Music for the eyes

I have this probably false memory of seeing Peter Bogdanovich’s Nickolodeon as an ABC movie of the week, the film’s excesses–and there are a good number, usually to the film’s detriment–exacerbated by the noisy bombast of the intertitle ABC movie-of-the-week theme as we went to commercial, and the bullshit bombast of the slew of ads interrupting the film. Whether I saw it in that particular venue, the tone of that memory aligns with my more specific recollections of the film: many scenes of cluttered brouhaha, a tendency toward din rather than wit, lots of falling down. Burt Reynolds.

But while there are too many people falling down, a “comic” fight scene that is as long but about one-third as interesting as the alley brawl in They Live, an occasional bid toward wacky that makes one wince, and the leaden balloon that is Burt Reynolds playing wacky* [see below]…. the new director’s cut of Nickolodeon (which was I believe actually shortened from the theatrical release, but most pertinently transferred into a lovely black-and-white from the too-golden sugar-dust look of the color print) …. well, it’s lovely. It’s funny, just melancholic enough to be sweet and not saccharine, full of the trademark Bogdanovich eye for compositional perfection, replete with many bits of slapstick and screwball dialogue that work like gangbusters (the occasionally-great W.D. Richter co-wrote the film), and a genuinely moving sense of the silly wonder of moviemaking. I really enjoyed it.

My heading comes from a final sort-of speech by blustery film hack-turned-czar H. H. Cobb (played by blustery Brian Keith) who, following a showing of Griffith’s Birth of a Nation (a great set-piece where Bogdanovich recreates the spectacle of a picture palace), grows nearly misty imagining audiences who “barely speak American” coming in droves to see films, and cribs a line from Jimmy Stewart about how, if you do it right, when you make a movie you give people “little pieces of time” . . . and then Cobb makes fun of Tatum O’Neal (almost exactly reprising her Paper Moon role), offers the bedraggled/worn-out ragtag film crew tons of money to return to his employment and make big pictures, and blusters his way offscreen. It’s lovely.

Ryan O’Neal. Good god, in the right role–like here, as Leo Harrigan–he was such a brilliantly adept comedian, with great timing, a perfect moviescreen of a face across the seemingly bland beautiful spaces of which you could see projected alternating waves of sadness, a blithe Harold-Lloydish innocence, the flash of gritty steel, and so on. (Contra B. Reynolds, see below.)

I was surprised at how much I enjoyed this.

Except for *Reynolds — the man seems always to be inside his own quotation marks, inauthentically playing at whatever the moment demands — instead of O’Neal’s ability to mash up a ‘seventies critical reflection with a silent-era innocence, Reynolds seems always on the verge of a wink. I listened to some of the commentary, and Bogdanovich was very happy with this performance, but… ah, man, it almost killed the movie for me. (And the lead actress, Jane Hitchock, is not so bad but utterly blank and unmemorable.)

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