Paper Moon. 1973. USA. Directed by Peter Bogdanovich. Screenplay by Alvin Sargent, based on the novel Addie Pray by Joe David Brown. With Ryan O’Neal, Tatum O’Neal, Madeline Kahn, John Hillerman. 35mm. 102 min.
In the Great Plains during the 1930s, people listened to Jack Benny, sang the song “Sunnyside Up”—and, from time to time, swindled unsuspecting widows. In Bogdanovich’s third consecutive critical and commercial triumph, ingratiating con man Moses Pray (Ryan O’Neal) and his equally larcenous young charge Addie Loggins (Tatum O’Neal, who won an Oscar) defraud recently widowed women whose husbands, they falsely claim, had ordered personalized Bibles. The film delights in their escapades, but Tatum O’Neal’s plaintive performance suggests deeper currents: the orphaned Addie only accompanies Moses on his cons to settle a debt between them—and because she has persuaded herself that he is her “pa.” As the father of two daughters, Bogdanovich brought enormous feeling to one of the least sentimental father-daughter stories in cinema. The film merges the stark black-and-white landscapes of The Last Picture Show with the elaborate farce scenes of What’s Up, Doc?, especially a long sequence in a hotel in which O’Neal and co-conspirator Imogene (P. J. Johnson) get the better of Moses’s current inamorata, the insufferable Trixie Delight (Madeline Kahn). –Peter Tonguette