Nickelodeon

Just finished watching the color version on Turner Classic Movies. I loved "Paper Moon," especially the wonderful depression-era music, and "The Last Picture Show" (I grew up in Texas not so far from Archer City in the same era), so that's what I knew about Peter Bogdonovich, the director. I echo many of the reviews, without having known about the reception the film apparently received at the time. Even though I was grown when it came out, I just never got around to seeing it. Maybe I wouldn't have enjoyed it as much as now, as I approach 60.

Yes, it's filled with slapstick, sometimes goofy, but the audience is in on the jokes. I felt like I was invited to the party, with all these wonderful actors (not in the thespian sense, but in the popular sense)as friends. The magic is that it makes you feel comfortable, because loving movies and movie making is part of my life, too. It appreciates the audience and wants us to have a good time with it.

The director obviously loves the medium. In many ways, there was a Fellini-esque quality to it, as another reviewer wrote. The magic of Fellini was similar: he used the everyday strangeness of reality to make his films real. Hollywood is the make-believe; reality makes a better film.

This is art imitating life. It celebrates the birth of the industry and the magic of the universal language of moving pictures, captured beautifully and simply in Brian Keith's closing monologue. It is Peter's love letter to the industry and to the audience, as only a lover could compose. It is beautifully crafted, the acting balanced throughout the ensemble, and the message delivered with wry humor. Though I didn't see it when released, it may look better now, in nostalgic retrospect. It IS a love letter, and at my age, it is a delightful homage to an industry that just "doesn't make 'em like this anymore." Thank you, Mr. Bogdonovich and all the cast. Love you, too.

I have very mixed feelings about 'Nickelodeon', a movie by a director (Peter Bogdanovich) whom I find deeply self-indulgent. On the favourable side, 'Nickelodeon' is about the early days of film-making: a subject which passionately interests me ... and Bogdanovich makes clear that he shares that passion. Even more remarkably, 'Nickelodeon' makes considerable effort to get the historical facts straight. Much of the material here is adapted from personal experiences in the early film careers of Allan Dwan and Raoul Walsh, two directors unfortunately forgotten and whose work is often unfairly neglected. So, what went wrong?

To be getting on with, Bogdanovich might have had a better film if he'd done a straightforward bio of either Dwan or Walsh (especially Walsh, whose life was fascinating). Instead, the real incidents from their lives are incorporated into the much less plausible slapstick shenanigans of some blatantly fictional characters. Throughout 'Nickelodeon', I had the nagging feeling that this was a roman-a-clef, with each fictional character based on an actual person from the early days of cinema. For instance, Tatum O'Neal (age 13 here) plays a girl who earns a living writing movie scenarios. I suspect that this character was inspired by Anita Loos, who actually did earn money writing movie scenarios while still a teenager. (Sadly, the late Ms Loos told some very vicious lies about other show-business figures -- including Paul Bern and Alexander Woollcott -- so I'm reluctant to believe anything she said about her own life.) All through 'Nickelodeon', I kept trying to guess which character was based on which real-life film figure ... and the problem is, there's not enough reality here to go round.

We do get, commendably, a very accurate depiction of the Patent Wars. Thomas Edison held exclusive patents on several crucial components of the motion-picture camera: he hired men to shut down all film productions that used his technology without paying him royalties, and some of Edison's hirelings actually went so far as to fire handguns into the mechanisms of unsanctioned movie cameras. ('Nickelodeon' gets this right.) Most of the period detail is accurate throughout this film.

Regrettably, the character played by Burt Reynolds is given too much slapstick material: a decision which annoyed me even more because Reynolds's character is clearly based more than slightly on the young Raoul Walsh, a film pioneer who didn't deserve to have his life and career reduced to pratfalls. Reynolds is also lumbered with an unwieldy script device which I call the Convenient Excerpt. We see him reading aloud Owen Wister's novel 'The Virginian', which was a best-seller at the time when this film takes place. Fair enough ... except, to my annoyance, the only time when we actually see and hear Reynolds doing this -- presumably working his way through the entire novel -- he conveniently happens to be reading the one and only passage in 'The Virginian' which would be recognised by people who haven't actually read the novel. (I refer to the "When you call me that, smile!" quote ... which was reworded for the film, so please don't 'correct' my version.)

