Saw the black-and-white restoration on TCM; it's lovely, with all that delectable Laszlo Kovacs outdoorsiness, but as a movie it just doesn't work very well, as sincerely as Peter Bogdanovich must have intended it. He loved old movies and knew many silent directors, and in fact dedicated this to Allan Dwan and Raoul Walsh, whose memories partly inspired it. But what we have is a slow-moving retrospective of 1910 to 1915 and movies' move out West, with Ryan O'Neal as an inept lawyer and Burt Reynolds as a promoter who both somehow end up making movies for an almost unrecognizable Brian Keith. It's something of a history of the Patents Company, which monopolized moviemaking, but that's quite secondary to a series of not-very-funny slapstick sequences, involving characters who don't make a lot of sense. There's little emotional resonance to the love triangle involving the two men and Jane Hitchcock, whom I liked and don't find as inexpressive as a bunch of reviewers did. Tatum O'Neal is a know-it-all kid who drives and keeps a rattlesnake, also the subjects of some unpersuasive slapstick, Stella Stevens is a nondescript troupe member, and John Ritter, who, as several reviewers have mentioned, seems to be in a different decade altogether, is the DP. There's a lot of love for D. W. Griffith, whom one character calls "the greatest movie director who ever lived" even in 1910, before Griffith had made much of a mark, and extended sequences of "The Birth of a Nation," minus the now-offensive parts. It's meant to be elegaic and nostalgic and affectionate, but mostly what I see are thin characters doing a lot of unmotivated pratfalls. And hey, I liked "At Long Last Love."
Review of Nickelodeon
