|
It sails over a cardboard sea, as the song goes, on it is the Dust Bowl sprite, unguarded one moment and wizened the next. The itinerant sharpie (Ryan O'Neal) drops by the flapper's funeral and scoops up the orphaned tomboy (Tatum O'Neal), she may or may not be his daughter but is certainly a good asset in his blackmail scheme. Not easily ditched, she tags along and proves to be quite a quick study in flim-flammery. "Folks don't take to children when they're doing business." Engraved Bibles for grieving dupes (cf. Fellini's Il Bidone), liquor sold back to bootleggers, a bittersweet pirouette across the Midwest. Peter Bogdanovich's rural Thirties, a landscape of movie memories—the tiny heroine trying on necklaces before a mirror evokes Ma Joad with her earrings in Ford's The Grapes of Wrath, the police station with the crooked sheriff (John Hillerman) is a detour from Lang's Fury. The "exotic dancer" (Madeline Kahn) comes along for the ride, on a grassy hill she reveals the crack in the baby-doll voice, "a new pair of shoes, a nice dress, a few laughs. Times are hard." (As her reluctant teenage maid, P.J. Johnson has her own brew of cheek and melancholia: "I tried to push her out of a window in Little Rock once.") Building on The Last Picture Show, the Heartland with a sharp European eye (László Kovács apes the Gregg Toland monochrome in packed frames) and a sensitive radio ear (the hard-boiled moppet smiles for the first time while listening to Jack Benny). The push-pull of cuteness and cynicism, the wink following the brawl kick, the poignant reunion as wry slapstick on a lunar wasteland. "It wouldn't be make-believe if you believed in me." Wenders is strikingly concurrent with Alice in the Cities. With Burton Gilliam, Randy Quaid, and Noble Willingham. In black and white.
--- Fernando F. Croce |