Paper Moon (1973)

          When movie stars invite their children to act with them, the results usually range from embarrassing to forgettable—but every so often, something like Paper Moon happens. Featuring a spectacular debut performance by preteen Tatum O’Neal and a charmingly gruff star turn by her famous father, Ryan O’Neal, the movie both satisfies and undercuts audience expectations of what might occur when real-life relatives perform together onscreen. The movie has heart, but more importantly, it has edge—since many of the best scenes in Paper Moon feature the O’Neals sparring with each other, it’s impossible to mistake the picture for a softhearted love letter from a father to a daughter. Somehow, producer-director Peter Bogdanovich sensed a vein of natural conflict in the dynamic between the O’Neals, and then the filmmaker channeled that conflict into the fictional relationship of a 1930s con man and a girl who may or may not be his daughter.

          Better still, Bogdanovich ensured that the sparks flying between the O’Neals were only part of the movie’s appeal. In addition to the memorable father-daughter acting, Paper Moon features crisp storytelling, sparkling dialogue, stunning black-and-white cinematography, and vivacious supporting performances. It’s a near-masterpiece that only happens to contain effective stunt casting.

          Masterfully adapted by Alvin Sargent from a novel by Joe David Brown, Paper Moon takes place during the Depression, hence Bogdanovich’s choice to present the story with monochromatic visuals that evoke the photography of the Depression era. Flimflam artist Moses Pray (Ryan O’Neal) attends the funeral of a former lover, where he meets scrappy nine-year-old Addie Loggins (Tatum O’Neal), whom he realizes might be his daughter. Through delightfully contrived circumstances—the plot comes together with Swiss-watch precision that echoes Moses’ elaborate scams—Addie pressures Moses into taking her along for a lengthy auto journey. A quick study, Addie finds a role for herself in Moses’ principal scheme of selling personalized Bibles to the widows of recently deceased men, so the main characters’ natural instinct for bonding gets sublimated into the formation of a criminal enterprise.

          Bogdanovich milks this perverse premise for all it’s worth, opting for the rich drama of betrayals, disappointments, and double-crosses instead of trying for easy sentimentality. Yet woven into nearly every scene of the movie is deftly crafted humor, an element maximized by the impeccable comic timing of Bogdanovich’s actors. In fact, one of the juiciest subplots involves Moses’ relationship with a woman of ill repute named Trixie Delight, played by the magnificent comedienne Madeline Kahn, who made her big-screen debut in Bogdanovich’s hit farce What’s Up Doc? (1972). Demonstrating the skill of the film’s narrative construction, the speed with which Moses throws over Addie in order to court Trixie reveals the limitations of Moses’ integrity and the sad fate awaiting Addie unless Moses grows a conscience.

          While sensitive character work is ultimately what makes Paper Moon meaningful, the style is what makes the movie sing. Working with cinematographer Lászlo Kovács, Bogdanovich creates intimate textures throughout Paper Moon, especially during long takes that the director fills with rat-a-tat dialogue. Like the best of Bogdanovich’s early movies, Paper Moon feels handcrafted, with equal care given to characterization, emotion, mood, pace, and tone.

          As such, if there’s a minor complaint that one could make about Paper Moon, it’s that Bogdanovich seems just as concerned with announcing his incandescent talent as he is in telling the story. But then again, since Paper Moon was made when the very gifted director was at the height of his powers, it’s hard to blame him for showboating. And since the film earned an Academy Award for Tatum O’Neal (making her the youngest-ever winner of a competitive acting Oscar), as well as a nomination for screenwriter Sargent, the director’s grandstanding clearly did not obscure the remarkable contributions of his collaborators.

Paper Moon: RIGHT ON

New York, New York (1977)

          A generous reading of Martin Scorsese’s quasi-musical, New York, New York, would situate the film as a grand attempt to mesh Old Hollywood artifice with New Hollywood realism. And, indeed, the juxtaposition of intense Method acting with soundstage fakery gives New York, New York a unique flavor. However, even though the film’s look is exquisite—Scorsese and cinematographer Laszlo Kovacs create dazzling effects with dense compositions and elegant camera movement—the project’s aesthetic value is undermined by the trite narrative and the ridiculous running time (nearly three hours).

