1976's Nickelodeon Is Peter Bogdanovich's Affectionate, Problematic Tribute to Silent Film and Birth of a Nation
Considering his personality and aesthetic, it’s not surprising that Peter Bogdanovich has made more than his share of movies about movies. It’s more surprising that the former film critic, sidekick to the sum of old Hollywood, neckerchief enthusiast and preeminent cinephile has made movies about anything other than films.
Following the epic embarrassment of his tin-eared 1975 period Cole Porter musical At Long Last Love, which did so disastrously with critics and audiences that Bogdanovich famously published an open letter apologizing for the movie, the writer-director returned to the fertile field of film, which had served him so well in previous Fractured Mirror entry Targets, with another expensive, ambitious period love letter to a half-remembered era of American film in the form of 1976’s Nickelodeon, which unfortunately kept Bogdanovich’s commercial losing streak, which began with the 1974 flop Daisy Miller, going strong.
Bogdanovich reportedly directed some of the scenes here on horseback in emulation of his hero John Ford, a sign, perhaps, that the seventies superstar’s megalomania was spiraling out of control. The controversial filmmaker re-wrote W.D. Richter’s more dramatic, serious-minded screenplay to be a roaring cavalcade of intricately choreographed silent film-style physical comedy and wanted the movie distributed in black and white like his Oscar-winning hit Paper Moon, which also co-starred Ryan and Tatum O’Neal. Bogdanovich eventually received his wish when a black and white Director’s Cut DVD was released in 2009, but by that point the movie had been all but forgotten, so it was a matter of too little, too late.
Bogdanovich’s surprisingly fizzy and entertaining movie-movie follows Leo Harrigan (Ryan O’Neal), a bumbling University of Chicago-educated lawyer in the milquetoast Harold Lloyd mold who quite literally bumbles his way into a career as a film director in the crazy prehistoric days of silent cinema before 1915’s Birth of a Nation changed everything, when movies were crude, primitive contraptions made by charlatans, hucksters and scoundrels making up an industry and an art form as they went along.
With the possible and notable exceptions of Stanley Kubrick and The Driver director Walter Hill, nobody got more out of O’Neal than Bogdanovich. Bogdanovich alone looked at O’Neal and saw a distinct Cary Grant/Harold Lloyd milquetoast buffoon quality he could exploit for big laughs, first in What’s Up, Doc? and then Nickelodeon. Maybe it’s the glasses: as in What’s Up, Doc?, spectacles here distance O’Neal from his bruiser boxer image and smarten him up, making him seem professorial instead of pugilistic, charmingly geeky instead of off-puttingly cold and distant.
Burt Reynolds reunites with Bogdanovich after the all-time disaster of At Long Last Love as Buck Greenway, a role that spoofs Reynolds' own movie superstardom. Like Reynolds, the affable but dim-witted Greenway is a Southern-fried jock skilled at manly arts like riding a horse, fighting and firing a gun who stumbles into movie stardom due to an irrepressible charisma so vast the Gods of cinema angrily demanded that the gum-chewing, stoic exemplar of rugged, hirsute 1970s masculinity become the biggest and most bankable of big screen idols.
Nickelodeon was one of a series of movies about movies Reynolds made over the course of his glorious, checkered career. His old-school masculinity and movie star charisma made him perfect for movies about the art, con and business of filmmaking. Some of his biggest, most legendary roles are rooted in the tragicomic melodrama of show-business. Most notably there’s Reynolds’ revelatory, Oscar-nominated, all-time best turn as a heartbreakingly paternal porn maestro in Boogie Nights, but also a wonderfully sly, self-effacing and utterly delightful performance as a stunt man in the blockbuster mid-1970s action comedy Hooper. And he was predictably delightful in an even more self-effacing turn as himself in Mel Brooks’ lovely silent movie homage Silent Movie.
Reynolds’ final film as a director was 2000’s The Last Producer, and one of his final films as an actor was 2017’s The Last Movie Star. Reynolds was at once a man’s man/man of the people and a creature of Hollywood who was perfectly at home playing not just movie stars like himself but also directors, producers and stuntmen. Then again, Reynolds fulfilled all those roles offscreen as well so on some level he was acting from experience. Reynolds obviously loved movies but in a decidedly less cerebral, academic, scholarly fashion than Bogdanovich, and though the box-office and reviews might not have reflected it, they made for a winning team. It’s refreshing to see Reynolds mix up with New Hollywood’s preeminent Hollywood ascot-donning historian and fun to see Bogdanovich work with the man who would soon give the world Smokey and The Bandit and Cannonball Run.
Ryan O'Neal's Leo serves as an unlikely patriarch and leader of a group of renegade filmmakers forever scrambling to stay one step ahead of the Motion Picture Patents Company, which Thomas Edison’s company tried to use to keep independents out of the nascent film industry. Leo’s motley crew of filmmakers includes a sly cameraman who tells an overwhelmed Harrigan that “Any jerk can direct a movie,” played by a pre-stardom, pre-Three’s Company John Ritter, who Bogdanovich would later cast in They All Laughed and Noises Off.
