Night Moves (Warner Bros., 1975)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2020 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

At 9 p.m. last night I screened Charles a quite interesting movie from my backlog of home-recorded DVD’s I’d been able to make until the start of 2016, when Cox Cable changed to an “all-digital” service that doesn’t allow you to make recordings (unless you pay them extra for a so-called “DVR” that’s cloud-based instead of using physical storage media): Night Moves, a 1975 neo-noir thriller starring Gene Hackman as L.A.-based private detective Harry Moseby, who gets hired by faded starlet Arlene Iverson (Janet Ward) to find her missing 16-year-old daughter Delly -- short for “Delilah” because her dad was a producer who specialized in Biblical films -- played by a young Melanie Griffith in what must have been one of her earliest credits. (According to imdb.com, Night Moves was her third film and she was 18 at the time she made it, though the character is specified in Alan Sharp’s script as being 16.) The search takes Harry from L.A. (where when he’s not working for pay he’s surveilling his own wife Ellie, played by Susan Clark, to prove she’s having an affair) to New Mexico and ultimately to Florida. For some reason screenwriter Sharp never explains, Harry seems to drive a different car in each sequence, and it’s not like he has a vehicle in every port, either: he’ll sometimes drive two different cars in the same city on the same day. (Does he borrow them? Rent them? Does he not want to be “outed” as a private investigator because if he drove the same car all the time, like most people, someone would recognize the car and “out” him?)

The two big themes of Night Moves are movies and sex: Delly is shooting to follow her mom’s career path into films (as the real Melanie Griffith followed her mother, ‘Tippi’ Hedren, and Grifflth’s daughter Dakota Johnson has become the third generation of her family to be a movie star) -- at one point someone announces she’s just got her card in the Screen Extras Guild -- and she follows her creepy biker boyfriend Quentin (a young and almost unrecognizable James Woods) to New Mexico because he’s a mechanic and he’s needed to keep the period cars and planes (the film features a white biplane trailing white clouds of a toxic substance in a scene obviously “borrowed,” shall we say, from Alfred Hitchcock’s North by Northwest). Only Delly is a total slut who seems, as my late partner John Gabrish said of me, to be interested in anything with two legs and something between them: she ditches Quentin for the older but butcher stunt pilot flying the plane, and later when the plane crashes Quentin is suspected of sabotaging it. Moseby traces Delly to Florida, where her ex-stepfather Tom Iverson (John Crawford) is running a boat charter service with his girlfriend Paula (Jennifer Warren), whose combination of sexiness and spunk easily makes her the film’s most interesting character.

The two are shielding Delly from her mom, and she’s resisting going back to L.A. until Harry and Paula take Delly on a diving trip (Paula’s supposed to be an experienced diver but she lets Harry, who’s never dived at all, help her check out her SCUBA equipment) and Delly discovers a decayed but still recognizably human body under water. Then she agrees to let Harry take her back to L.A. and her mom, only she’s killed in L.A. and Harry, thinking that her murder and that dead body down in Florida are connected, goes back there, confronts Paula and realizes that the stepfather, the stunt pilot and a lot of other people were involved in a scheme to smuggle priceless pre-Colombian artworks out of Yucatan and sell them to private U.S. collectors. (Sharp “planted” this plot twist by having one of Harry’s L.A. friends be a collector of pre-Colombian Mexican art.) Needless to say, this film is full of references to classic noirs and the people who made them: when Harry finally catches his wife’s paramour, the guy asks him, “Are you going to beat me up, like Sam Spade?” Later, when Paula is seducing Harry, she tells him that the first guy who ever touched her breasts was named Billy Dannreuther, “and my nipples were hard for half an hour after that.” (“Billy Dannreuther” was the name of Humphrey Bogart’s character in the 1954 film Beat the Devil.) The ending is a typically nihilistic one for a mid-1970’s movie: the still-surviving characters end up on a yacht called “Point of View” (interesting that Sharp named it after a cinematic term) off the Florida coast in which all the principals shoot each other and all but Harry die -- though he’s seriously wounded and the last shot is of Harry desperately trying to control the yacht, which just continues to turn around in circles, and it’s unclear whether Harry is going to die or the Coast Guard or someone will rescue him in time.

Night Moves is a good movie on its own but it pales in the shadows of its predecessors -- not only the great noirs of the 1940’s but a film Gene Hackman had made the year before, The Conversation, which also cast him as an alienated private eye and also had a singularly dark ending but was a much deeper and richer film raising questions of privacy and the ubiquity of surveillance (Hackman’s character in The Conversation specializes in audio surveillance and the catastrophe comes from his mishearing a key inflection in a conversation he’s recorded) that ring even truer today than they did in 1974. The Conversation was directed by Francis Ford Coppola and was the only film he made between the first two Godfathers; it had a troubled production history and ran so far over schedule it became a running joke in Herb Caen’s San Francisco Chronicle column. But it turned out to be an excellent film and Night Moves, directed by Arthur Penn (who’d previously worked with Hackman in his star-making film, Bonnie and Clyde, in which he played Clyde Barrow’s older brother Buck), is a good and engaging film but nowhere near the level of The Conversation. It also suffers from the problem Dwight Macdonald noted in his review of George Stevens’ 1959 Jesus biopic The Greatest Story Ever Told, in which he wrote that Jesus and his disciples didn’t realize they were making history “any more than the builders of Chartres Cathedral knew they were making Gothic architecture, though the builders of our modern collegiate ‘Gothic’ did.” My problem with a lot of the neo-noirs is that the directors of the classic films noir of the 1940’s (John Huston, Alfred Hitchcock, Billy Wilder, Fritz Lang, Robert Siodmak, Howard Hawks et al.) didn’t know they were making film noir but the makers of the neo-noirs did, Not only were the scripts often all too referential to the classics (as Sharp’s script here is in mentioning two characters played by Humphrey Bogart!) but the writers and directors seemed almost to be working from checklists as they ticked off the cliches of classic noir one by one as they appropriated them.

It also doesn’t help that while the makers of 1970’s neo-noir copied the themes and plot lines of classic noir, they did not attempt to duplicate the rich chiaroscuro visuals of classic noir. Part of the problem is they were forced to work in color (though director Allan Dwan and cinematographer John Alton had proven you can adapt the visual style of film noir to color in the 1956 film Slightly Scarlet, and I’d count Hitchcock’s Rear Window and Vertigo as films noir even though they’re in color), and they tended towards a washed-out palette at the opposite extreme from the rich visuals of classic noir. (The cinematographer was Bruce Surtees, whose father Robert Surtees had had a long career doing professionally competent but unspectacular work on mostly historical or romantic films.) It also doesn’t help that instead of a rich, sinister orchestral score, Michael Small’s music was mostly based on the pop- and funk-influenced jazz that was just becoming popular in 1975. Still, on its own merits Night Moves was an excellent film -- though Sharp’s script didn’t allow for the rapid alternations of comedy and action Arthur Penn was known for as a director, he nonetheless respects his story and gets great performances, especially from Hackman, Warren and Griffith -- and my nit-picks about it certainly shouldn’t discourage you from seeking it out and seeing it.