Directed by: Arthur Penn.
Written by: Alan Sharp.
Starring: Gene Hackman (Harry Moseby), Jennifer Warren (Paula), Susan Clark (Ellen Moseby), Edward Binns (Joey Ziegler), Harris Yulin (Marty Heller), Kenneth Mars (Nick), Janet Ward (Arlene Iverson), James Woods (Quentin), Melanie Griffith (Delly Grastner), Anthony Costello (Marv Ellman), John Crawford (Tom Iverson).
The
post-Vietnam, post-Watergate era was perhaps the most cynical time in American
history – and that cynicism affected the movies in a big way – particularly a
series of neo-noirs of the time. Roman Polanski’s Chinatown (1974) ends with
the futile line “Forget it Jake, its Chinatown”. Francis Ford Coppola’s The
Conversation (1974) is about a man who is apparently the best at his job, but
completely and totally misunderstands the title conversation until it’s too
late. Robert Altman’s The Long Goodbye (1973) is based on a Raymond Chandler
Philip Marlowe novel from 20 years earlier, and Altman has great fun pointing
out how much has changed in the decades since – and turns Chandler’s noir hero
into a cold blooded murderer. Arthur Penn’s Night Moves (1975) probably isn’t
quite as well-known as those other movies, but it deserves to be in their
company – and it’s perhaps more cynical than any of them. It stars Gene Hackman
as a detective who from beginning to end has no real idea what is going on –
and ends with him literally going around in circles trying to piece together
yet another twist in a case that had so many of them – that he keeps thinking
he has figured out, and keeps being completely wrong.
It
would be easy to call Harry Moseby (Hackman) a little on the slow side – he’s a
former professional football player, who now makes his living as a P.I. –
mainly doing divorce and runaway cases. His wife asks him to go to an Erich
Rohmer movie with her, but he declines. “I saw a Rohmer movie once. It was
kinda of like watching paint dry” he says in the film’s most famous line of
dialogue. He doesn’t realize that his wife, Ellen (Susan Clark) is cheating on
him – and even when he finds out, he seems to be acting hurt more than actually
being hurt.
He gets
hired by a woman who could be straight out of a Chandler Marlowe novel – Arlene
Iverson (Janet Ward) is a former B-movie starlet, who has married and divorced
a few rich men in her life, and now is living on all that money, drinking her
days into oblivion. She wants Moseby to find her daughter Delly (Melanie Griffith
– in her first movie) – a teenager vixen who has taken after her mother, who
she hates, in that she’ll sleep with just about any guy who pays her the
slightest attention (both mother and daughter will hit on Moseby throughout the
movie). Moseby tracks her down in the Florida Keys, living with her
ex-stepfather Tom (John Crawford) and his, what? (Girlfriend? Lover?
Companion?) Paula (Jennifer Warren). From there the plot gets thicker and more
twisted and I won’t say anything else except to say that the movie locks in on
Moseby’s point of view, and he makes deductions and assumptions that seem to
make sense at the time. Watching the film both times I have, I’d be hard
pressed to come up with a different solution than Moseby does – even the second
time through when I knew the mysteries. The movie doesn’t play like a typical
mystery film where the director and writer plant clues for the audience to put
together as the movie goes along. There’s no real way you could figure out what
really happened as you watch the movie – not because the movie withholds the
information (not really anyway), but because Moseby doesn’t see all the pieces
of the puzzle until it’s too late – and neither do we. And looking back at all
the puzzle pieces at the end of the movie, I’m sure there will be quite a few
viewers like myself who still don’t think they fully understand what the hell
happened or why. In a sense, we’re stuck on that boat with Moseby going round
and round wondering what the hell went wrong.
In many
movies, that would be a flaw – and I’m sure that the people who spend their
time trying hard to decode every movie – treating them as a puzzle to be solved
rather than a work of art to be interpreted will think it’s a flaw here as
well. It’s not one to me though, because although Night Moves looks like a
typical noir mystery, it really isn’t – it doesn’t really care about the plot,
which after all really is kind of ridiculous (the devious conspiracy plot
involves smuggling, and really could come out of Hardy Boys novel “They’re all
about smugglers.” “Except this one: The Smugglers of Pirate’s Cove. It’s about
pirates”)
So what
is Night Moves really about if it’s not about its overly complex mystery? In
part, it is a character study of Moseby – a character who is drifting, not sure
what to do with his life. He’s middle aged, has one career behind him, another
that doesn’t seem to be going anywhere, a childless marriage that may break up
because of infidelity on her part (and then his). Hackman is one of the few
actors who could make a man like Moseby – kind of dull, not overly bright – and
make him seem sympathetic and likable. He really is kind of asshole if you
think about it – but everyone around him is even worse, so you forgive him his
sins. But mainly, I think it is a portrait of a society that simply cannot
follow along with what the hell is happening. The conspiracies are too big, too
wide ranging, and we don’t have all the information we need in order to know
who the hell is screwing us this time. However well-intentioned Harry Moseby
is, he has no clue what he’s gotten himself into.
The
movie was directed by Arthur Penn, whose Bonnie & Clyde was one of the
movies that helped announce a new generation of American filmmaker, influenced
by the young, European masters like Godard and Truffaut. That golden age of
American filmmaking lasted from 1967 – when he made Bonnie & Clyde – until
about 1975, when he made Night Moves. Certainly American movies were already
moving back towards a modern studio centric, blockbuster model even before this
year, but Steven Spielberg’s Jaws pretty much sealed the deal, even if we
continued to see trickles of that golden age until Michael Cimino’s Heaven’s
Gate (1980) pretty much put a nail in its coffin.
Penn
was a major figure in American film at that time – but Night Moves may have
been his last hooray – although he continued to direct afterwards, none of his
previous films are have garnered the same praise as his work during this period
(which also included Alice’s Restaurant and Little Big Man). It’s remarkable
how Penn went from something with the energy of Bonnie and Clyde – also
co-starring Hackman – and its portrait of ultimately futile, but liberating,
youthful rebellion, into something as dark and cynical as Night Moves in just a
few years. The film is a different kind of noir – much of the action takes
place during the day on the sun drenched beaches of Florida. But no matter how
beautiful, make no mistake; this is a dark and cynical film to its core. And
one of the best of its kind to come out of the 1970s.
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