Tatum O'Neal and Madeline Kahn, Paper Moon

David Thomson

"The coup of the film would seem to be casting Ryan O'Neal as Mose and Tatum, his real daughter, as Addie. She was ten when she won the Supporting Actress Oscar, and she has done nothing else to remind one of this flawless performance. Was it being with her dad that did it? Was it that Bogdanovich at that time had an assured way with actors? Or is it so good a role that any adult could play it? Whatever answer you prefer, I think this is among the toughest views of children in the unduly sentimental range of the American film. The real movie star of the years in which Paper Moon was set was Shirley Temple, whose goodness was as true as her dimples. Whereas Addie is born old and wise--and this this is a film that every ambitious child loves.

"Another point of view is to say that Tatum O'Neal is far more than a supporting actress in Paper Moon. Her role dominates the film. She is its mind, its conscience, its humor and fears. So if Tatum had got Best Actress (that went to Glenda Jackson in A Touch of Class), then a further justice could have been done--giving the Supporting Actress Oscar to Madeline Kahn for her superb Trixie Delight. There is much else, including John Hillerman in tow parts, Randy Quaid, P. J. Johnson, and Burton Gilliam...."

David Thomson, Have You Seen...? A Personal Introduction to 1,000 Films (2008), p. 642


"Oddly, Kahn had already done a beautiful job in a real part, all lampoon aside, in Paper Moon (1973)... Kahn played a small part in the film's center as Trixie Delight, the baby-talking hooker whom the con man picks up. Figuring herself Kahn's rival, Tatum at one point pulls a sit-down strike, a serious threat in a road picture. Nothing can move her--until Kahn picks her way up a hill on her bitty spike heels in her pathetic finery to intimidate, bribe, and at last beseech the little girl not to ruin this gig for her. It's a poignant, smartly underplayed passage, the only honest thing the character says in the whole picture. Kahn got an Oscar nomination for her role, too...."

Ethan Mordden, Movie Star: A Look at the Women Who Made Hollywood (1983), p. 239

Anne Bancroft, The Miracle Worker

"....It was Arthur Penn's film of the [The Miracle Worker] (1962) that brought her back to movies and a working of raw emotion, torn between independence and her bond with Helen Keller, great enough to justify the dissatisfaction with her early films. The Oscar for that part was irrelevant to its frightening complexity. As well as nursing the performance of Patty Duke, she so dramatized the struggle between liberty and discipline that she probably helped reveal Penn's own talent to himself...."

David Thomson, A Biographical Dictionary of Film (3rd Edition) (1994), p. 41