By Michael F. Duggan
Peter Bogdanovich is gone.
A master technical director who was equally an artist, he was a part of the “New Hollywood” generation of filmmakers that includes Woody Allen, Robert Altman, Francis Ford Coppola, Milos Forman, Terrence Malick, Mike Nichols, Sam Peckinpah, George Roy Hill, Arthur Penn, Sidney Pollock, Stanley Kubrick, George Lucas, and Steven Spielberg. He had a good historical sense and knew how to set the feel for a period with music and material culture as well as anybody (few filmmakers knew the 20th century American Songbook better). He had the courage and insight to make artistic, commercially successful, black and white films in the early 1970s (The Last Picture Show, Paper Moon). He was also a master of the screwball comedy (What’s Up Doc?) and even 1910s-20s slapstick (Nickelodeon).
Paper Moon is wonderful (shot in stark monochrome with red and green filters for definition and in wide angel for universal depth of focus). Seldom has an eight-and-a-half-year-old so powerfully upstaged pretty much everybody else in a film (except for Madeline Kahn), and a lot of that was the result of good directing (and amazing father-daughter screen chemistry). The final scene and ending credits are among my all-time favorites.
If the criteria for being a great director is to have made at least one great film, then he makes the cut (The Last Picture Show).