Peter Bogdanovich Films | Peter Bogdanovich Filmography | Peter Bogdanovich Biography | Peter Bogdanovich Career | Peter Bogdanovich Awards

Of all trades ancillary to the cinema, few offer worse preparation for a directing career than criticism. Bogdanovich's background as Hollywood historian and profiler of its legendary figures inevitably invited comparisons between his movies and those of directors like Ford, Hawks, and Dwan, whom he had deified. That he should have occasionally created films that deserve such comparison argues for his skill and resilience.

He first attracted attention with Targets, a flashy exercise with an ailing Boris Karloff playing straight man to Bogdanovich's film-buff director and a psychotic sniper menacing the audience at a drive-in cinema. The documentary Directed by John Ford likewise exploited Hollywood history, but with uncertain scholarship and even less certain taste. Yet in his first major fiction feature, based on Larry McMurtry's rural nocturne The Last Picture Show, Bogdanovich created a precise and moving chronicle of small-town values eroded by selfishness and disloyalty. He also showed a flair for casting in his choice of underrated veterans and fresh newcomers. Ben Johnson, Cloris Leachman, and Ellen Burstyn earned new respect, while Timothy Bottoms, Jeff Bridges, and Cybill Shepherd received boosts to nascent careers? though Shepherd, via her relationship with the director, was to prove a troublesome protegee.

What's Up, Doc? and Paper Moon are among the shapeliest comedies of the 1970s, trading on nostalgia but undercutting it with sly character-playing and dead-pan wit. Ryan and Tatum O'Neal achieve a stylish ensemble performance in the latter as 1930s con-man and unwanted orphan auxiliary; in the former, O'Neal makes a creditable attempt at playing Cary Grant to Barbra Streisand's Hepburn, backed up by a typically rich character cast?notably Austin Pendleton, Kenneth Mars, and the ululating Madeline Kahn.

Daisy Miller, a period vehicle for Shepherd more redolent of Henry King than Henry James, inaugurated Bogdanovich's decline. An attempt at a 1930s Cole Porter musical, At Long Last Love likewise flopped, as did Nickelodeon, an unexpectedly leaden tribute to pioneer moviemaking. He returned to form with a low-budget adaptation of Paul Theroux's Saint Jack, dignified by Ben Gazzara's performance as the ironic man of honor coping with Occidental venality and Asian corruption. And the Manhattan comedy They All Laughed, though widely disliked, showed a truer synthesis of screwball humour and sentimentality than other equivalent films, and marked a return by Bogdanovich to the spirit of the classical directors he admires.

Bogdanovich worked little in the 1980s, apparently traumatised by the murder of his lover Dorothy Stratten shortly after her acting debut in They All Laughed. At decade's end, in a twin return to his roots that offered some hope for his future, he married Stratten's sister and directed Texasville, a Last Picture Show sequel with many of the original cast.

Texasville, like most sequels, fails because what made the original interesting and valuable cannot be repeated. Like Bogdanovich himself, then at the beginning of his career, the characters in The Last Picture Show were embarked, with tragi-comic results, on the painful journey into adulthood; the loss of childhood certainties was mirrored by the film's detailed mise-en-scene, a small Texas town that loses its heart and soul when a benevolent patriarch dies suddenly. Grown up, they are no longer connected by the irresistible force of adolescence, and Bogdanovich's film?though based on novelist Larry McMurtry's often poignant continuation? wanders in search of a plot, boring the spectator with childish antics meant to signify the onset of a collective life crisis. The story goes on, but without much interest or direction.

Much the same might be said of his career in the 1990s, which has not prospered. The Thing Called Love tries to recapture Bogdanovich's earlier success with coming-of-age stories (not only The Last Picture Show but also Paper Moon). However, this overly predictable and slow-moving saga of young adults trying to make it big in the highly competitive world of country music deservedly failed to find much of an audience. Noises Off based on Michael Frayn's hugely successful play, has moments that recall Bogdanovich's earlier success with fast-paced farce (the delightful What's Up, Doc?), but lacks a firm sense of directorial control; a fine cast?including Michael Caine and Carol Burnett?never becomes an effective ensemble, and the film's only virtues derive from Frayn's play, whose commercial productions are far superior to this screen version.?JOHN BAXTER and R. BARTON PALMER