Brian Keith has a good supporting role in 'Nickelodeon', except that he delivers all of his dialogue with some peculiar sort of speech defect. Here, too, I got the impression that the fictional character on screen was based on a real person: in Keith's case, the early film producer Colonel Selig. Less effective here is John Ritter, who shows no sense of period and seems to be living about six decades later than the other characters.

As the love interest, Jane Hitchcock (who?) brings absolutely nothing to her role except a distracting surname and the same facial bone structure as Cybill Shepherd. The latter trait leads me to conjecture as to why Bogdanovich cast her.

I watched 'Nickelodeon' with a semi-consistent sense of enjoyment, but with a more prominent (and more consistent) sensation of "This could have been so much BETTER, if only...". Insert sigh of regret here. 'Nickelodeon' was a huge flop in its day, and I suppose that it deserved to be. At least it spawned one clever in-joke. Two years after starring in this flop, Burt Reynolds starred in the solid actioner "Hooper", in which Robert Klein played a character based on Peter Bogdanovich. When Klein starts spouting that movies are 'pieces of time' (a Bogdanovich quote), Reynolds hauls off and belts him. I'll rate 'Nickelodeon' 6 out of 10: it probably deserves less, but this poor movie is based on a subject very dear to me.

If director Peter Bogdanovich hadn't used such a heavy-handed slapstick treatment of his little epic about early film-making called NICKELODEON, there might have emerged a fond tribute to the pioneering days of silent films in the early part of the 20th Century.

But instead, he has filled NICKELODEON with a whole series of non-stop sight gags that become tiresome and repetitious, even more so because none of the characters involved really come to life. As the pretty heroine of the piece, JANE HITCHCOCK has very limited abilities beyond staring wide-eyed into the camera lens for comic effect. BURT REYNOLDS at least does derive several good chuckles from his comedy efforts as a reluctant participant in RYAN O'NEAL's troupe of silent film actors.

O'Neal has obviously chosen to play his role as though he has just watched a Harold Lloyd film, wearing spectacles for his first entrance and doing the bumbling sight gags on cue, as hapless a hero as Lloyd was in all his comedies. He's not too bad, but is never as funny as he was in WHAT'S UP DOC?, an earlier Bogdanovich film.

Tecbnically, the film is handsomely produced and pleasing to look at in color, but STELLA STEVENS is given little to do in what amounts to a supporting role. JOHN RITTER doesn't have too much opportunity to display his comic gifts. Entirely too much footage is devoted to a rough and tumble fight between Reynolds and O'Neal that takes up too much time with too many slapstick pratfalls to emerge as anything more than filler.

The film plods along without the benefit of a tight script or a really compelling story and suffers, mainly, from the heavy-handed approach to comedy.

The critical "view" of this film is that it's a dog. But that's only true if you want to see films through the eyes of critics; and when this one came out, the critics were gunning for Bogdanovich. Why? Who knows. They were gunning for Spielberg when "1941" came out, the difference being that Spielberg bounced back. Bogdanovich never really did, but that doesn't make "Nickelodeon" a bad film. True, it has no appreciable story, but it's a nifty little love letter to the makers of those early movies; which is why it has equal parts slapstick and straight drama. It's affectionate rather than melodramatic, and has a convincing evocation of what it must have been like to be around, scuffling on the edges of fame and fortune with this weird new invention, motion pictures. It's not going to scare you, or thrill you with wall to wall CGI pyrotechnics, it doesn't have a cast of thousands, and it didn't bankrupt a studio to make it. It's a good little film, well made, solidly cast and directed, and in general, well acted. A lot of what we like in film depends on our expectations. The critics were gunning for Bogdanovich because they were expecting Art with a capital A; instead what they got were a lifelong film fan's notes. Enjoy.

This expensive 70's flop is not nearly as bad as its reputation indicates. Leonard Maltin's review is pretty accurate. And it's got some fine performances by a good cast which includes- Ryan O'neal, Burt Reynolds, Tatum O neal, John Ritter, Stella Stevens and (especially) Brian Keith. Two highlights- Tatum's negotiating and Brian Keith's speech at the end. It's got some dull stretches and the slapstick gets wearying,overall not bad.