Arthur Penn (1975)

A commercial failure on its release, Night Moves has acquired ‘neglected masterpiece’ status over the years.  Michael Sragow included it in his 1990 collection of reviews, Produced and Abandoned: The Best Films You’ve Never Seen. Manohla Dargis, in her New York Times obituary of Arthur Penn in 2010, referred to ‘the great, despairing  Night Moves …, with Gene Hackman as a private detective who ends up circling the abyss, a no-exit comment on the post-1968, post-Watergate times’.  The film is remarkable in the oeuvre of both Penn and the Scottish writer Alan Sharp, who wrote the screenplay.  Sharp’s first novel, A Green Tree in Gedde, was acclaimed on its publication in 1965;  he completed only one more novel before deciding to concentrate on screenwriting; his single plays on British television include Long Distance Piano Player (1970).  He wrote movies that cover an eclectic range – for example, the westerns The Hired Hand (1971) and Ulzana’s Raid (1972), the historical adventure Rob Roy (1995) and the singular, excellent Dean Spanley, an adaptation of Lord Dunsany’s novel, in 2008.  Dean Spanley was the last cinema screenplay by Sharp, who died in 2013.

His script for Night Moves is ambitious.  Like The Long Goodbye (1973) and Chinatown (1974), two other LA-based neo-noir films of the period, this has been described as a revisionist private eye movie but it’s harder to get your bearings here than it is in Robert Altman’s or Roman Polanski’s Los Angeles.  The Raymond Chandler novel of 1953 supplies an immediate comparator for Altman’s take on it; the period (1930s) setting of Robert Towne’s screenplay for Chinatown helps similarly in Polanski’s film.  There’s not the same distance between Night Moves and genre reference points.  Sharp’s story is peopled by those who either work in movies or are at least movie-literate; at one point, Ellen (Susan Clark), the wife of the protagonist Harry Moseby (Hackman), sarcastically compares her husband to Sam Spade.   (The movie-literacy extends beyond noir cinema.  Ellen goes to see Ma nuit chez Maud, an invitation to which Harry, delivering Night Moves’ best-known line, declines:  the only Eric Rohmer film that he’s seen was ‘kinda like watching paint dry’.)  The detective job that Harry takes on in Night Moves is to find the disappeared (or absconded) teenager Delilah (Delly) Grastner (Melanie Griffith) and return her to her mother Arlene Iverson (Janet Ward), a past-it actress.  Key characters in the plot include stunt men and movie-making small fry.  Harry Moseby is aware that working as a private eye in Los Angeles means operating in a mythic territory as well as a geographical location – but that awareness doesn’t give him any kind of secure perspective, and you sympathise.  He’s stuck in Hollywood-land in more ways than one and it’s not easy for the viewer to clear their head of Harry’s screen progenitors, or to engage with the consistently acrid, often depressed world of Night Moves.

Harry is also afflicted by the national trauma of the 1970s.  The aetiology of this condition is usually reckoned to include, inter alia, the assassinations of the Kennedy brothers and Martin Luther King, and the Vietnam War, and to have culminated, as Manohla Dargis implies, in Watergate.  Harry tracks Delly down to the Florida Keys, where she’s with her stepfather (John Crawford) and his companion, Paula (Jennifer Warren).   Harry talks and sleeps with Paula.  At one point in their conversation, she asks, ‘Where were you when Kennedy got shot?’  Harry replies ‘Which Kennedy?’   He knows where he was at the time of Robert’s death, as well as JFK’s; and his responses, according to the pattern of the film, reflect a state of being, as well as a physical location.  In November 1963, Harry was a successful professional football player; by June 1968, he was working as a private eye.   The change of career – a move from the gridiron to mean streets – summarises almost too neatly that, for Harry, the national malaise had already taken hold.  This hints at one of the problems with Alan Sharp’s very interesting screenplay.

From the start of Night Moves, Harry Moseby appears to have a gloomy view of life and to be determined that his detective work is just a job.  I particularly liked an early sequence of him driving in his car and receiving audio information that his office has collected on Arlene Iverson.  The sequence is followed by the discovery that his wife is having an affair with another man (Harris Yulin), which makes Harry gloomier still.  This episode could be seen as a foreshadowing of what happens in the last half hour of the film.  The Delly Grastner mission is accomplished, in that Harry returns the girl to her mother, but the events that follow reveal that Harry was not, as he had thought, beyond disillusionment.  Penn and Sharp may intend to lull the audience into feeling too that things can’t get worse and take us, like Harry, by surprise.  But whereas it’s entirely credible that Harry, although he’s self-aware, doesn’t expect things to follow the pattern of fictional private detectives’ experiences, any reasonably sophisticated viewer does expect this (and a less sophisticated viewer will likely have got bored by Night Moves well before this point).

The shrewd, cynical private eye whom a story reveals him to be a more romantic and vulnerable creature than he at first seemed, is a familiar enough figure.  (Jack Nicholson’s J J Gittes in Chinatown was a very recent example of the type.)  Night Moves isn’t a long film yet, even without knowing anything of the plot beforehand, I found myself getting impatient for Harry Moseby to be revealed as naive after all.  In order to make the audience experience a sense of horror that allows us to understand a little of Harry’s, Arthur Penn needs a shocking finish.  He certainly delivers it:  the climax, back on the Florida Keys, is superbly staged.  (The cutting by Penn and his editor Dede Allen is disorientingly good throughout and brilliant in this finale.)  But if the end of Night Moves is shocking, it’s not surprising.  I’m no expert in noir but I wonder how ‘revisionist’ the film really is.

Gene Hackman does fine work as Harry, although I sometimes found it difficult to get out of my head his greater performance as this protagonist’s namesake, Harry Caul, a more profoundly devastated man, in the previous year’s The Conversation.   As Ellen, the predictable, actressy Susan Clark is a dull partner for Hackman and this marital relationship is the weakest part of the film.  (Also, the timeframe of their attempts to restart their marriage, after Harry has returned from Los Angeles with Delly, is puzzling.  In a key exchange, Ellen is insistent that they shouldn’t give up trying to continue together, as if they’ve been working on this for ages.  In a subsequent scene, Harry asks another character why he was at Arlene Iverson’s house ‘the other day’, when Delly was brought back there from Florida.)   The playing of the other smaller parts is broader than you might expect in a film by the man who made Bonnie and Clyde although the actors are physically well cast and often effective:  Janet Ward is increasingly persuasive as Arlene and Kenneth Mars enjoyable as a friend of Harry’s.  Easy to say this with hindsight but I think it would have been simple to predict which of the two unknowns in the cast would go on to bigger things:  Melanie Griffith, who’s vividly reckless as Delly; and James Woods, who plays a car mechanic with nasty dynamism to spare.

20 July 2015