          A period piece that begins in the mid-1940s and stretches into the ’50s, New York, New York presents an uninteresting riff on the oft-filmed A Star is Born formula. Sax player Jimmy Doyle (Robert De Niro) is an egomaniacal, insecure, sexist hothead with the morals of a snake. His on-again/off-again lover, Francine Evans (Liza Minnelli), wobbles between being a doormat and being a shrew during her long career as a singer. As per the A Star is Born playbook, Jimmy helps Francine achieve fame but then resents her success, and his jealousy (combined with his self-destructive behavior) drives them apart. Watching an asshole abuse an enabler doesn’t make for the most enjoyable experience. Worse, the film is subplot-averse; although minor characters including an agent (Lionel Stander), a bandleader (Barry Priums), and a chanteuse (Mary Kay Place) all get decent amounts of screen time, these characters exist only to accentuate Jimmy, Francine, or both.

          Scorsese’s fidelity to such pet themes as the animalistic nature of overachieving men is admirable, after a fashion, but the inescapable question is why Scorsese thought the world needed a bummer musical done in the candy-colored style of a World War II-era MGM extravaganza. Plus, at times, it seems Scorsese would have preferred making a straight-up song-and-dance epic. In a long sequence that was cut from the original release but restored for reissues, Francine toplines a movie-within-a-movie-within-a-movie (she plays a character who’s playing a third character). The sequence, built around the song “Happy Endings,” has the over-the-top production design and boisterous vocalizing one normally associates with the work Minnelli’s father, director Vincente Minnelli, did with the actress’ mother, showbiz legend Judy Garland. What this homage has to do with New York, New York’s street-level story of Jimmy’s love life is anyone’s guess.

          Broadway tunesmiths John Kander and Fred Ebb created a number of original songs for this project, the most famous of which is the title track (“Theme from New York, New York”), but there’s a fundamental imbalance stemming from the fact that only one of the protagonists sings. Whenever Minnelli bursts into song while De Niro fakes playing the sax, she overwhelms the movie. That suits the A Star is Born formula, of course, but it represents yet another manner in which New York, New York feels contrived and inorganic. Often (rightfully) cited as a prime example of auteur-era hubris, since Scorsese went apeshit with grandiose sets and hordes of extras while creating easily half the film’s scenes, New York, New York isn’t an outright disaster, simply because the technical aspects are impeccable. That said, the movie’s absurd scope bludgeons the story’s meager virtues to a degree that’s almost laughable, and De Niro’s characterization is so repellent that the performance wears out its welcome far before New York, New York’s endless 163 minutes have unspooled.

New York, New York: FUNKY

The Last Movie (1971)

          One of the most notorious auteur misfires of the ’70s, this misbegotten mind-fuck was Dennis Hopper’s follow-up to Easy Rider (1969), the surprise blockbuster that not only transformed Hopper from a journeyman actor to an A-list director but also established him, for a brief time, as a leading voice of the counterculture. Alas, Hopper’s poor choices as an actor, co-writer, and director turned The Last Movie into a metaphor representing the way some people, Hopper included, fell victim to the excesses of the drug era. In trying to escape the constraints associated with conventional cinema, Hopper created a maddening hodgepodge of self-indulgent nonsense and uninteresting experimentation.

          Hopper stars as Kansas, the horse wrangler for a Hollywood film crew that’s shooting on location in Peru. After a fatal on-set accident, Kansas drops out of his Hollywood lifestyle to start over in South America, hooking up with a sexy local girl (Stella Garcia) and scheming with a fellow U.S. expat (Don Gordon) to get rich off a gold mine. Kansas also romances a beautiful upper-crust American (Julie Adams), with whom he engages in gentle sadomasochism, and he gets roped into a bizarre situation involving Peruvian villagers who are “shooting” their own movie using primitive mock-up cameras and microphones made from scrap metal and sticks. (One of The Last Movie’s myriad pretentious allusions is that the “fake” film crew is making more authentic art than the “real” film crew.)

