About every six months or so, Criterion.com has a 50% off sale on their blu-rays/DVDs and they must make a good 90% of their sales in that window, because it's definitely a thing online. Anyway, I try to curtail my habit, especially as we have films that are years old and we've yet to watch them (not to mention those last 5 or 6 in the box set we've had for well over a decade), so I tend to buy things that I think we'll watch regularly. This includes Charlie Chaplin and Harold Lloyd films (Criterion only does one Buster Keaton - his final masterpiece before the studios ruined his life by taking away his creative control, The Cameraman, but we have all the others by the less-trendy but no less reputable Kino Lorber), and, in a similar black and white vein, this film, which I'm sure I saw once on telly as a child, but had very little memory of. It's actually the 4K version, which is supposedly one step up from Blu Ray, but I don't notice the difference. Anyway: verdict - very good indeed, and not sentimental as I feared. And Ryan O'Neal, while of course overshadowed by Tatum (to her detriment, apparently - not a great father), is very good.
It's funny, he's definitely a limited actor, but that didn't stop him being in truly excellent films (two of them - this and What's Up Doc? directed by Peter Bogdanovich, but probably the best being Barry Lyndon). Shame about the alcoholism and general abuse.
Also a standout (and also nominated for best supporting actress, losing to Tatum) is the always great Madeline Kahn, playing a rather coarser and sadder character than her normal Mel Brooks fare, and only in the film for 17 minutes, although you'd never know it from her outsized footprint.
The film is pretty picaresque. It begins with Tatam O'Neal's Addie attending the funeral of her mother (who seems to have been the local lady of the night) with a few neighbors at a desolate graveyard out in the middle of a very flat landscape, when we see a backfiring car approaching across the plains. It's Ryan O'Neal's Moze, come to pay his respects. He is immediately suspected of being Addie's real father, owing to a remarkable similarity in chin shape, noted by the neighbors. They soon persuade him to take Addie to stay with her aunt in Missouri, and while he initially seems reluctant, we soon discover that he had plans all along to use Addie to extract money from the local plant owner whose relative (son?) it was that caused Addie to be orphaned. He gets $200, and uses a fair chunk of it to fix up his car (all new tires) and a small chunk of it to buy Addie a train ticket. But in a diner over a Nehi and coney island she rejects the idea of going by train and insists that the $200 (she was listening in) is hers.
So begins their odyssey. Very quickly Addie discovers (a) that Moze's business is a con job whereby he looks up recently widowed women in the newspaper and arrives at their door claiming to have a deluxe monogrammed bible for the husband that he bought to give as a gift to the wife. Addie quickly works out that she is better at assessing how much each woman will pay (and, occasionally, that she shouldn't be swindled at all) than Moze and they make a pretty good team. Until, that is, they stop off at a fair and Moze becomes besotted with Trixie Delight (Kahn) who, along with her teenage black "maid" Imogene (who is only still with Trixie (who hasn't paid her) because she can't afford to go home), joins their party.
Addie soon becomes tired of Moze's infatuation (he doesn't work and he's blowing all their money on things like a new car) and works out a way to get Moze to dump Trixie by tempting her into an assignation when she thinks Moze is away for the day. We then catch up with them weeks later, having hit a bit of a dry spell in the bible-selling business, when they oversee a bootlegger's operation and find out the shed where he's stored all his booze. They steal a far quantity of it and sell it back to him, before making good their escape. Well - not quite. Turns out he's related to the local law (played by an actor (John Hillerman) I recognized from Magnum P.I., only doing a Southern accent rather than an English one)
who arrests them and tries to find the $600+ that he knows they should have. Fortunately Addie has it stashed in the lining of her hat, and they manage to do a runner. As he is in hot pursuit, though, they have to go off road and try to swap out their car. This they do by Moze winning a wrestling match (Ryan O'Neal actually was a wrestler) with a hulking hayseed played by a very young Randy Quaid, and in the ancient truck they get in exchange they manage to reach the safety of Missouri. Addie is obviously scared that Moze intends to dump her with her aunt, but by this point he's clearly enamored of their partnership and they set up a big score involving duping the owner of a silver mine. Alas, just as Moze is setting out to the arranged meeting, he runs into the corrupt cop, who, while he can't arrest him in Missouri, can still beat him viciously and take all their money.
So it's off to Addie's aunt for Addie. Fortunately, she seems a lovely woman who lives in a very nice house, with a piano, just like Addie has always wanted, and seems genuinely concerned with Addie. All's well that ends well (except for the penniless, battered Moze) right? Well...
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