He has a tortured childhood, which from of all people, you learn by dialogue given the wife’s lover. He plays chess (hence the title Night Moves= Knight Moves). He’s way too smart to be a head-banging NFL pro. Harry is a new kind of person for the movies, the intellectual jock. In a Marlowe or Spade story, the girl would just be screaming her head off. There is another fight later in the film, where Harry and the girl’s Step-father are in a tussle, all the while, Paula (Jennifer Warren), the woman both have slept with, is yelling at them about how stupid they are acting, how childish. At one point, the man Harry’s wife is having an affair with says, “C'mon take a swing at me Harry, the way Sam Spade would!” It’s a great moment, when you realize that this is the 70’s, not the 40’s, and things are not going to progress the way the standard detective fare would go. It’s not so much a “noir deconstruction”, as a rethinking of the classic Private Dick character, giving him a rounder, more corruptible and more faceted personality. “Night Moves” overcomes this most prurient of situations 10-fold, with a densely plotted mystery and a very well developed character study of it’s protagonist. Watching a supposedly 17-year-old Melanie Griffith get in and out of clothes for the better part of two hours makes you feel a little bit creepy, a little bit tingly (Hey, wasn’t that an Osmonds’ song title?). Yeah, that’s pretty creepy, but damn funny too. Isn’t that a big word for an 8-year-old?” The girl turns to the guy and asks, “Does having sex with me make you a pedophile?” The guy responds, “Pedophile. He runs from the emotional conflict headlong into his investigation, which takes him into the world of stuntmen, charter boating and eventually pre-Columbian artifact smuggling.Ī couple are lying in bed after sex. At the same time Moseby discovers his wife is having an affair. Otherwise, the two want nothing to do with each other. The starlet needs her child back so that she can collect a trust owed her from her first husband. The runaway is well known for her promiscuity, as is the mother. Ellen and Harry MosebyĮx NFL defensive back Harry Moseby is a private investigator who is called in to trace the runaway daughter of an aging ex Hollywood starlet. One team’s losing slower than the other”. Plus, the most deconstructed detective film of all time, “The Big Lebowski” references “Night Moves” in many ways. With “Night Moves”, I think the genre was imploded. Heading the list was “Chinatown”, but there were also “The Long Goodbye”, “Klute”, “The Late Show”, and you could even include “Shaft” on this list. There was a lot of detective genre deconstruction in the ‘70’s. Now you’re asking, why did you choose this movie for your blog? I guess it comes under the heading, “It’s so weird that it’s cool, maybe even great”. I remember that the supporting cast was a tad weak, and there was a laugh-out-loud absurdist line when out of nowhere, Paula, Hackman’s love interest in the movie, blurts out, “Where were you when Kennedy was shot?” Hackman replies, “Which Kennedy?” Possibly blame it on the film and it’s convoluted narrative line. Blame it on my youth, blame it on whatever 1975 had me indulging in. I recall that I needed to see “Night Moves” a second time before I could really follow the story and understand the characters. So what could possibly go wrong here? Penn was famous for being an autocrat both on the shoot and behind the scenes. Hackman was coming off a great run including his brilliant turn as Jimmy Doyle in both “French Connection” movies, his signature role as Harry Caul in the Coppola’s masterpiece “The Conversation”, and his great actor pair with Al Pacino in “Scarecrow”. Penn had been hot during the intervening period (spanning 1968-1974) “Alice’s Restaurant” was a charmer based on the Arlo Guthrie counter-culture anthem, and “Little Big Man” was a big hit with the hippies and a breakthrough in its depiction of the Native American. It would seem to be a very easy sell to the moguls. Here was one of Hollywood’s guiding lights, directing one of filmdom’s hottest stars in Gene Hackman. Arthur Penn, who had helped foment the New Hollywood revolution with his unforgettable “Bonnie and Clyde”, and, in my mind at least, cemented his role as a great auteur with one of my favorite films then and now, “Little Big Man”, would not be interested in making a standard private dick flick. This was not your standard whodunit for certain. I saw this in the theater when it came out, and was a little befuddled.
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