          Simply listing the trippy flourishes in The Last Movie would take an entire website, so a few telling examples should suffice. Early in the picture, a Hollywood starlet (played by Hopper’s then-girlfriend, former Mamas and the Papas singer Michelle Phillips) conducts a ritual during which she pierces a Peruvian woman’s ear with a large pin while people stand around the scene wearing creepy masks and chanting. Later, Kansas leads a group of Americans to a whorehouse, where they watch a grimy girl-on-girl floor show; this inexplicably drives Kansas into such a rage that he ends up slapping around his long-suffering female companion. And we haven’t even gotten to the weird one-shot bits that are periodically inserted into the narrative. At one point, Kansas leans back while a woman shoots breast milk from her nipple to his face. Elsewhere, while getting his hair trimmed, Kansas shares the following random remark: “I never jerked off a horse before.” Good to know.

          The whole movie culminates with a befuddling barrage of images, including scenes of Kansas getting beaten by members of the “fake” film crew, as if the Hollywood runaway is some sort of martyr for art. It’s all very deliberately weird. During the final stretch, for instance, Hopper cuts to silly things like “scene missing” placeholders and outtakes of actors consulting their scripts. The idea, presumably, was to deconstruct Hollywood filmmaking so that a new art form could emerge from the ruins, but Hopper missed the mark in every way. That said, it’s worth noting that Hopper brought interesting friends along for the ride. Cinematographer László Kovács, who also shot Easy Rider, does what he can to infuse Hopper’s scattershot frames with artistry, and the cast includes ’70s cult-cinema stalwart Severn Darden (who does a musical number!) as well as maverick B-movie director Samuel Fuller, who plays a version of himself during the scenes depicting the making of the Hollywood movie.

The Last Movie: FREAKY

Paradise Alley (1978)

          While Paradise Alley is unmistakably a major ego trip for Sylvester Stallone—he wrote, directed, and stars in the picture, and he even (over)sings the theme song—his onscreen presence is more muted than one might expect, given the circumstances. A cornball ensemble piece about three Italian-American brothers living in Hell’s Kitchen circa the late ’40s, the film as much a showcase for costars Armand Assante and Lee Canalito as it is for Stallone. In fact, Canalito gets the showiest part because he spends much of the movie in a wrestling ring, playing the same sort of undereducated underdog that Stallone did in Rocky (1976) and its endless sequels. Yet if Stallone demonstrated restraint by ensuring that Paradise Alley wasn’t entirely about his character, that’s the only restraint he demonstrated—in every other regard, Paradise Alley is florid, overwrought, and schmaltzy.

          Our hero, Cosmo Carboni (Stallone), is a street hustler who anachronistically wears long hair and an earring while he pulls one scheme after another because he doesn’t want to work for a living. His brother Victor (Canalito) is a gentle giant who hauls ice up apartment-building stairs for a living—which means that, of course, we get an epic, sweaty scene of Victor lugging ice, only to have it fall down and shatter (in slow motion). Their other sibling, Lenny (Assante), is a haunted war veteran with a limp who works as an undertaker. Because, you see, he’s dead inside. Subtlety, thy name is not Stallone. As the turgid narrative unfolds, Cosmo courts Lenny’s ex, dancehall girl Annie (Anne Archer), and Cosmo gets into hassles with local mobster Stitch (Kevin Conway, giving the film’s most cartoonish performance). Eventually—which is to say, halfway through the movie, once Stallone remembers to generate a plot—Cosmo asks Victor to become a wrestler so the family can get rich. Inexplicably, this decision transforms Lenny into an avaricious prick, allowing Stallone to twist the story so his character can grow a conscience. 

