Depression Diorama

By JAY COCKS

PAPER MOON

Directed by PETER BOGDANOVICH Screenplay by ALVIN SARGENT

Peter Bogdanovich is a film maker with talent enough to make anyone regret what he does not do with it. Targets (1968), like most first films, was rough and not fully assimilated, but for all its crudity it had a vigor and invention that Bogdanovich has not approached since. Its long climactic scene, involving a schizophrenic sniper picking off the patrons of a drive-in theater, was made with the kind of virtuosity that promised an audacious new director. With each subsequent film, the memory of Targets--as well as its promise--grows dimmer.

Starting with The Last Picture Show, Bogdanovich has become more detached from his work, less committed and more casually manipulative. Like Picture Show, like last year's What's Up, Doc?, his latest effort, Paper Moon, is ruthlessly mechanical, a frivolous and cursory piece of work that never even challenges, much less engages, its director's best abilities. The film has no perceptible feeling of any kind.

It is very fussy about period detail, and goes to some length to evoke the dim days of Depression America, while just about everything else is left to slide.

The music (including Ozzie Nelson and his orchestra and Tommy Dorsey), the radio programs (Fibber McGee, Jack Benny) are carefully chosen, as if reality could be totally re-created out of air waves. Billboards, movie marquees, houses, cars, clothes--all are so fastidiously arranged that the movie begins to look like an elaborately decorated show window, or a diorama for a contemporary American history class. It is also just about as moving. As a young critic, Bogdanovich paid lavish tribute to such American masters as John Ford and Howard Hawks. But the harder Bogdanovich strains after emulation, the more it eludes him. Paper Moon has less relation to the kind of personal expression he so admired in Ford, Hawks, Welles and Lubitsch than to the sort of glossy, empty big-studio product he used to despise.

The movie is based--rather inadequately, it would appear--on a novel by Joe David Brown called Addie Pray.

In the hands of Bogdanovich and his scenarist, the material is gutted of charm. It becomes a sort of attenuated general-store yarn about a bunko artist named Moses Pray (Ryan O'Neal) and a nine-year-old girl, Addie (played by O'Neal's daughter Tatum), who team up to fleece the citizens of Kansas and Missouri. The relationship between the older man and the girl, who may or may not be father and daughter, is grudgingly respectful and guardedly affectionate. They start off trying to fox and swindle each other, and the girl actually runs an elaborate scheme to get Moses out of the clutches of a carny golddigger called Trixie Delight (Madeline Kahn).

It is all supposed to be very folksy and good-natured and wise. But neither Bogdanovich nor Scenarist Alvin Sargent (Love and Pain and the Whole Damn Thing) seems to understand that the tutoring Moses gives Addie is not so much sentimental education as congenial corruption. We are supposed to smile and blink back a tear when Addie decides she would rather remain with Moses, bilking the suckers, than settle down to a stifling middle-class life.

It is a choice between conventional suffocation and smiling criminality, which is to say it is no choice at all. Both alternatives are spurious, both dead ends, although Bogdanovich and Sargent are too busy plucking away at the heart strings to pay attention to such details.

Ryan O'Neal, a stolid leading man, works up a sweat over the few bits of character that he is given to act. Despite a mustache and a rumpled pin stripe, he still looks like the surfer king.

His daughter Tatum (TIME, May 21) is peppy, coarse, funny as Addie, sort of a cyanide Shirley Temple. She is also a little too calculating, a little too coyly self-conscious about being gruff and cute. Madeline Kahn (O'Neal's hapless fiancee in What's Up, Doc?) makes a smashingly dippy Trixie, and Burton Gilliam is so unctuous as a desk clerk named Floyd that he looks as if he showered with a grease gun. Laszlo Kovacs shot the film in muted black and white, a little reminiscent of Gregg Toland's photography in Ford's The Grapes of Wrath. Comparisons end there.

Jay Cocks

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