Classics Revisted: Night Moves (1975)

Night Moves (1975)
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.

DVD Views: Bonnie and Clyde

Bonnie and Clyde (1967) ****
Directed by: Arthur Penn
Written By: David Newman & Robert Benton.
Starrng: Warren Beatty (Clyde Barrow), Faye Dunaway (Bonnie Parker), Gene Hackman (Buck Barrow), Estelle Parsons (Blanche), Michael J. Pollard (C.W. Moss), Denver Pyle (Frank Hamer), Dub Taylor (Ivan Moss), Gene Wilder (Eugene Grizzard), Evans Evans (Velma Davis), Mabel Cavitt (Bonnie's mother).

I’m not sure how many times I watched Bonnie and Clyde as a young teenager. Probably at least five and perhaps twice as many as that. From the time I was around 12 or 13, I showed an interest in movies. My mother, much to her credit, decided to start showing me some older films that she had liked as teenager. I think the logic of showing me something like Bonnie and Clyde was to try and keep me away from some of the more modern, even more violent films that were coming out around that time (Natural Born Killers for example). Well, she failed, but I will always appreciate the fact that she got me started.

As a teenager, I was drawn to Bonnie and Clyde for several reasons. The first time I watched it, I remember sitting there waiting for the ending, which I had been promised was the among the most violent in cinema history. Yet, I was drawn to the film time and again because of something else. Yes, I enjoyed the violence in the movie. I enjoyed the fact that these were outlaws, and yet they were young and sexy, and that you felt genuine sadness at the end of the film when they died. But there was something else that kept me coming back. When the 40th Anniversary DVD came out, I naturally bought it, and yet it was only recently that I actually sat down and watched the film again – probably for the first time in 10 years. I found that the intervening years changed my perspective on Bonnie and Clyde, and yet my appreciation for the film had not diminished. It is now, as it was then, one of the best American films ever made.

The opening scenes of the movie are still as much fun as I remembered them to be. From the moment we see Bonnie Parker (Faye Dunaway), for the first time, lounging around her bedroom naked we are drawn into the movie. As a teenager, I was mystified by the strange camera angles, editing and zooms being used in this scene (this, of course, being before I had ever heard of Francois Truffaut or Jean Luc Godard, let alone seen their films), but it seemed new and exciting at the time. Now, it’s not so new, but it’s just as exciting. We meet Clyde (Warren Beatty) at the same time Bonnie does, starring down from her window, still naked, as he stalks around the car parked outside. From the moment she says “Hey, boy. What you doin’ around my mama’s car?” and he Beatty smiles that knowing smile, we feel that sexual energy between the two of them, and we are hooked.

The film’s first half is a rollicking ride. The pair plan and carry out a series of robberies that are almost a comedy of errors. They show up at one bank and Clyde discovers that it shut down the week before, so he drags the lowly bank manager outside to explain it to Bonnie, so he’s not humiliated. They rob a grocery store, and a huge hulking man attacks Clyde with a meat clever, before Clyde pistol whips him and takes off. There is a comic edge to each of the films violent scenes in this half. The comedic edge to the film gets greater when the pair hook up with C.W. Moss (Michael J. Pollard), a kid with a slightly off centered smile who idolizes Clyde, and nurtures a crush on Bonnie. Finally they hook up with Clyde’s boisterous brother Buck (Gene Hackman) and his shrill wife Blanche (Estelle Parsons). The films mixture of violence and comedy reaches its apex when the police raid a house where they’re all staying and Blanche runs out into gunfire shrieking and waving a spatula around.

If you were to pinpoint a moment where the action in the film goes from light to dark, its scene where the gang kidnap a young couple (Gene Wilder and Evans Evans). At first, the young couple is scared, but soon they loosen up and are laughing and joking right alongside the gang (Wilder, who was funny in many films, may never have been better than he was in what amounts to a mere cameo here). The scene, and the movie, suddenly shifts gears when Wilder reveals what he does for a living – he’s an undertaker. Into this happy little “family” comes darkness, as Bonnie seems to realize that they are doomed – there is only one way for this to end – death.

The following two scenes are among the films best. Bonnie takes off one morning through a cornfield, and Clyde chases after her. Seen in a high angle shot, the shadows of the clouds sweep across the cornfield, placing Bonnie and Clyde in darkness. This shot, one of the most famous in the movie, was an accident, but it perfectly captures the mood of the film. The scene that follows, a family reunion of sorts with Bonnie’s family, is shot with a slight haze on the film, giving it a dreamlike quality. As Clyde tries to lie to Bonnie’s mother, about giving up the life and finding a small house within a few miles of her, she replies honestly with “If you try to live within three miles of me, you won’t live very long”. The mood of the film has now clearly shifted, and each scene that follows leads inextricably towards the death of Bonnie and Clyde.

The death scene in the film is among the most famous in any film ever made. Bonnie and Clyde are gunned down in a hail of gunfire that lasts almost 30 seconds. Each of them has dozens of gunshots explode through them, Clyde has part of his scalp ripped off, and they fall motionless in a bloody heap on the ground. At the time, this scene was shocking, not least because of the way it was edited – almost 60 different cuts are made in that time. Now, with rapid editing that makes even this scene seem slow, and violence like this being included in lots of films, it doesn’t shock in the same way it once did to audiences in 1967. What it does do however is end the movie on a tragic note. We still feel for Bonnie and Clyde as they slump to the ground, bloody messes. We still don’t want them to die, even if we realize that they must. Director Arthur Penn does something interesting after the gunfire stops – he doesn’t pull out and survey the entirety of the scene – instead he simply shows Bonnie and Clyde’s killers emerging from the bush and looking at what they did. There seems to be no joy in their faces as they do this, even though this was their goal all along.

When the movie came out in 1967, it was shocking to audiences, and embraced by young moviegoers, who saw Bonnie and Clyde as stand-ins for their generation. They rejected the long held notions of the generations before them, and so did Bonnie and Clyde – who essentially give the finger to “the man” throughout the movie. That the film is not historically accurate isn’t the point, is it? In short, who cares? This movie isn’t about the real Bonnie and Clyde, but about the characters of Bonnie and Clyde in the movie.

But the movie wouldn’t have lasted this long if the only thing remarkable about it was the violence, and the element of ‘60’s youth rebellion in the film. What makes Bonnie and Clyde still powerful is the fact the film takes its time to set up the characters, to get to know them, to sympathize with them, and draw out the connections. Theirs is not a love that is based on sex – Clyde is impotent after all, and the two only once actually manage to do it – but rather a deeper connection. For her, Clyde was a way out of her boring life in Texas – her escape from becoming just another bored housewife. For him, Bonnie made everything mean something. For the first time, he starts to care about something outside of himself. I still may not be 100% sure of what intrinsic quality the movie has that keeps me coming back to it, but I do know that the film is a true masterpiece. Few films in history can match it.