          After several diverting but pointless sequences—Lenny decides he wants Annie back, Cosmo bonds with a broken-down wrestler (Frank McRae), and so on—the movie climaxes in an interminable wrestling match that is set, for no reason except that Stallone wanted a visual flourish, during a rainstorm. Cue repetitive shots of Canalito and his sparring partner flipping each other into puddles for maximum slow-mo splashing! The great cinematographer László Kovács shoots the hell out of Stallone’s absurd scenes, making the movie look better than it deserves, and the acting is so flamboyant that many scenes have energy. However, Paradise Alley is both clichéd and confusing—it’s as if Stallone couldn’t decide which old movies he wanted to pillage, so he copped something from all of them. Combined with the excessive storytelling style, the haphazard cribbing from vintage cinema turns Paradise Alley into an unappealing jumble.

Paradise Alley: LAME

Baby Blue Marine (1976)

          Even though Baby Blue Marine tries to accomplish too much, resulting in narrative muddiness, every quality to which the movie aspires is commendable. Set during World War II, the picture follows the exploits of Marion (Jan-Michael Vincent), a gung-ho youth who gets kicked out of the Marines during basic training for failing to meet basic proficiency requirements. (Never mind that Vincent is in extraordinary shape, or that his character is shown to possess bravery, intelligence, and leadership—not exactly the traits of a likely washout.) Making his way home from boot camp to St. Louis, while wearing the demeaning “baby blue” uniform of a reject, Marion gets assaulted by a combat veteran (Richard Gere) who steals Marion’s clothing as a ruse for escaping the military. (Again, never mind that Gere’s character could simply have bought street clothes.) Now dressed as a decorated soldier, Marion hitchhikes toward a small town in the Northwest, where he’s taken in by sweet-natured teen waitress Rose (Glynnis O’Connor) and her family. Eventually, Marion gets called into action when three young Japanese-Americans escape from an internment camp, so Marion—oh, the irony!—becomes the voice of pacifism when hotheads seek to hunt down the escapees.

          TV-trained writer Stanford Whitmore’s script is contrived but offbeat, while director John Hancock’s storytelling is blunt and mechanical, but Baby Blue Marine means well. Themes of courage, decency, and humanism are always welcome, and everyone learns a tidy little lesson at the end of the picture, Afterschool Special-style. Plus, the movie looks much better than it should, because the great cinematographer László Kovács fills Hancock’s bland frames with nuanced lighting. The acting is generally underwhelming, with Vincent going for a babe-in-the-woods dreaminess that makes him seem detached during many scenes; meanwhile, supporting players including Dana Elcar, Katherine Helmond, and Burt Remsen are hamstrung by trite dialogue. (O’Connor comes across as sweet and warm, but her work is not especially memorable.) However, Bruno Kirby makes a strong impression in the opening scenes as one of Marion’s fellow ne’er-do-well recruits, and Art Lund provides gravitas as a small-town dad mourning the battlefield death of his son.

Baby Blue Marine: FUNKY

A Reflection of Fear (1973)

          There are a number of provocative ideas buried inside the perverse thriller A Reflection of Fear, and the picture also boasts a gorgeous surface, thanks to luminous photography by László Kovács. So, even though the movie is a total jumble from a narrative perspective, it offers many textural pleasures. The story centers around Marguerite (Sondra Locke), a disturbed 16-year-old girl who lives in luxurious isolation with her wealthy mother (Mary Ure) and grandmother (Signe Hasso) on a sprawling private estate. Marguerite’s room is crowded with dolls whom she believes are alive, and she’s obsessed with horticulture; in other words, the movie does everything but brand the word “psycho” across her forehead.

          Marguerite’s absentee father, Michael (Robert Shaw), shows up for a visit one summer because he wants a divorce from Marguerite’s mother so he can marry his girlfriend, Anne (Sally Kellerman). When Michael finally meets the daughter he’s never known, he becomes worried about her oddball nature and decides to rescue her from the grips of her family. Before he can do so, someone murders Mom and Grandma. In the aftermath, a local cop (Mitchell Ryan) tells Michael and Anne not to leave town, so the lovers move into the estate. As weird goings-on continue, Marguerite develops a quasi-incestuous obsession with her father, which understandably displeases long-suffering Anne. And so it goes as the movie spirals toward a psychosexual “twist” ending that’s neither satisfying nor surprising.

