Review of Nickelodeon (1976) by Ola G — 27 Jul 2011

Leo Harrigan (Ryan O´Neal), a young attorney and not very good at it, bumps one day into the renegade movie producer H.H Cobb (Brian Keith) and before he knows it he has been asked to write scripts for Cobb. Eventually he is sent to a small desert town to take over a group of silent movie makers as a director. The Motion Picture Patents Co. doesn´t allow this sort of filmmaking, so they send the cowboy/con artist Buck Greenway (Burt Reynolds) to sabotage Harrigan´s and Cobb´s shoot...

I have browsed the "Nickelodeon" title several times, but never seen it. Judging from what I have red about this movie, I felt it was about time I saw it. How could you fail with O´Neal and Reynolds in the lead and with Peter Bogdanovich behind the camera? Well.. fail they did. I knew from scene one that this was going to bomb. A slapstick comedy without the comedy is more or less the correct description of "Nickelodeon". Or the comedy is trying to be so in phase with the 1920´s slapstick filmaking it´s just becomes over the top. It fails in so many ways, I can´t be bothered to bring all of them up. O´Neal does the same kind of jittery nervous character we have seen before, Reynolds seems to not know what he is doing on the set and Bogdanovich must have written the script with no insight into what he was writing. This is not working in my book.