Night Moves

R.I. P., Gene

The 1970s were truly a golden age for cinema, arguably the last to date.   Film noir, by then branded "neo-noir", was well represented, including 1975's NIGHT MOVES.   Like many of its type, a saturation of hopelessness infects every shot, even (especially?) when sunlight fills the frame.  This film takes place in Los Angeles and the Florida Keys, where the skies are often clear but souls are no less corrupted than anywhere else.  Director Arthur Penn's film is a relentless downer, but so beautifully melancholy and perceptive that watching it is a real retro pleasure.  Troubling, yet involving.

Gene Hackman plays Harry Moseby, a private investigator content with his own low rent existence, working for himself.  His wife Ellen (Susan Clark) wishes he'd join the mainstream and work for a P.I. agency.  Their marriage suffers her affair with a guy named Marty (Harris Yulin), whom Harry sees kissing his wife after they just saw the Eric Rohmer film  ONE NIGHT AT MAUD'S.   He'd declined an invitation for the movie as he feels watching a Rohmer film is like "watching paint dry."  So when Harry takes a new case and has to travel to Florida to track a missing sixteen year old, he's far from reluctant.  Maybe he sees it as therapy.

Typically in stories like this, people who seem OK are not what they seem.  Sometimes the reverse is also true.  Harry is hired by an aging former B-movie actress named Arlene Iverson (Janet Ward) to find and bring back her daughter Delly (Melanie Griffith), now apparently living with Arlene's ex, Tom (John Crawford) somewhere around Key Largo.   Harry will discover Tom also lives with Paula (Jennifer Warren), a wayward, solemn, 30ish woman who sends mixed signals.   Also in the stew is Quentin (James Woods), a shifty mechanic who once dated Delly, and Joey Ziegler (Edward Binns), a Hollywood stuntman.  

Harry, certainly no dolt but not the quickest study, will be confounded by the dynamics of the relationships of these characters, to him and each other.  The more he learns, the more his own sense of hopelessness and meaninglessness will serve to consume.  Our last image of Harry illustrates this quite perfectly in one of the finest, most haunting conclusions of any movie of the 1970s. 

Penn has been called a master director and this film makes the case.   So assured and smooth.  And what an atmosphere he creates.  The Key West stuff was shot in other parts of Florida but still evokes the sweaty desperation and restlessness to which anyone who's lived there can attest.   Alan Sharp's screenplay is quite good, but the mystery isn't airtight.  In fact, it's not far off from what you'd see on an episode of any T.V. detective show of its era.   But those rich characterizations owe as much to the script as the actors' portrayals.  Beautifully and believably sketched.  And it goes without saying that Hackman is a treasure, one of the most engaging and natural of actors.

Many viewers have interpreted NIGHT MOVES, its title in part a homophone relating to a chess motif, as a statement on a post-Watergate, post-counterculture society in existential ruin.  To others not familiar with those time periods, it may come off more as a timeless morality play.  Actions and motivations as old as mankind.  This is not the film to seek out to remind you that Good still exists in the world.  Yet, even the "bad" characters here are not drawn as purely evil.  This is best demonstrated during that finale, when a character we thought we knew is revealed to be something else, yet seems completely helpless and confused to explain just why.

Or maybe the ultimate message of Penn's movie is simply "Don't go to Florida."