          Based on a novel by Stanton Forbes, the script for A Reflection of Fear vacillates awkwardly between intimate psychological tension and full-on horror jolts, so the tone is as disjointed as the story is murky. Most of the actors underplay their scenes, as if they’re not sure which way to take the material, but Locke eschews subtlety by complementing her peculiar appearance (she’s one of the palest people ever committed to film) with a breathy little-girl vocal delivery. It’s either an awful performance, if the goal was to be taken seriously, or an effective one, if the goal was merely to seem weird.

           Cinematographer-turned-director William A. Fraker, stumbling after his promising directorial debut Monte Walsh (1970), can’t pull the story together, but he does a fantastic job creating atmosphere with haze filters, ornate production design, and smoked sets. A Reflection of Fear isn’t particularly frightening, but it’s easily one of the best-looking movies of its type, and some viewers will find the picture’s strange mood and enigmatic dramaturgy mesmerizing. (Available through Columbia Screen Classics via WarnerArchive.com)

A Reflection of Fear: FUNKY

Harry and Walter Go to New York (1976)

          Despite a fantastic cast, the would-be farce Harry and Walter Go to New York falls flat because only a handful of the movie’s myriad one-liners, sight gags, and slapstick routines actually elicit laughter. A failed attempt to blend the Vaudevillian style of silent-era comedy with the elaborate con-man plotting of The Sting (1973), the ineptly written but lavishly produced picture follows a pair of nincompoop 19th-century crooks who fall into the orbit of a world-famous master criminal, then try to rob a bank before the criminal gets there first.
          James Caan and Elliot Gould play Harry and Walter, small-time robbers who get caught picking pockets during one of their low-rent song-and-dance routines. Meanwhile, gentleman thief Adam Worth (Michael Caine) gets tossed into the same jail as our heroes, but Adam’s so rich that he gets a private cell appointed with velvet curtains and silver table settings. Harry and Walter discover—and accidentally destroy—Adam’s prized blueprints for an ambitious bank job, then escape and get enmeshed with activist reporter Lissa Chestnut (Diane Keaton). Through convoluted circumstances, Harry, Walter, and Lissa end up trying to rob the bank the same night as Adam’s gang, leading to silliness like Harry and Walter stalling for time with an improvised musical number.

          As photographed in a nostalgic glow by Laszlo Kovacs, Harry and Walter looks great, and the leads are complemented by a gaggle of ace supporting players, including Val Avery, Ted Cassidy, Charles Durning, Jack Gilford, Carol Kane, Lesley Ann Warren, and Burt Young. Unfortunately, the material just isn’t there. The characters are underdeveloped, the comedic situations don’t percolate, the dialogue doesn’t sparkle, and the narrative conceit that the idiotic Harry and Walter keep stumbling into good fortune feels like a cheat. Still, it’s impossible not to find commendable elements with this much talent involved, and those high points range from the intentionally awful musical passages featuring Caan and Gould to Caine’s peerless delivery of sardonic dialogue. Providing one of the movie’s few real laughs, he dismisses the heroes by explaining that “They’re not oafs—they would require practice to become oafs.”

Harry and Walter Go to New York: FUNKY

Nickelodeon (1976)

          The notorious flop that finally knocked director Peter Bogdanovich off the Hollywood A-list after a precipitous slide, Nickelodeon is a fascinating movie unfairly relegated to obscurity. In the overstuffed narrative, Ryan O’Neal and Burt Reynolds play early-20th-century ne’er-do-wells who stumble into cinema careers when they encounter a disreputable producer (Brian Keith); a romantic triangle then emerges because O’Neal and Reynolds are both infatuated with the beautiful klutz (Jane Hitchcock) who keeps crossing their respective paths. Eventually, O’Neal becomes a director and Reynolds becomes his long-suffering leading man, so they wend their way through calamitous filmmaking experiences accompanied by a motley crew of actors and technicians (played by a vibrant ensemble including George Gaynes, Tatum O’Neal, John Ritter, and Stella Stevens).

