Christopher Hudson on colours without colours
I read the other day. — where, I can't for the life of me remember — about a Canadian teacher who decided to carry out an experiment. A parade of some kind was being covered by Canadian television, and he instructed half his students to watch it on colour sets, the other half On black-and-white, and told both groups to write about what they saw. Those who watched in black-and-white wrote about the parade as a whole, its purpose and progress, relying soberly on the TV commentator. A high proportion of the students with colour sets, on the other hand, picked out incidental visual effects which their classmates disregarded or may not have noticed at all. A gaily-coloured handkerchief, fluttering across the road, assumed significance in the rather different image of events which the colour picture created for them.
I suspect that this is a familiar reaction to colour photography, and it must provide welcome reassurance for film production companies who tend to employ
plenty of people to bother about whether their pictures look nice, and no one to bother about whether they actually say anything. It is all the more courageous, then, for Peter Bogdanovich to make Paper Moon ('A' Paramount) in black-andwhite. For the second time in three films (the first was The Last Picture Show) he has to worry about people paying critical attention to the story.
As it turns out, he made a wise decision. Paper Moon is set in Kansas and Missouri at the time of the Depression. Moses Pray, a bright and .personable conman who makes a living selling bibles to widows on the pretext that their recently-deceased husbands ordered them, turns up at the graveside of one of his old flames. Nobody has claimed paternity of her nine-year-old daughter Addie, and the orphaned girl is. pressed upon the unwilling Moses to take to her only surviving relative in St Joseph, Missouri. Moses tries to dump her, but he gets into Addie's debt and makes the crucial mistake of underestimating this precocious child. The two of them join forces, and it is usually Addie, the stooge for the confidence tricks, who raises the profits, stage-manages the escapes, and saves Moses in the nick of time from loose and expensive women.
It could have been the worst sort of Shirley Temple slush, but instead it is an utterly delightful and entertaining film. The blackand-white photography gives a sense of the period, which colour film, glozing the rigours of the Depression, could never achieve. It also concentrates our attention on the performances of Ryan O'Neal and his daughter Tatum as Moses and Addie Pray, and this is all to the good. Ryan O'Neal is excellent as the perky, naive, selfconfident bible-seller, and the greatest compliment 1 can pay him is to say that he keeps his end up in scenes with his eight-year-old daughter Tatum, who is, I think, the only American child actor I have seen in the cinema whom I can wholeheartedly endorse.
Much of the joy of her performance is in watching the effortless superiority which which she disposes of the Pollyanna image, whether smoking one of her bedtime cigarettes and gravely pondering the frailty of her adult partner, or conniving to end his infatuation with Miss Trixie Delight and remarking with infinite scorn, as Miss Delight makes one of her frequent exits to the rest room, that she must have a bladder the size of a peanut. Occasionally the comparisons with Shirley Temple are explicit: whenever she breaks into childish song, Moses makes a face and she subsides unwillingly. But usually she is more than a match for him.
When he confesses to having scruples about something she looks confused and he bends down patronisingly to ask her, "Scruples? Do you know what they are?" A moment's pause and she replies triumphantly, "No I don't, but if you've got them they sure belong to someone else!"
Her expressive features changing in a moment from horrendous glower to radiant charm, she swans through a complicated role as if she'd been acting for donkey's years; it's hardly surprising that, as we are told, the film's nickname during produc
tion rapidly changed from Ryan's Daughter to Tatum 's Dad. Bogdanovitch was lucky in this, but
he deserved to be. In expounding the relationship between Moses and Addie, and in his direction as a whole, he has kept a fine balance between the farcical and the serious, the sentimental and the practical. A film very well worth seeing. Easily the best of the films I have watched so far in the London Film Festival is Satyajit Ray's
Distant Thunder. His second film in colour, and one less closely
focused on individual lives than before, it provides a good introduction, for those who still need to be introduced, to the work of this remarkable film-maker. In the middle of the second world war, in a remote Bengali village, a young Brahmin, Ganga, and his pretty wife, Ananda, have come to settle. Ganga is highly respected by the low-caste villagers as the only priest, teacher and doctor they have, and Ananda is admired by the village women for her delicacy and good breeding. Ray sketches them in with great humour and sympathy: Ganga striding away briskly in the mornings, clean white dhoti tucked around his waist, pipe clenched between the teeth, black umbrella raised against the sun, mild, gentle eyes peering anxiously behind a large pair of spectacles, to go and take a class of young children, or follow the instructions printed in. his textbook of religious Ceremonies or take the pulse of a village elder,, nodding owlishly the while; Ananda scurrying about the house and giving generously of advice and food to Moti, an untouchable, before reminding her in the friendliest way not to brush against her, so that she won't have to go back and bathe in the river, rather as an affluent young Hampstead bride might see off her Mrs Mop through the back door before the dinner guests arrive.
The distant thunder of the war, represented by the occasional aeroplanes flying overhead, is brought home to the villagers by
the cost of rice, which rapidly rises beyond their means. The headman's granary is looted; in the scuffle Ganga is accidentally knocked to the ground. Slowly, in some bewilderment, he begins to understand that the threat of starvation can erode even the hierarchy of caste. Ananda will have to work; Ganga will have to search for food. Without relaxing, even in privation, any of their caste-rules about hospitality and open-handedness towards those who ask for it, they find some of their attitudes shifting to come to terms with this man-made famine. When their old friend Moti dies on their threshold before they can feed her, Ganga proposes to defy tradition and give her the rites of cremation. There is a faint presage, a distant thunder on the horizon, of more far-reaching changes than any that famine or war can bring about.
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