Sean Burns
The most oft-quoted scene in Arthur Penn’s Night Moves finds a disconsolate Gene Hackman slouched in front of the television, half-watching a football game on a small black-and-white set in his den. His wife walks in and asks who’s winning. “Nobody,” he mutters. “One side’s just losing slower than the other.” There are at least two dozen as good in Alan Sharp’s acerbic screenplay, but this one succinctly sums up a gloriously bummed-out era of American cinema, and few films embody those bad vibes better than Night Moves. Jokingly referred to as “a movie about a private detective who doesn’t detect shit,” the film stars Hackman as Harry Moseby, former pro football player turned down-on-his-luck gumshoe who stumbles into a conspiracy he can’t comprehend, let alone solve.
Much like Philip Marlowe in Robert Altman’s “The Long Goodbye,” Harry is awfully out of place in the swinging 1970s. His ratty office and business card reading “Moseby Confidential” (“At least it doesn’t have a picture of an eye on it,” he quips) are from another era altogether. His wife wants him to take a job at a more prosperous agency that uses newfangled computers and hi-tech surveillance equipment. But Harry would rather tail people in his Mustang, scribbling clues in his pocket notebook like an old-school dick. You can tell how well his business is going when he walks into his wife’s office mid-afternoon – she’s a successful antique dealer – and asks for some cash.
The key to Hackman’s genius is that he was always one of our most vulnerable actors. Just beneath that gruff, macho bluster lurks an almost child-like sensitivity. He bruises so easily. We can feel Harry’s antsy discomfort around his wife’s sophisticated homosexual friends from the art world. His bristling insecurity about being another antique in her collection prompts him to play-act as a bully, bowing out of an outing to go see an Eric Rohmer film so he can stay home and watch the game. This is why he’s so confounded to find her sleeping with an effete, bookish colleague played by Harris Yulin, a man so physically unimposing he walks with a limp. Being cuckolded is enough of an affront to Harry’s fragile masculinity, but being cuckolded by this guy?
He skips town, getting himself good and lost in New Mexico and then the Florida keys while trying to track down the runaway teenage daughter of a washed-up former Hollywood starlet. The kid’s name is Delly – short for Delilah – played by a then-16-year-old Melanie Griffith in her first credited film role. She’s trouble, this one, currently working her way through her mom’s ex-boyfriends in what Harry surmises is “an attempt to even the score.” He eventually finds her in the sunshine state, shacked up with her former stepfather (John Crawford) and a mysterious woman named Paula (Jennifer Warren) who speaks in enchantingly flirty and elusive aphorisms. “What’s the setup here?” Harry asks, obviously intrigued. Paula doesn’t answer.
There’s a plot about stolen Mexican artifacts from the Yucatan, but our detective is never able to put it together. Neither can we. (The most boring conversations I’ve had about Night Moves are with people who insist on understanding what actually happened.) Harry’s fascinated by chess, and the movie explains itself to us when he tells Paula about the famous 1922 tournament when Bruno Mortiz couldn’t see he had a possible checkmate. All the (knight) moves were right there, but he played something else instead and lost. “He must have regretted it every day of his life,” Hackman sighs before flashing his sad, conspiratorial grin, “Fact is, I do. And I wasn’t even born.”
Night Moves swims in that kind of regret. It’s a film steeped in bone-weary failure, about people realizing that their time has just about run out. Sharp’s dialogue is the gold standard of exhausted, Watergate-era fatalism. Like when Paula asks Harry where he was when Kennedy got shot. “Which Kennedy?” he asks. Or my favorite, after Delly’s stepfather confesses to getting “a little foolish” with the young girl he says, “You’ve seen her. There ought to be a law.” Hackman’s eyes narrow before reminding him, “There is.”
The underage Griffith’s nude scenes were a scandal even then. But especially these days, it’s important to note that there’s nothing exploitative about the picture. Like most things in Night Moves, Delly’s promiscuity is profoundly sad, her childish exhibitionism a way of trying to control the men in her life who always seem to let her down. The fact that her nymphet act doesn’t work on Harry binds these two together in what might be the movie’s sweetest relationship, or at least the only one that isn’t corrupted by some level of deception. Griffith is excellent in her scenes with Hackman, as is an impossibly young and wonderfully wormy James Woods, playing another of Delly’s quickly abandoned suitors who, in his words, “won second prize in a fight.” (Among other virtues, the film provides the not inconsiderable pleasure watching Gene Hackman smack the shit out of James Woods.)
Shot in 1973, Night Moves had a lengthy and contentious post-production period during which director Penn and screenwriter Sharp fell out entirely. Both took to bad-mouthing the film (and each other) in the press. By the time the movie came out in theaters, it was 1975 and the summer of Jaws. Warner Bros. tried to market it as a sexy action picture, which presumably pissed off audiences who weren’t prepared for such a talky, downbeat character study. But the picture’s reputation has flourished over the years, as have debates about the harrowing, inconclusive ending, which leaves both Harry and the audience stranded on a boat aimlessly spinning around in circles. Adrift.
“Night Moves” is streaming on The Criterion Channel.