Bogdanovich made a tribute to the early days of silent film that immerses itself in the stylistic techniques of the era, such as irises in and out and the selective use of inter-titles, but that’s also nearly as rooted in the rat-a-tat, machine-gun rhythms of screwball comedy patter as What’s Up, Doc? Nickelodeon is a profoundly verbal tribute to the physical comedy of the silent era executed with a sense of meticulousness and care that’s impressive but also a little distancing, as if Bogdanovich is putting on a seminar on silent film craftsmanship rather than trying to get laughs.
In that respect, the movie resembles Bogdanovich’s poorly received but similarly remarkable and underrated adaptation of Michael Frayn’s classic slamming doors stage farce Noises Off, which was so virtuoso and complicated in its staging and execution of physical comedy that it resembled an exquisitely assembled ballet or exceedingly difficult group gymnastics routine as much as it did a movie.
#SquadGoals
Particularly in its freewheeling first hour, before a time jump transforms our kooky bunch of scrappy movie makers into full-on players, Nickelodeon resembles a series of lovingly put together comedy shorts duct-taped together more than it does a feature film. It’s not just style over substance, it’s style as substance as Bogdanovich creates a movie-lover’s fantasia where the decidedly niche subject matter and the aggressively retro (albeit not as retro as the director would have liked) filmmaking style fuse together to make something as rooted in our spooky collective past as the malevolent spirits Jack Torrance encounters in the Overlook Hotel in The Shining.
Bogdanovich and his exceedingly game collaborators composed and painstakingly executed a veritable symphony of slapstick silliness in Nickelodeon, yet there’s something a little clinical and even academic in the film’s execution, a sense of perfectionism that can’t help but make the movie feel a little less spontaneous and fresh. It sure feels like every pratfall and head bonk (and I can assure you that this movie is very pratfall and head bonk-intensive) has been storyboarded and rehearsed until it becomes a little antiseptic.
Alas, by the time Nickelodeon flopped with critics and audiences, the silent-style slapstick here had been out of favor for decades, if not an entire half-century and the film’s obsessive attention to its gauntlet of smartly staged, if sometimes exhausting, set-pieces can make it feel a little inert and underwhelming emotionally, particularly where an underwhelming love triangle between the leads and their favorite leading lady is concerned.
The film’s arc has its unlikely warriors for cinema evolving from accidental moviemakers to passionate artists out to make, to paraphrase Boogie Nights, the one they will be remembered for. They can feel the bar for an entire medium and art-form being raised to seemingly impossible heights with a screening of Birth of a Nation, D.W. Griffith’s beloved ode to the Ku Klux Klan that figures even more prominently in the film’s climax than The Terror did in the climax of Targets, and in a much more problematic fashion.
It’s a curious, uncomfortable experience to watch a movie today that climaxes with its all-white cast gazing with religious awe at a movie that romanticizes and celebrates the Ku Klux Klan and, consequently, White Supremacism. These snippets depict the movie as the all-important Big Bang that single-handedly elevated glorified carny work into an enduring and important art form rather than a deeply racist film whose racial and political aspects cannot be overlooked in light of its incontrovertible importance as a film.
Nickelodeon has always been a film out of time. When his peers were ferociously engaged with the social issues of the day, Bogdanovich was fastidiously recreating a time in Hollywood’s past so distant and primitive that almost all of it has been lost forever, the victim of both a culture that does not value its past and the complicated, combustible chemicals used in making the ephemeral miracle of movie-making and distribution possible.
Ending Nickelodeon with a dewy, uncomplicated, unambiguous tribute to Birth of a Nation without acknowledging the ugliness of the film’s ideology at a time when the Black Power movement had opened the eyes of white America to the ugliness and pervasive racism of its vaunted cultural past (a past that held Gone With the Wind and Birth of a Nation as apogees of peerless and important American cinematic art) was a choice that needless to say, has aged poorly.
Time has not been entirely kind to Nickelodeon but it’s nevertheless a sprightly, elegantly composed love letter to early cinema that’s infinitely better than its reputation suggests.
Buy The Joy of Trash, The Weird Accordion to Al and the The Weird Accordion to Al in both paperback and hardcover and The Weird A-Coloring to Al and The Weird A-Coloring to Al: Colored-In Special Edition signed from me personally (recommended) over at https://www.nathanrabin.com/shop
Or you can buy The Joy of Trash here and The Weird A-Coloring to Al here and The Weird Accordion to Al here
Help ensure a future for the Happy Place during an uncertain era AND get sweet merch by pledging to the site’s Patreon account at https://www.patreon.com/nathanrabinshappyplace
Alternately you can buy The Weird Accordion to Al, signed, for just 19.50, tax and shipping included, at the https://www.nathanrabin.com/shop or for more, unsigned, from Amazon here.
I make my living exclusively through book sales and Patreon so please support independent media and one man’s dream and kick in a shekel or two!