The Mirror and the Scene

Considered as the first of the Ealing Comedies, Hue and Cry (1947) is a socio-realist thriller for children set amongst the rubble of post-war London. Scene after scene show swathes of a crumbling city. The ruins serve as a playground for the children and in an odd way a nurturing ground.




Hue and Cry tells the story of a gang of boys, Joe chief among them, who discover that a criminal gang are communicating to each other covertly through a comic book called Trump. He reaches out to the comic book's author, played by Alistair Sim (best known for his portrayal of Ebenezer Scrooge) for clues and begins to piece together the activities of the criminal gang. Little does he realise how close to the central figure of the criminal gang he is. Joe and his friends pursue a sinister lady who works for the publisher of the comic books as they suspect that she is is in cahoots with the leader of the criminal gang, played by Jack Warner masquerading as a fruit and veg seller in Covent Garden.

I was reminded somewhat of Luis Buñuel's Los Olvidados (1950), which shares the same social realist context featuring child protagonists growing up amidst poverty, yet in Hue and Cry we witness children living in poverty who do not turn to crime and delinquency but attempt to uncover the immoral actions of the adults.

For a film with a dark side, this is a light hearted romp through post-war London. Here the children are bold and triumphant and the adults are devious or disconnected and distant. 

This film is now considered culturally significant because it is one of the last to truly show the damage inflicted on London during the Blitz. In the years that followed, rebuilding projects would considerably change whole sections of the city, and in many ways this film preserves the memory of an older and now lost London.

Utilising black and white much as with The Last Picture Show (1971), Peter Bogdanovich goes vintage again and captures the period, the dust, the radio (archived recordings of Jack Benny); the artefacts of a time gone by.

Paper Moon is the story of Addie (Tatum O'Neal) a girl who has lost her mother and needs to be relocated to her aunt's. A man called Moses (Ryan O'Neal) shows up at her mothers funeral, he is given the responsibility of delivering Addie to her aunt's. He might well be her father (Ryan O'Neal and Tatum O'Neal are father and daughter) but this will remain an unknown. Their relationship at first turbulent eventually evolves into a duo up to mischief and adventure. It's a beautiful little road movie about a rather unorthodox 'father/daughter' relationship.

The opening shot in Paper Moon

The film opens with the sound of wind rustling across the plains and the strains of the hymn 'Rock of Ages'. The beautiful opening shot of Addie has evokes Dreyer and Pasolini. Addie is a child of the depression and over the next decade and a half there will be many changes and advances which will define the America she has known, against the one that is to come.   

Addie listening to Jack Benny

Radio plays a crucial role in Paper Moon, and at every juncture Addie relies on it for escapism. She listens to Jack Benny and her frequent references to Frankie (Franklin Delano Roosevelt) contextualises the impact radio had on the population and how FDR's fireside chats connected the country and shaped the consciousness of the people.

Moses and Addie sit in a cafe, while a Will Rogers plays across the street

From the shots of Kansas, to the encroaching commercialism and images from the outside world present in the cafe Moses and Addie dine at it's clear the film presents an America undergoing great cultural and technological changes. Brand names and advertisements are seen on the walls and across the street a Will Rogers film, Steamboat Round the Bend (1935) plays. The American dream is epitomised by the caption 'Dream' which suggests the growing influence of cinema on the American way of life as a form of escapism but also as a medium for reflecting American culture back on itself  and in the process changing and reshaping the culture.

Moses and the hillbilly wrestle

Paper Moon depicts the evolution of the American way of life and the slow homogenisation of the smaller cultural cliques, state to state, town to town - the exchanges of the rural and the City. Much of this is is also represented by the difference between the small towns and the rural areas, highlighted particularly in a scene where Moses trades in his car for a truck and the hillbilly owner of the truck refers to him as a "city boy". The battle of town and country, quaint and new is established in the wrestling fight between the hillbilly's son and Moses.



Things turn sour on the duo's adventure when they encounter a local bootlegger in Kansas and Moses and the music on the radio changes as well. The use of 'Down On The Banks Of The Ohio' by the Blue Sky Boys is perfectly placed after the previous scene which involved Moses discovering the woman from the carnival in bed with the hotel manager, a tryst arranged by Addie, resulting in Moses and Addie leaving for the next town. The song, a Murder Ballad, tells the tale of a man who murders his lover because she would not marry him. The song's theme outlines how Moses and Addie have entered the dark underbelly of American life, and is specifically more rural than the city-sounding tunes heard so far on their radio. It is a rural song about the real grit of love and death in a still wild untamed and morally abtuse land and perfectly placed as it showcases the transfer of early Folk (English to American) into early Country Music against the more refined and newer city tunes of Broadway and Tin Pan Alley. Unlike 'Ohio', 'Paper Moon' is a city song about dreams and aspirations in an increasingly plastic (or was it Bakelite?) world. The song underlines the darker scenes to follow where Moses and Addie discover that the bootlegger's brother is a crooked Sheriff.


There is a happy ending to Paper Moon. But it's certainly not entirely one of make believe. Addie arrives at the home of her aunt and given the choice to live the perfect American family life, she hesitates and returns to a reluctant Moses. The moment is bittersweet because she would rather remain on the road with him on a path of uncertainty and adventure and he would rather she remain with her aunt. This is a film of surfaces, of subtext, and the final scenes evoke this beautifully. Its not so much how the characters interact or what they say, there is an emotional intensity which suggests the feelings underneath the dialogue. There is no embrace between the two, but as with doubts about Moses denial that he is her father, you sense in the same way that deep down somehow he wants to her to come along with him after all.

The film is highly stylised. Wide shots and close-ups help evoke the sense of classic Americana, the relationships between the characters and their surroundings. Some of the establishing shots in the film are interesting in how they present characters against their environment, particularly in an early shot where Moses aims to swindle Mr Robertson out of $200 because of his brother's connection to Addie's mother's death. Here the perspective shots of the characters in relation to the car, the factory office and the factory, create a beautiful still image, in each case the small insignificance of the characters against their environment. There is something hyperreal about the dainty looking office (which looks much like an American home) against an overbearing industrial backdrop.


Paper Moon is framed by the song 'It's Only A Paper Moon', written by Harold Arlen. It was the sage advice of Orson Welles which resulted in Peter Bogdanovich naming the film Paper Moon. In fact Welles said it was so good that, "you don't even need to release the film, just put out the title on it's own". It was originally used in the film Take A Chance (1933), which was a rehash of a Broadway musical where two small time gamblers leave the carnival circuit to seek out fame and fortune. There is certainly something of this in Paper Moon when Moses forms a relationship with a women from a travelling carnival