Much like Philip Marlowe in Robert Altman\u2019s \u201cThe Long Goodbye,\u201d Harry is awfully out of place in the swinging 1970s. His ratty office and business card reading \u201cMoseby Confidential\u201d (\u201cAt least it doesn\u2019t have a picture of an eye on it,\u201d 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\u2019s office mid-afternoon \u2013 she\u2019s a successful antique dealer \u2013 and asks for some cash.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The key to Hackman\u2019s 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\u2019s antsy discomfort around his wife\u2019s 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\u2019s 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\u2019s fragile masculinity, but being cuckolded by this guy<\/em>?<\/p>\n\n\n\n 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\u2019s name is Delly \u2013 short for Delilah \u2013 played by a then-16-year-old Melanie Griffith in her first credited film role. She\u2019s trouble, this one, currently working her way through her mom\u2019s ex-boyfriends in what Harry surmises is \u201can attempt to even the score.\u201d 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. \u201cWhat\u2019s the setup here?\u201d Harry asks, obviously intrigued. Paula doesn\u2019t answer. <\/p>\n\n\n\n Night Moves<\/em> swims in that kind of regret. It\u2019s a film steeped in bone-weary failure, about people realizing that their time has just about run out. Sharp\u2019s dialogue is the gold standard of exhausted, Watergate-era fatalism. Like when Paula asks Harry where he was when Kennedy got shot. \u201cWhich Kennedy?\u201d he asks. Or my favorite, after Delly\u2019s stepfather confesses to getting \u201ca little foolish\u201d with the young girl he says, \u201cYou\u2019ve seen her. There ought to be a law.\u201d Hackman\u2019s eyes narrow before reminding him, \u201cThere is.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n The underage Griffith\u2019s nude scenes were a scandal even then. But especially these days, it\u2019s important to note that there\u2019s nothing exploitative about the picture. Like most things in Night Moves<\/em>, Delly\u2019s 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\u2019t work on Harry binds these two together in what might be the movie\u2019s sweetest relationship, or at least the only one that isn\u2019t 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\u2019s quickly abandoned suitors who, in his words, \u201cwon second prize in a fight.\u201d (Among other virtues, the film provides the not inconsiderable pleasure watching Gene Hackman smack the shit out of James Woods.) <\/p>\n\n\n\n Shot in 1973, Night Moves<\/em> 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. <\/em>Warner Bros. tried to market it as a sexy action picture, which presumably pissed off audiences who weren\u2019t prepared for such a talky, downbeat character study. But the picture\u2019s 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.\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n\n “Night Moves” is streaming on The Criterion Channel.<\/a><\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-content\/uploads\/2023\/06\/night-moves2-1024x674.jpg\")
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There\u2019s 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\u2019ve had about Night Moves<\/em> are with people who insist on understanding what actually happened.) Harry\u2019s fascinated by chess, and the movie explains itself to us when he tells Paula about the famous 1922 tournament when Bruno Mortiz couldn\u2019t see he had a possible checkmate. All the (knight) moves were right there, but he played something else instead and lost. \u201cHe must have regretted it every day of his life,\u201d Hackman sighs before flashing his sad, conspiratorial grin, \u201cFact is, I do. And I wasn’t even born.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n