Nickelodeon

When this movie was released they had a promotion for the premiere where you could see it for a nickel. So I went to the theater, stood in a very long line, and watched a very funny, entertaining movie that the audience seemed to quite enjoy. The next day I read a review that slammed it, and then another. And I have never understood it.

Over 30 years later I took a second look, and while sometimes you can't for the life of you figure out why you liked a movie from the past, I still really liked this one. It's a very funny movie that mixes in Keystone Kops-style slapstick with Howard Hawks-style screwball comedy. There are good performances by Burt Reynolds and Ryan O'Neal, and even better ones from Tatum O'Neal and, best of all, Brian Keith.

The strong negative reactions particular surprise me because the film is similar in feel to What's Up Doc (Ryan even plays basically the same character) and yet that movie was much better received.

I found this movie funny and likable. Everyone's good in it, including the lead actress, who apparently found film work so dispiriting that she gave up on them altogether and stuck with modeling. The first half is probably stronger than the second half, but I thoroughly enjoyed it.

Oddly this is a film that I have always liked and still make a point to watch when it is televised. I say "oddly" because I find Peter Bogdanovich and Ryan O'Neal excellent examples of two people pretty much clueless about their chosen professions. Bogdanovich was a journalist/critic/film theorist turned director (who had the bad taste to be involved with Cybill Shepperd) and O'Neal was a Hollywood personality who occasionally acted (who had the good taste to marry Leigh Taylor-Young).

Jane Hitchcock is the most interesting thing about "Nickelodeon". Hitchcock was a magazine model who Bogdanovich hoped to groom into a star. Bogdanovich historically has had a weakness for beautiful women of marginal talent (Shepherd and Dorothy Stratten's sister come to mind). Unlike the others, Hitchcock was quickly turned off by both Bogdanovich and the movie game-she already had a lucrative modeling career and didn't have to put up with the Hollywood starlet system. Whether Hitchcock would have made it big in movies is hard to tell, but in "Nickelodeon's" "Kathleen Cooke" she found a character she could play with wide-eyed innocence and complete sincerity. While it doesn't hurt that Hitchcock is drop dead gorgeous, her Kathleen Cooke character is more than gorgeous, she is absolutely captivating. Which makes her completely believable as the object of the movie's love triangle and elevates her to the top of my list of the all-time most irresistible screen heroines (even ahead of Fay Wray's "Ann Darrow" and Clara's Bow's "Mary Preston").

But "Kathleen Cooke" is not the only good thing about "Nickelodeon". It has one of cinema's all time funniest sequences. O'Neal arrives by train at a remote shooting location out west. He steps off the train at a watering stop and looks out over the desert to the movie set 500 yards away. The sun is high overhead baking the desert landscape and O'Neal is not enthusiastic about the prospect of walking that far in such heat. A tiny dog with the movie company spots him from that distance and begins running toward him. The dog is making a bee-line for him, as it gets closer we wait for the happy reunion, but when it arrives it immediately bites his leg. The dog hates him so much that it was willing to run that far in the hot sun just for the opportunity to attack him.

It also is an excellent and generally accurate history lesson about the early days of movies and the serendipity that determined who became involved with the new industry. Serendipity is the theme of the film and the source of most of its comedy, as the expanding talent needs of the new movie industry were often met by whoever they happened to encounter at a particular moment and not through any systematic process. Thus Burt Reynolds (in his best comic performance) becomes a stunt man only because at that moment they need a stunt man and he needs a job. A running gag is his boastful declaration with each new job that the job title (whatever it might be) is his middle name. Also a great take on how milestones like "Birth of a Nation" periodically set the bar higher throughout film history and inspired those within the industry to stretch themselves to do better work.

Ryan O'Neal is fairly low-key and therefore tolerable. In addition to Hitchcock and Reynolds, Bogdanovich gets excellent performances from Tatum O'Neal (great negotiating sequences), John Ritter, Stella Stevens and Brian Keith.

The main problem with "Nickelodeon" is that the depth and breathe of early film history is too complicated for a small comedic treatment. As a film historian Bogdanovich was dealing with a subject near and dear to his heart. He appears to have borrowed heavily from Fellini's "Variety Lights" and "White Sheik" to construct his company of players but could not integrate the intimate and light-hearted flavor of those films with the huge historical subject he was documenting. "Nickelodeon" is still entertaining and informative but the whole is less that the sum of its parts.

Then again, what do I know? I'm only a child.

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.

Nickelodeon must have been a labor of love for Peter Bogdanovich as both a filmmaker and film historian. Whatever else you can say about Nickelodeon it was certainly meticulously researched.

This film is a portrait of the early years of motion pictures. Forthose who doubt the veracity of the film you can find stories like this in the autobiography of Cecil B. DeMille. Back in the early teen years DeMille went to Californiawith his troop and made The Squaw Man against the trust who are the villains here.

His name is not mentioned, but the trust was an effort by Thomas Edison to control all aspects of film making with patents. Unfortunately while it is arguable he was the first to invent moving pictures, he was not alone. Melies in France and Friese-Greene in Great Britain were doing te same work not to mention others in the USA. Ultimately Edison lost the patent wars as portrayed here.

Lawyer Ryan O'Neal and conman Burt Reynolds become director and action star working for Brian Keith an independent producer. They also become romantic rivals for Jane Hitchcock.

Tatum O'Neal as a nicepartas a precocious adolescent with a good imagination who becomes a screenwriter. John Ritter is an early cameramanand Stella Stevens another actress.

I'm surprised at the tepid reviews that Nickelodeon got. It's a well crafted film that shows the love Peter Bogdanovich has for his profession.

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.