OVP: Paper Moon (1973)

Film: Paper Moon (1973)
Stars: Ryan O'Neal, Tatum O'Neal, Madeline Kahn, Randy Quaid
Director: Peter Bogdonavich
Oscar History: 4 nominations/1 win (Best Supporting Actress-Tatum O'Neal*, Supporting Actress-Madeline Kahn, Adapted Screenplay, Sound)
Snap Judgment Ranking: 5/5 stars

All week long we're looking at films from 1973, with an emphasis on Oscar-nominated films (all of which are movies I watched for the first time while on quarantine).  Yesterday we talked about the Best Supporting Actor winner The Paper Chase, so it felt appropriate to bookend that movie with the Best Supporting Actress winner of that year, the youngest victor in Oscar history, Tatum O'Neal.  Both, weirdly, were at the beginnings of their film acting career, though O'Neal was some sixty years Houseman's junior.  Houseman had become a theater legend at that point, but in terms of film acting he'd only had two bit parts, one of which was uncredited, before he won his Oscar for The Paper Chase.  O'Neal won for her first film proper, playing opposite her dad in the similarly-titled Paper Moon.

(Spoilers Ahead) The movie is about Moze Pray (Ryan O'Neal), a devilishly handsome (seriously-the elder O'Neal has never looked better) con artist who sells Bibles to widows for a profit, and a young girl named Addie (Tatum O'Neal) whose mother has recently died, and who has no one to take her to live with her aunt in Missouri.  Moze is basically asked to drive Addie to the train station, but upon realizing that Moze used her dead mother to secure $200 in a con, Addie demands that he pay her back the money, and she won't leave his side until he does.  Thus, an unlikely pair heads off on a road trip, and Addie quickly brings finesse to Moze's schtick, getting him more money and helping him to pull off more sophisticated cons.  Along the way, they meet an exotic dancer named Trixie Delight (Kahn), with whom Moze is smitten, but Addie isn't (she quickly schemes with Trixie's maid on a way to eliminate the "competition"), and they form a bond.  In the end, this is enough of a bond that even though Moze (after a botched bootlegging scheme) is broke-and-beaten-down, Addie picks a life on the road with him rather than the more secure world of her aunt's home.

The bulk of the film is predicated on the relationship between Addie-and-Moze, and whether or not you find it endearing or dangerous.  It's pretty clear, both in casting his actual daughter (who looks like him, though in my opinion she does indeed favor her real-life mother actress Joanna Moore) and in the way they structure the film that we're meant to believe that Addie is Moze's biological child, and thus he does owe her some sort of debt outside of the monetary.  This unspoken truth hangs beautifully over the movie-there's a sense of Moze realizing not just of an obligation to himself to expect more from this life, but of Addie getting a second chance on a parent after her first one dies tragically before the film commences.

The movie itself is not breaking new ground, but I loved it.  Paper Moon is the kind of gemlike picture you can't stop watching, and are just engrossed in fully.  It helps that the movie has a dynamo pair of leads.  Ryan O'Neal has charisma, sex appeal, and just enough rascal in his Moze to make this one of his best performances.  His daughter is a natural, and feeds off of that energy.  It's always hard to tell how much credit you should give a child actor's performance to the director (and it's hard to get a gage on that when the director is as fascinating but immodest as Peter Bogdonavich), but O'Neal is riveting from start-to-finish.  It's not remotely fair to call this a supporting part-she's in virtually every scene of the movie (I'd be willing to bet she has more screen-time than her dad), and it's the most egregious case of category fraud I've ever witnessed...but she's awesome in it.  I totally get the impulse to give her this Oscar, even if when we get to the OVP write-ups I'm going to have to knock a star off of her score to put her competitors on the same field.

The film's other nominations are all well-earned too.  Bogdonavich felt of the era by filming the movie in pristine black-and-white (today this would have gotten a Cinematography nomination), and it crackles with period songs & radio shows, as well as great detail in the sound work.  The screenplay is a delight-quippy one-liners, it manages to feel authentic while never falling into cliche (and this is a road picture, so opportunity for cliche is blooming everywhere).  It had to suck for Madeline Kahn, who is in about 12 minutes of the movie, to compete against someone in her own movie that was in so much of the picture, but she still brings finesse.  There's a wonderful moment where she's trying to win over Addie, and in the process delivers a summary not just of the tricks that you know she's tried on other girl's with handsome fathers, but soon she starts confessing the problems of her life, how men never seem to stick around, even when she hopes they will.  It's the sort of character work that Kahn would bring to all of her performances (such a brilliant actress), and might have even won her an Oscar...were it not for the little girl she finally convinces to smile taking up the rest of the movie.