We’re Screening Paper Moon (1973): A Staff Pick Worth Rediscovering

Paper Moon opens with a funeral. At her graveside, young Addie Loggins grieves the death of her mother. We hear the strains of the hymn Rock of Ages, as, off in the distance, conman and one-time acquaintance of Addie’s now deceased mother, Moses Pray, sputters and spurts onto the scene.

Rock of Ages, cleft for me,

let me hide myself in thee;

let the water and the blood,

from thy wounded side which flowed,

be of sin the double cure;

save from wrath and make me pure.

The vivid imagery within these words echo throughout the film, but it’s at this point the precocious Loggins first spots an opportunity to go on and forge an unlikely partnership.

The conceit that throws these two together is one full of sadness and despair, and one that speaks heavily to the period in which Paper Moon is set. However, it is one that also begins their journey of grifting their way across the Great Depression-era USA.

The 1930’s was a tumultuous decade for the USA, and for most parts of the world. The effects of the stock market crash of 1929 would last the majority of the following decade and lead to total economic disorder – in America banks would lose faith in the economic system and people, jobless, often homeless and living on breadlines, would lose faith in any kind of future.

Kansas, like many of the neighbouring states, suffered further misery as droughts and dust storms struck the Great Plains. Thick, heavy clouds of towering darkness blew through these towns, stripping topsoil, destroying crops and livestock in unprecedented amounts, at a time when agriculture was key to the state’s sustained economic welfare.

1935 saw the worst year for Kansas, as what became known black blizzards stormed the state. On March 15th, a fog so thick and intense enveloped the town, daily life ground to a complete halt. One year later, we see Moses join Addie at her mother’s graveside.

1851; a small Village in the North East of England began its development as a shipbuilding town. In 1852 its first ship was launched and by 1902 Palmer’s shipyard in Jarrow employed about 10,000 men and boys. When the Great Depression hit the UK, the demand for shipbuilding declined and eventually Palmer’s collapsed and disappeared in 1933, with it all those jobs vanished too. With no alternative source of work or income, the town fell into poverty and malnutrition, already felt from the worldwide depression.

The story in Paper Moon may be deeply connected to Kansas, but its roots connect many.

At first it may seem hard to imagine how so much humour could be extracted from this voyage through the abject poverty and desperation of mid-western 1930’s America. 

However, Paper Moon artfully balances those harsh realities, with a graceful and kind sweetness, that never ventures into overly saccharine territory, or ever feels the need to manipulate you into feeling. 

Instead, driven by the charismatic real life father-daughter duo Ryan and Tatum O’Neal, and combined with Peter Bogdanovich and Polly Platt’s loving and pitch perfect recreation of the time period, Paper Moon emerges as a deft, subversive and delightful road comedy that exudes a glowing monochrome warmth, full of heart and as charming as it is anarchic.

While many of the families affected by the plight of 1930s Kansas left to find a better life in California’s golden state, many also stayed, bonded over their hardship and formed communities, showing a steely determination and courage that allowed them to build new homes.

In 1936, led by Councillor David Riley, chair of the Jarrow council, and Ellen Wilkinson, MP for Jarrow, around 200 men marched from the small, former shipbuilding town in the North East of England, to 10 Downing Street, in protest against the unemployment and poverty that plagued the town.

Amongst the real life stories of adversity in the severity of the depression that struck both nations, what’s important and noteworthy to acknowledge is the resilience shown by the communities within and their willingness to pull together and look for opportunity, where previously there only lay hard times. It’s from this optimism that the seeds of the future can be sewn.

For me, the crux of the film, and the true beauty there within, lies in the importance of those connections – like the people of Kansas, like the people of Jarrow and like the one we see develop between Addie and Moses – and how these bonds can become your rock, your shelter from the guilt and the sin and can enable us to find faith in someone who believes in you, and how that belief can help you look toward the promise and hope of better and brighter days.

Fitting then, that the song that opens the film and shares its title should contain the entirely pertinent and beautifully bittersweet refrain; “it wouldn’t be make-believe, if you believed in me.”

Tyneside Cinema is showing Paper Moon via 35mm print on 8th July and you can book tickets here.