtrusive documentary-style reality which would have been lost through conventional cutting techniques.

Another way the film achieves its feeling of reality is through its interesting lack of music. The only music heard through the entire film comes when someone is listening to a radio. This is a rather daring way to go about making a movie; almost every Hollywood picture has its own separately composed score. Therefore an audience is so prescribed to hearing some outside source of music that it is more noticeable not to have a score at all. It would have been difficult for a composer to write a score for “Paper Moon” which didn’t lend the movie another layer of sentimentality – a layer which, no matter how thin, may have been disastrous - and Bogdanovich surely realized the movie was able to work solely on its images and dialogue, and any extra help would cause actually cause a loss in impact.

Addie is central to keeping Moze in line. She doesn’t want Trixie (an acid-tongued prostitute Moze falls in love with – played hilariously by Madeleine Kahn) to intrude on the fun she was having when it was just “her and Moze” so she sabotages their romance by luring Trixie back to her whoring ways. She looks out for Moze - who is far more naďve, and truly the child of the two - but still wants to feel like someone is looking out for her. Her brash and crusty exterior is a merely a front she displays to most people, it is only with Moze that she really feels the desire to shed her façade and tell him she cares about him. That is the basis of their relationship – they need each other. Moze needs Addie to look out for him, and Addie needs Moze to support her, and make her feel loved. They compliment each other, without ever becoming gushy, and in the end they finally come to that realization, which is just understated enough to bring equal feelings of satisfaction and poignancy.

Helping along this quirky little road trip of a movie are several key people who deserve mention. The first is Polly Platt, a familiar name to anyone familiar with Bogdanovich as the two were married at the time of “Paper Moon”, and would soon be divorced due to Peter’s affair with “Last Picture Show” star Cybill Shepherd. Her role as production designer on this and her husband’s previous three movies is hugely important to the individual visual feel each film possesses. It’s no easy task to recreate the past, and Platt’s impressive juggling of both stark empty rooms and sets cluttered full of endless bric-a-brac is to be duly noted for how well it suits the emotional needs of the story.

Another person of note is Laszlo Kovaks, the film’s cinematographer. Kovacs lensed some of the best films of the American “New Wave” directors (including collaborations with Bogdanovich on the earlier “Targets”, “What’s Up Doc”, and later with “At Long Last Love”, “Nickelodeon”, and “Mask”), with his work on “Paper Moon” being especially notable for its depth-of-field (a Bogdanovich tendency) and its contrast-laden black and white. His complex compositions are on best display during an early scene in a train station in which the frame consists of the back of ticket vendors head in a close-up on the left, Ryan O’Neal over his shoulder in a medium shot in the middle, and Tatum O’Neal standing alone some 50 feet away in the on the far right of frame. Each person is in perfect focus and is beautifully lit by the intense sunlight – Gregg Toland would have enjoyed Kovacs work on this film to be sure.

Foolish critics often branded Peter Bogdanovich as being a copycat - someone who merely ran down the list of his favorite directors and copied their greatest movies. He proved easily that he could touch audiences as well as anybody with his first three big budget movies, but Bogdanovich never did anything to help dissuade his indictment as Hollywood star-chaser; he constantly name-dropped high profile directors with whom he shared very friendly relationships. Evidenced in a story Bogdanovich often told about the titling of “Paper Moon”; apparently he had come across a song titled Paper Moon while doing research for the film and called up Orson Welles (who was in Europe) asking him what he thought of this as a possible title for the story – Orson’s typically memorable reply: “That title is so good, you shouldn’t even make a movie, just release the title!” The title and the movie proved to be a huge success – something Bogdanovich would see little of in the next ten years – and can’t be denounced as being a ‘stolen’ picture in any regard: this is solely a Peter Bogdanovich effort.

Bogdanovich has a very sure handed approach to sentimentality. The endings to both “The Last Picture Show” and “Mask”, are fantastically emotional and, had the arc of each film been handled less subtly, would have been muted and unsatisfactory. "Paper Moon" ends exactly the way we want it, Moze and Addie reunited, as they should be, and off to stir up their own personal brand of goofy trouble someplace else. We have a less emotional climax, but an extremely satisfying one, as we believe that Addie has found someone to be her father, and Moze has found someone to keep him from becoming too sleazy or to be taken advantage of again.

Since “Paper Moon”, Peter Bogdanovich hasn’t had too much commercial success. Other than “Mask” in 1985, he’s barely made a film that has made its money back at the box office. Though he has directed many quality films since 1973, the lack of receipts at the ticket booths has hampered his ability to make Hollywood movies, and forced the director into doing a lot of TV productions during the 1990’s. With the DVD revolution helping to revive lost classics like “Paper Moon”, hopefully the Bogdanovich name will become known again and respected for the type of quality pictures he is capable of.

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originally posted: 09/13/04 03:45:05
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