          In a rare case of a movie being too meticulously scripted for its own good, Nickelodeon smothers a slight premise with painstaking detail, since each new plot development is dramatized at considerable length; accordingly, the movie wavers between happy-go-lucky farce and romantic dramedy as Bogdanovich endeavors to include every colorful episode he can imagine, whether the episodes advance the narrative or not. Bogdanovich, a scholarly cinephile who interviewed many of the great studio-era directors, rewrote W.D. Richter’s original script to include fictionalized anecdotes drawn from the life experiences of real-life cinematic pioneers, and the all-business soberness of Bogdanovich’s attempt to re-create the madcap milieu of silent-era comedy undercuts the story’s frothy appeal.

          Yet even with these storytelling excesses (and an overreliance on slapstick gags like breakaway walls and pratfalls), there’s a lot of gorgeous filmmaking on display in Nickelodeon. Laszlo Kovacs’ photography is elegant, the craftsmanship of the sight gags is impressive, and the nerdy motif of shout-outs to classic directors is endearing. Ryan O’Neal and Reynolds lock into smooth grooves during light-comedy passages like their epic fistfight, while Tatum O’Neal delivers a memorable dose of her signature old-before-her-years edginess. So even though Nickelodeon is excessive and undisciplined, it’s crafted with such care that it can’t be ignored. In 2009, Bogdanovich revisited the movie for its DVD debut, adding several minutes of previously unused footage and converting the imagery to black-and-white, the format he originally intended to use; the disc features both the monochromatic version and the original full-color theatrical release.

Nickelodeon: GROOVY

The King of Marvin Gardens (1972)

          A film that sounds more interesting than it actually is, The King of Marvin Gardens features a convergence of several of the most important players in ’70s cinema. The cast includes Ellen Burstyn, Bruce Dern, and Jack Nicholson; New Hollywood mainstay Bob Rafelson co-wrote the story and directed; and acclaimed cinematographer László Kovács shot the picture. The narrative also seems like it should hit the sweet spot of early-’70s ennui, with Dern playing Jason Stabler, a small-time Atlantic City schemer who tries to rope his reluctant brother, David (Nicholson), into helping him put together some sort of casino/resort enterprise, much to the chagrin of Jason’s boss, mid-level gangster Luther (Scatman Crothers).
          But right from the beginning of the picture, pretentious opacity rules: The first scene features David performing a grimly nostalgic monologue for his late-night radio show about David and his brother watching their overbearing grandfather die, and the next scene reveals that the grandfather is very much alive. Presumably the idea was to establish a milieu exploring the gap between dreams and reality, but the film never comes into sharper focus than the opening sequence, so it’s a struggle to follow basic threads like what exactly Jason wants to accomplish and why he’s constantly accompanied by an unhinged middle-aged beauty named Sally (Burstyn) and her adult stepdaughter Jessica (Julia Anne Robinson). In lieu of clarity, the movie presents gifted actors generating unusual dynamics, but the performances are inhibited by the film’s murkiness.
          Nicholson is muted to a fault, communicating his character’s lost quality by seeming lost himself, and Burstyn is uncharacteristically screechy, as if she’s flailing for some legitimate character motivation the script can’t provide. Dern comes off best, effectively personifying a huckster of limited ability but unlimited ambition, and it’s a shame that his fine performance appears in such a disappointing film. Kovács’ impeccable photography provides an unvarnished travelogue through the ghost-town streets of early-’70s Atlantic City, and it’s impressive that the film doesn’t have any musical scoring; to Rafelson’s credit, the focus is entirely on acting. The King of Marvin Gardens is very much of its moment, so now that time has deprived the movie of its currency as a counterpoint to the staid cinema of the studio era, it’s simply a clinical exercise in affected New Hollywood style.

The King of Marvin Gardens: FUNKY