Night Moves
IN THE PRIZE (1963), a big-budget, near-miss bit of cod-hitchcock based on a thick paperback, Paul Newman plays a Nobel laureate for literature who finally breaks down and admits what he’s been doing since his last Great American novel was published — writing cheap mystery paperbacks, which he dismisses as “private eyewash”.
Already, the great private eye movies — The Maltese Falcon (1941), with Humphrey Bogart as Dashiell Hammett’s shamus Sam Spade,
The Big Sleep (1946), with Bogart as Raymond Chandler’s Philip Marlowe — were backlist items. Yet the fantasy of the idealised hero persisted. Spade, Marlowe and many others — Shaft in the movies and Rockford on TV — were as much knight errants as sleuths. These men were tough but not mean, loyal to clients who didn’t deserve it, saved the girls and caught the killers (though often the girl was the killer). In the end, the eye kept his integrity in a rotten world. That seemed absurd in the shadows of Vietnam and Watergate, but Hollywood couldn’t let the detective go in the 1970s, even as hip writers and directors competed to bury Sam Spade.
In 1973, Elliott Gould shambled as Marlowe in Robert Altman’s The Long Goodbye, which made Chandler’s hero a sap who couldn’t cope with the loss of his cat. In Roman Polanski’s Chinatown (1974), Jack Nicholson’s J.J. Gittes is a cynical loser — the film is set in the 1930s, and insists the great days of private eyes weren’t so great. You could have been forgiven after that for thinking no-one need ever make another film noir — at least, not until The Big Lebowski (1998), Inherent Vice (2014) and The Nice Guys (2016) got nostalgic for 1970s movies that said nostalgia was a cultural poison. Maybe the Coen Brothers, Paul Thomas Anderson and Shane Black — not to mention Quentin Tarantino in Once Upon A Time In Hollywood (2019) — just looked back in wonder at an era of moviemaking when audiences had to pay attention to character, plot, mood and nuance.
Too often overlooked in the rush to enshrine The Long Goodbye and Chinatown is Arthur Penn’s Night Moves — the last and, arguably, most perfect of the 1970s trio of revisionist privaye eye movies. Penn had already taken swings at the gangster film (Bonnie And Clyde, 1967) and the Western (Little Big Man, 1970) and made the best American film about the counterculture (Alice’s Restaurant, 1969), but — just as writer Robert Towne was the impetus behind Chinatown — Night Moves is as notable for its script as its direction. Scots novelist Alan Sharp had already written one of the best Westerns of the 1970s — Ulzana’s Raid (1972), directed by another auteur of violence, Robert Aldrich. Like Tarantino after him, Sharp novelised his Night Moves screenplay into a slim paperback that makes an interesting contrast with the film. An often-quoted moment in the movie has private eye Harry Moseby (Gene Hackman) diss his wife’s taste in cinema by sneering, “I saw a Rohmer movie once… it was kinda like watching paint dry.” In the novel, the cited director is Claude Chabrol and the author
makes it clear that Harry is lying about having seen a French movie (which, in the text, is the serial killer drama Le Boucher, exactly the sort of film Night Moves is, rather than the more resistable Ma Nuit Chez Maud). Harry is the most undervalued of Hackman’s great performances, as fully rounded as Popeye Doyle in The French Connection and Harry Caul in The Conversation. An ex-football player, which explains why he can pull off surprising fight moves, Harry is an independent resisting the lure of signing up with a big agency and so addicted to detection that if he doesn’t have a case he’ll pick at the scabs of his own marriage. He smiles often and he can’t help liking people — which means he’s almost always in pain when they disappoint (or try to murder) him.
Harry is hired by ex-starlet Arlene Iverson (Janet Ward) to retrieve runaway daughter Delly (a young Melanie Griffith), not out of concern but because an entailed inheritance is at stake. The first suspect is Quentin (a young James Woods) — imagine how Tarantino felt hearing his unusual name on screen in this context — a mechanic for the movies whose face is covered in bruises. “I won second prize in a fight,” snaps Quentin, in one of Sharp’s many killer lines (this movie is as endlessly quotable as Lebowski). Then Harry skips the Rohmer film but goes to the movies, or at least movie sets, as he digs about in the industry hinterland Tarantino will be drawn to. The case involves a stunt arranger (Edward Binns), a daredevil movie pilot (Anthony Costello), a dolphin farmer/tour guide (John Crawford), smuggled Incan artefacts, and a woman of mystery (Jennifer Warren, who should have been a huge star, only they stopped making movies like this). When Paula (Warren) gives Harry her hard knocks backstory, he comments, “Sounds kind of bleak — or is that just the way you tell it?” That’s the whole deal of Night Moves — it’s bleak, but admits the possibility that Harry is too tough on himself and the world. It ends out on a boat with three characters, just like in Jaws (released two weeks later in 1975), only with very different results. Penn was as much a filmmaker of action as contemplation. A key plotpoint is a movie stunt that goes wrong, which must have hung heavily over the staging of an elaborate and eyeopening gambit with a seaplane that’s astonishing as pure cinema but also emotionally devastating.
It’s a film shot through with humanity. When Harry tries to be hard-boiled, he can’t sell it, spitting out put-downs but wincing in sympathetic pain with whoever he’s trying to needle. Only Hackman could have played the scene where after make-up sex with his wife Ellen (Susan Clark), Harry rubs her nipple with his big toe while preparing bedside fondue in a way Eric Rohmer couldn’t best. Only Penn could have directed a finale where an insanely complicated plot is fully understood but the detective is still stuck on a boat going in circles around patches of blood in the water.
NIGHT MOVES IS OUT NOW ON DVD, BLU-RAY AND DIGITAL