The O’Neals, Ryan and Tatum, make for appealing swindlers in Paper Moon

Every day, Watch This offers staff recommendations inspired by a new movie coming out that week. This week: Just in time for The Family, starring Robert De Niro as a mobster who enters the Witness Protection Program with his wife and kids, we’re recommending five tales of crime and kinship.
Paper Moon (1973)
Paper Moon wastes no time in suggesting that con man Moses Pray (Ryan O’Neal) may be the father of 9-year-old Addie Loggins (Tatum O’Neal). When Moses arrives to pay his respects at the funeral of Addie’s mother, other characters point out their physical resemblance, which the O’Neals share as real-life father and daughter, and Addie floats the possibility herself several times. Moses, in turn, wastes no time denying it: “Just because a man meets a woman in a barroom doesn’t make him your pa.” Whether out of guilt or pity, he allows himself to be roped into driving the tyke over to her next of kin, so long as he can make some stops to sell Bibles to widows on the way.
With questions of paternity dismissed (or at least set aside) early on, Peter Bogdanovich’s comedy moves at the speed of its cons, efficiently forcing a smooth-talking hustler into collaboration with a surly, radio-loving, cigarette-smoking prepubescent. The littler O’Neal regards the elder warily—not because of his scams, but because she feels entitled to a cut. Indeed, she introduces additional nuance and plausibility to this questionable line of work. Given the small-time nature of their cons, the not-inconsiderable work involved, and the film’s Depression-era setting, selling unrequested Bibles and bilking cashiers out of change begins to seem almost like a legitimate day job.