So impressed you made good on your promise to check this film out! There really is something so serpentine about NIGHT MOVE's plot. Gene Hackman as private eye Harry Moseby plays chess with himself (knight moves, anyone) during a stakeout Griffith makes quite an impression, and I distinctly remember wondering if this girl's helium voice would change when she grew up. A nymphet role of the sort she would play again in Paul Newman's The Drowning Pool (1975) and likely incite picket lines today. Seventeen-year-old Melanie Griffith, making her film debut, is cast as the sexually precocious daughter. The detective in question, Harry Moseby (Gene Hackman, who, like Karen Black, seemed to be in every film made in the '70s), is adrift, both personally and professionally, when hired by a fading movie actress to locate her runaway teenage daughter. The plot of Night Moves is ostensibly an update of the typical '40s film noir detective thriller, only with a post-Watergate deconstruction of the American hero myth thrown in. It was simply icing on the cake that Penn's solemn approach to the detective film genre so suited my post-adolescent self-seriousness. for the plot of Night Moves is a real puzzler that benefits from repeat viewings. I was thrilled Night Moves opened in the theater where I was employed, allowing me the opportunity to see it countless times (for free!). In the summer of 1975, I had just graduated high school and my summer job was ushering at a movie theater in San Francisco while waiting to start film school in the fall. In the case of Night Moves, an updated noir bathed in the same chic nihilism as Francis Ford Coppola's The Conversation (1974), the "significance" is there in abundance. Kubrick is great for icy misanthropy, and Woody Allen is ideal for.well, Woody Allen.Īrthur Penn ( Bonnie and Clyde) is a director whose name I so associate with serious themes and deep social commentary that even when he directs a simple little detective drama like Night Moves, it's difficult not to attach to it a profound, pithy significance that may not even be there. If I see a David Lean film, I expect sweeping spectacle If I see Bogdanovich, I expect film school redux. It works as about two thrillers.For some of us film fans, certain directors come with their own baggage. By the movie's end, and especially during its last shock of recognition, we've been through a wringer. These are all the trademarks of the Lew Archer novels by Ross MacDonald especially the little-girl-lost theme, and Alan Sharp's screenplay uses them infinitely better than "The Drowning Pool" did - even though that was actually based on a Macdonald book. The plot involves former and present lovers of the girl and her mother, sunken treasure (yes, sunken treasure), conflicts across the generations and murders more complex by far than they seem at first. Miss Warren creates a character so refreshingly eccentric, so sexy in such an unusual way, that it's all the movie can do to get past her without stopping to admire. The mistress is played by a relatively unknown actress and sometime singer named Jennifer Warren, who has the cool gaze and air of competence and tawny hair of that girl in the Winston ads who smokes for pleasure and creates waves of longing in men from coast to coast. And from the moment he sets eyes on the stepfather's mistress, the movie, which has been absorbing anyway, really takes off. Harry traces the missing girl to her stepfather, a genial pilot in the Florida Keys, and goes there to bring her back. His confrontation with the man, like so many scenes in the movie, is done with dialog so blunt in its truthfulness that the characters really do escape their genre. Harry takes the case, pausing only long enough to track down his own missing wife - who is, it turns out, having a not especially important, affair with a man with a beach house in Malibu. He's a private detective for reasons, vaguely hinted at, involving his childhood.Ī Hollywood divorcee, clinging to the last shreds of a glamor that once won her a movie director (and half the other men in town, she claims) hires him to trace down her missing daughter. He's a former pro football player and a man of considerable intelligence, whose wife ( Susan Clark) runs an antique business. The eye this time is named Harry Moseby, perhaps with a nod toward Hackman's great performance as Harry Caul in " The Conversation," perhaps not.
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