Paper Moon (The Directors’ Company, Paramount, 1973)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2026 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night (Saturday, June 20) I watched three films in a row on Turner Classic Movies: Rear Window, Paper Moon, and the 1946 film The Man I Love. Paper Moon was a capable and quite charming movie, though after Alfred Hitchcock’s masterpiece Rear Window it was decidedly a comedown. It was directed and produced by Peter Bogdanovich, who like François Truffaut began as a film critic and historian, interviewing such legendary directors as John Ford and Allan Dwan. Bogdanovich made his debut as a writer/director in 1968 with an extraordinary movie, Targets, which combined two stories: a disillusioned veteran horror actor (Boris Karloff) who’s convinced that the brutality of modern life has rendered his movies meaningless, and a serial killer (Tim O’Kelly) who stages a mass shooting at a drive-in theatre showing the Karloff character’s latest film. He followed that up with The Last Picture Show (1971), based on a Larry McMurtry novel about a small town in Texas which is dying out as a lot of its residents either die or leave. The Last Picture Show was set in 1951 and Bogdanovich decided to make it look drearier by shooting it in black-and-white. He also dumped his first wife, art director Polly Platt, for his blonde star, Cybill Shepherd. After What’s Up, Doc?, a screwball comedy starring Barbra Streisand and Ryan O’Neal in what was essentially a rehash of Howard Hawks’s 1938 screwball classic Bringing Up Baby (with Katharine Hepburn and Cary Grant), Bogdanovich teamed up with O’Neal again for Paper Moon, a Depression-era comedy/romance set in the 1930’s (just when in the 1930’s is a bit unclear; Franklin D. Roosevelt is already President but Prohibition is still in force, though the 21st Amendment which repealed it still allowed states to maintain their own prohibition laws) in Kansas and Missouri.

The big thing everyone remembers about this movie is that not only was Ryan O’Neal the star, he cast his nine-year-old daughter Tatum O’Neal as his daughter in the film. Actually it’s not specified that the characters the O’Neals play in the film are father and daughter – his name is Moses Pray and hers is Addie Loggins – but the novel on which the film was based (published in 1971, two years before the film was made) by Joe David Brown was called Addie Pray and there was no reason to cast the roles with a real-life father-daughter pair unless the characters were supposed to be father and daughter as well. Like The Last Picture Show, Paper Moon was shot in black-and-white to make it look more like a movie from the time period in which it takes place, but cinematographer László Kovács was unable, at least for the first half of the film, to re-create the rich, deep grayscales of authentic 1930’s films. The images reminded me of Verichrome Pan, the tacky, overly grey black-and-white film Kodak offered amateur photographers in the 1960’s (when I started taking photos of my own), though later on as the film got darker (literally and figuratively) and more of it took place at night, Kovács’s black-and-white images did start to look more authentically like 1930’s films. The plot is a charming tale of Moses Pray’s life as a con man, albeit a lovable and sympathetic one (there’s a strong similarity to the movies W. C. Fields made in the 1930’s as a con man traveling with a daughter, particularly The Old-Fashioned Way and Poppy, and though in Fields’s movies the daughter was a young woman instead of a pre-pubescent girl so she could be paired off with a male romantic lead at the end, the dynamics aren’t that different).

The film starts with the funeral of Addie’s mother, at which Moses agrees to see her off to the train to St. Joseph, Missouri where there’s an aunt she can live with who’s Addie’s only known living relative. Along the way Moses cons a railway station agent out of $200 which Addie insists is rightfully hers, though his main scheme is posing as a traveling salesman for the “Kansas Bible Company.” In this alleged capacity he drives through the countryside stopping at the homes of women who’ve recently been widowed and claiming that their husbands ordered them Bibles before they croaked. If the scheme works as planned, he can extract full price for the Bibles less the $1 the late husband allegedly paid as an advance. Addie, who has a better business sense than Moses, improves on the con and makes it more lucrative. Then sex rears its head in the person of Trixie Delight (Madeline Kahn), a prostitute Moses falls for, and her 15-year-old Black maid Imogene (P. J. Johnson). Addie resents Trixie for usurping the front seat in Moses’s car Addie thinks she deserves herself, though she and Imogene bond. As they travel they collect their earnings in a Cremo Cigars box, a nice touch given that Cremo was Bing Crosby’s first national radio sponsor in 1931; Crosby was billed as “The Cremo Crooner” and one of the songs he sang on the Cremo show, “Just One More Chance,” is heard in the film. In fact a lot of songs from the period are heard in the film (Rudi Fehr gets a special credit for supplying the period records), alongside radio transcriptions of broadcasts featuring Jack Benny (who was still alive when the film was made and gave permission for them to be used) and Jim and Marian Jordan, a.k.a. Fibber McGee and Molly. Addie travels with a portable radio on which she listens to these shows, and there’s a running gag as Moses tries to sleep with Addie’s radio going and demands that she turn it off.

Ultimately the film takes a really dark turn as Moses decides to scam local bootlegger Jess Hardin (John Hillerman) out of $600 by stealing his own whiskey and then selling it back to him, only Hardin’s brother, a local sheriff’s deputy (also John Hillerman), catches him and literally runs him out of town. Desperate to escape across the state line from Kansas to Missouri, Moses stops by a local farm and offers to trade his relatively new car for the farmer’s truck, even though the truck barely runs. The farmer is played by Gilbert Milton and his four sons include Leroy (a young Randy Quaid), who agrees to wrestle Moses as part of the deal. Moses wins (surprisingly since Leroy literally towers over him) and he and Addie escape in the truck, only Deputy Hardin catches up to him, beats him up and takes back the money. Moses drops Addie at her aunt’s home, and the aunt turns out to be warm and loving, but Addie’s bored out of her wits by her bland, normal existence and runs off to pair up with Moses again at the end. Paper Moon is a really charming and delightful movie, and Tatum O’Neal won the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress (she’s still the youngest performer to win a competitive Oscar), but I’d call it a good film rather than a great one. Bogdanovich’s later directorial career seems to be an all too typical case of an artist who “went Hollywood” in the worst ways; he made a musical called They All Laughed in 1980 and started an affair with his leading lady, Dorothy Stratten, only Stratten was murdered by her pathologically jealous manager/husband, whereupon Bogdanovich fell in love with and married Stratten’s sister Louise. Bogdanovich did make a few capable films after that, including Mask (1985) and a sequel to The Last Picture Show called Texasville (1990), but otherwise his subsequent career seemed to be a frittering away of his early promise much like that of his friend and mentor, Orson Welles.