Retrospective: Paper Moon

Paper Moon is one of those movies that could succeed purely on the merits of its premise. "A con man and his illegitimate daughter deceive woman into buying Bibles during the Great Depression" is one of the great ideas of 70s American cinema. Peter Bogdanovich and company's sublime execution of the premise is just a superb entrée after a top-notch appetizer. That Paper Moon is only Bogdanovich's second best movie of the 70s speaks to how good What's Up Doc is.

Moze and Addie's scheme is clever in itself, but their gradual realization of the scheme is a masterwork of character and story structure. Moze hatches the quick change scam, and Addie makes it her own and increases their profits with her "sweet little girl" angle. The setting of the Great Depression is hardly unrelated here — the most iconic photograph to come out of America's greatest financial crisis depicts a mother and her two starving children. Moze and Addie seize on the sentimentality of 1936 America and exploit the hell out of it.

Like What's Up Doc, Paper Moon stars Ryan O'Neal as a hapless man frantically trying to break into American capitalism, only for someone to foil his plans (in this case, she's played by her daughter Tatum). In both movies, O'Neal's character can't get anywhere without the help of women and girls. Paper Moon thrives on the subtext of Moze and Addy's relationship, with his reluctance to be a father mixed with his sense of moral obligation to Addy. Meanwhile, Addy both resents her father's sudden arrival in the wake of her mother's death and desperately wants him to be her parent.

It's not all great — we do get a Black servant girl in the second act who, while sympathetic, ultimately embodies some of the same stereotypes as Huckleberry Finn's Jim. But the second act also gives us Madeline Kahn, one of America's treasures, and sees Addie turning her skill at manipulation against her father. This is a classic, a solid argument for American cinema, and God bless The Sopranos for introducing a generation to Peter Bogdanovich.