NICKELODEON (1976)
Reviewed by Jerry Saravia
"Nickelodeon" looks and feels like a warmed-over nostalgia piece. It is suffused with a sepia-toned glow and it reminds us of a different time and place when movies were just mere entertainments you could watch for a nickle. Peter Bogdanovich, a master craftsman, is the right director for this type of film, but the spirit and joy are missing.
Set in the 1910's, Ryan O'Neal is Leo Harrigan, an attorney who is close to losing a case involving assault. He somehow stumbles into a movie producer (Brian Keith) who urges him to write a film about a Texas Ranger (how this happens is part of the fun of the movie's few contrivances). After working in the film industry for many years, O'Neal turns from writer to director. Over some unfortunate mishaps (some of which are funny), O'Neal's luggage gets switched with a movie stuntman and horse rider's luggage, Buck Greenway (Burt Reynolds), and both men vie for the same breathless beauty, Kathleen Cooke (Jane Hitchcock) who has one pratfall after another because she is nearsighted. Meanwhile, slasptick ensues and we get a klansman on stage that gets cheers from the audience (times have changed); a tough little girl with a rattlesnake (Tatum O'Neal); more misplaced luggage scenes; the premiere of D. W. Griffith's notorious "Birth of a Nation"; actors putting on blackface, and not a heck of a lot more.
"Nickelodeon" is mostly aimless and inert, despite a game cast that includes John Ritter and Stella Stevens. Burt Reynolds comes off best, showing ample Southern charm that illustrates what a colorful character actor he might have become. Ryan O'Neal is so transparent that you could throw him through a sieve and he'd still be intact. Tatum O'Neal mostly recedes in the background, occasionally yelling so we know she is there. And Jane Hitchcock is radiant to look at but the underwritten screenplay dissolves her before the end credits.
Bogdanovich has misdirected "Nickelodeon," shifting tone and rhythm without any regards to the thin story involving patents, the first "real war in movies." There is one clever long take where we see several tents strung together with a different movie made in each one. It is such a good scene that I'd almost recommend it, but it is hardly enough.
