Paper Moon

This poster doesn't make me want to see the movie.

With so many made before I was born and the fact that I only really started to look back through film history starting ten years later (and that was really mostly the Monty Python/Mel Brooks ouvre), I often struggle with watching older films that deal with what are now very familiar tropes. Paper Moon came out in 1973 and while I'm sure the "precocious child clever beyond her years" and the "antagonistic adult/child road trip" plot devices existed, I seriously doubt they were as ubiquitous as they are now (I couldn't stop thinking about Dutch). As a result, Paper Moon felt intensely familiar and predictable, which is a shame because I love a story about conmen (conpeople?). While that colors my viewing experience, I know rationally that it's not a valid criticism (I once got into a ridiculous and heated argument with my cousin because I said I didn't care for The Last of the Mohicans because I was sick and tired of historical epics. He rightly pointed out that it was released before the crop of films that exhausted me [Braveheart, Gladiator, etc]). It doesn't help that The Simpsons has covered this ground several times, much to my immense enjoyment.

Of course, none of that would matter if Paper Moon was a great film, but it's just good. I never realized that it was a black and white film and after the initial surprise (I really thought it was going to be some kind of homage to three-strip Technicolor, for some reason, and kept waiting for the shift to color like The Wizard of Oz or Alice Doesn't Live Here Anymore), I eased into the photography and found it to be quite remarkable. If there is one standout in Paper Moon, it's Laszlo Kovacs' photography.

I was also pleased to find that Ryan O'Neal can act and that Stanley Kubrick must have instructed him to be as wooden as possible throughout Barry Lyndon (seriously, I hope that role had little to do with his steady decline in film appearances, but I thought he was just a bad actor until now). Ryan O'Neal was the biggest wild card going in to my viewing and he was quite good. On the flip side of that coin, Tatum O'Neal was just as annoying as I thought she'd be judging by my experiences with this type of character. It's remarkable to me that she won the Academy Award for the performance aside from the fact that there's some heart-string pulling associated with her recently-orphaned character.

As is usually the case with road trip movies, much of the fun comes from seeing who's going to pop up next. While audiences in 1973 probably weren't too familiar with much of the supporting cast, I was very pleased to see three(!) future Blazing Saddles alum pop up. Mel Brooks must have been keeping an eye on Paper Moon for some casting choices. Madeleine Kahn is always nice to see, but it's even better when unexpected people like John Hillerman (who's also in Chinatown) and Burton Gilliam (the outlaw who starts singing "Swing Low, Sweet Chariot" in Blazing Saddles) pop up.

Peter Bogdanovich does a nice job directing, though for some reason, I was disappointed to learn that Orson Welles was giving him and Kovacs tips throughout filming (I think it's because you can't mention Bogdanovich without Welles coming up and I find that unseemly, like the former is a leech). You could do worse than spend almost two hours watching this movie and if you're not tired of the tropes involved, you might get a huge kick out of the flim-flamming.


Paper Moon (Theatrical Trailer) by NakedBrotha2007