decision, but also personal ones: Bogdanovich would celebrate those days because they were the ones he found most useful and inspiring.
The film centers on Leo Harrigan (Ryan O’Neal), a meek attorney who—following a series of accidents and misunderstandings—is put to work for studio boss H. H. Cobb (Brian Keith). Leo starts off as a scenarist before being recruited to take over for a director on location in rural California. He is reassured by cameraman Frank Frank (John Ritter) that the job demands little: “It’s okay—any idiot can direct.”
In fact, Leo cottons to directing, but not because he thinks he is making art. Instead, the former attorney is charmed by the misfits and amateurs who make up his cast and crew, including Frank, leading man Buck Greenway (Burt Reynolds), leading lady Marty (Stella Stevens), and juvenile script doctor Alice (Tatum O’Neal). And he is positively smitten with Kathleen Cooke (Jane Hitchcock), an aspiring actress who is the gang’s newest initiate. A romance develops between Leo and Kathleen—later becoming a love triangle involving Leo, Buck, and Kathleen—that has a simplicity and sweetness echoing the best of silent cinema.
In fact, Leo and Kathleen’s first meeting is a sentimentalized version of the meet cute in What’s Up, Doc? Again, Ryan O’Neal finds himself hounded by a persistent woman. The difference? Where Barbra Streisand is bossy, Jane Hitchcock is bewitching. In the scene, Leo is about to step off a trolley car, in which he has just concluded what amounts to his first story conference with Cobb, when Kathleen steps aboard and stumbles. Leo, having dropped the contents of his suitcase inside the car, does not see Kathleen on the floor, although she spots him. Kathleen, we learn momentarily, is “blind as a rat,” so her point-of-view shot of Leo (seen gathering up his things in a hurry) is appropriately fuzzy. Leo rushes past Kathleen, tuning out her repeated cries of “I beg your pardon” until after he has gotten off the car. She rushes to a window and asks if he is all right. Leo, mumbling to himself, stops in midstride. Kathleen asks, “What?” Leo says, “Lollapalooza”—Cobb had earlier asked that Leo’s story be “a real lollapalooza”—and then, “Hello.” The two speak for several moments until the car begins to pull away, the camera irising-out on Jane Hitchcock’s face as it grows tinier and tinier. This time, Ryan O’Neal wants—rather than flees from—the girl.
For much of its duration, Nickelodeon is an appealing episodic comedy, recounting the haphazard means by which movies used to be made (e.g., story lines were tailored to what material was shot rather than the other way around) and the equally unplanned ways in which they were exhibited (e.g., a movie’s reels were shown out of order and in combination with those from other movies). Many of the incidents are modeled on tales relayed to Bogdanovich by such directors as Allan Dwan, Leo McCarey (for whom Leo Harrigan is named), and Raoul Walsh. But the film ends up achieving a certain heft as it steadily builds toward one of the great scenes in Bogdanovich’s filmography: the premiere on February 8, 1915, of D. W. Griffith’s The Birth of a Nation, the artistry and scope of which leaves Leo simultaneously inspired and depressed. He is inspired because he recognizes the significance and power of The Birth of a Nation and depressed because he also knows that his middling one- and two-reelers do not deserve to be mentioned in the same breath.
In excerpting passages of The Birth of a Nation in Nickelodeon, Bogdanovich chose not to focus on the earlier film’s virulent racism. Instead, he shows clips of its rousing battle scene and, in an impressive director’s cut of Nickelodeon that also shifted the film from color to black-and-white, the indisputably great scene in which the Little Colonel (Henry B. Walthall) arrives home and is met by his sister (Mae Marsh) on their front porch. The relatives’ delight at seeing each other turns somber when each actor gazes sadly into the distance. With its bittersweet tone—not to mention its moments of characters looking at and away from each other—this is a most Bogdanovichesque of scenes, even though it was directed by D. W. Griffith.
