Word: bogdanovich
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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...
...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...
...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...