When The Birth of a Nation ends in Nickelodeon, Griffith takes the stage, and Leo—like everyone else—applauds enthusiastically. Yet as he rides home from the premiere, it is not his newfound artistic aspirations but his nostalgia for the camaraderie of making movies that convinces him to persist in his crazy trade.
Riding with Leo is the old troupe: Buck, Kathleen, and Frank, along with little Alice, who is driving. Most had gone their separate ways until being reunited for the premiere of Griffith’s epic. “Might as well quit. Best damn picture that’s ever going to be made has already been made,” Leo says, referring to The Birth of a Nation. “I’m sick of this racket anyway. Get up at dawn, work all day, every night, six days a week.”
Commiserating with him, Buck quickly agrees, but then Alice spots a glimmer of light in the darkness: a greenhouse converted into a movie studio, in which a World War I adventure is being shot. She stops the car and says, “Look at that,” to which Leo pipes in, wistfully: “They’re shooting a picture.” Shooting a picture—is there a better way to spend a life? As they drive off, they bounce ideas off of each other … the moviemaking will go on, we feel, into the 1920s and perhaps even the 1930s.
In hindsight, both At Long Last Love and Nickelodeon were too self-congratulatory—of Bogdanovich’s success in life, of his exemplary taste in film—to be large successes, but perhaps such a fate was for the best. If they had been hits, would Bogdanovich have ever taken stock and returned with a follow-up as fascinating as Saint Jack? Based on a novel by Paul Theroux, the film is one of Bogdanovich’s finest, owing much to the gritty, unadorned style of Targets. In fact, the films have the same producer, Roger Corman. They share something else, too: a main character worthy of our admiration. Like Byron Orlok in Targets, Jack Flowers (Ben Gazzara) in Saint Jack is a virtuous figure in a corrupt world. Of course, the great irony of the story is that Jack is an American-born pimp who in the latter days of the Vietnam War makes Singapore his home. When we first meet him, Jack seems more like a rogue than a hero—we grin at his endless barking of orders to underlings and superiors alike and his sincere desire that his paying customers have a good time.
But make no mistake: in Jack’s own seedy way, he is as solid, as dependable as Byron Orlok—or Sam the Lion or even John Ford. Jack proves his mettle when a charming CIA agent (Bogdanovich in a devilish performance) offers him $25,000 to surreptitiously photograph an encounter between a muckraking U.S. senator (former James Bond star George Lazenby) and a male prostitute. In a fix and desperate for money—thanks to rival houses of prostitution that have brought his business to an end—Jack goes along with the scheme up to a point but ultimately realizes he cannot go through with it.
Long before the film’s genuinely suspenseful finale, though, we know that Jack is one of the good guys. His qualities are especially evident in the friendship he strikes up with a placid British accountant named William Leigh (Denholm Elliott), whose dreams are so different from Jack’s: William fancies retiring “to a small Georgian house in the West country,” accompanied by his wife and a little pond filled with trout. From their first encounter, Jack handles William kindly—almost gingerly; the Englishman’s rackety cough, heard on the first of his three stops in Singapore, suggests some brewing illness. “What is it—your ticker?” Jack asks, afraid, perhaps, of the answer. Howard Hawks referred to some of his own films as “love affairs between two men,” but no such love affair in a Hawks film was ever as tender as that between Jack Flowers and William Leigh in Saint Jack.
For Jack, William’s certain death spells the end of everything decent. Coursing through the film is a tone of longing and regret. Before Jack is to entrap the senator, he waits in a lobby and looks at a wall of clocks displaying times around the globe—he pauses to ponder the time in New York, his hometown, looking pensive and sad. Even when Jack’s girlfriend of the moment, Monika (Monika Subramaniam), says, upon parting, “I look for you in Ceylon,” it sounds as if she is saying good-bye rather than making a promise for the future. At least Jack has his integrity—as did Bogdanovich, for whom Saint Jack was a comeback in miniature. Although the film was
