Night Moves

It begins, in Los Angeles, with a simple phone message and ends, a crisp 99 minutes later, in a startling, revelatory act of violence on the sun-drenched waters of the Florida Keys. Gene Hackman, that consummate actor, is Harry Moseby, a world-weary private investigator hired by an aging former starlet (Janet Ward) to track down her runaway teenage daughter, played by Melanie Griffith in her film debut. Following a series of leads from a movie location in New Mexico to the home of a charter boat captain in the Florida Keys, Moseby uncovers - almost unwittingly - a labyrinthine scam involving stolen treasures of ancient art. In the true spirit of film noir, he also discovers that betrayal and greed are the magnetic poles of the dark world he has been drawn into.

Unlike the classic film noir heroes of the 50s though, Hackman's sense of betrayal begins at home with his own wife (Susan Clark), who is having an affair. When he eventually confronts his wife's lover (Harris Yulin, in a superb cameo performance), his pent-up anger is abruptly released, not in a rage of violence but in a simple gesture of despair: as the camera frames both men in the foreground, Hackman lowers his eyes and speaks his wife's name, his voice a whisper, his face a mask of pain. Throughout the course of the movie Hackman uses such subtle gestures to reveal Moseby's character, moment by moment, word by word, and Alan Sharp's generous, perceptive screenplay allows him to do just that. For all its twists and turns the movie never seems hurried: one clue dovetails into the next one. And even the smallest roles - James Woods as a sleazy mechanic, or Edward Binns as a film director - are written with precision: these are flesh and blood characterizations, not mere types. Only Jennifer Warren, in a too-mannered performance, seems out of synch.

Under the sure-handed direction of Arthur Penn, Night Moves is also a paean to the sheer visceral excitement of filmmaking. Upon its release in 1975, the estimable critic Penelope Gilliatt wrote that she could not recall another film that moved so easily over water and land. Along with a few other perceptive critics of the time, Gilliatt recognized Penn as a true stylist, a director who combined a painterly eye for physical detail - Griffith's outfits, on a clothesline, waving like pennants in the wind - with a fatalist's sensibility. Beneath the picturesque waters of the Gulf of Mexico lay a sea of moral decay.

Certainly, on the surface, Night Moves seems to contain enough popular elements to insure box office success. It's a well acted, beautifully paced mystery with an intriguing story line, gritty action, illicit sex, memorable villains and exotic locales. Why, then, did the audience resolutely stay away from this movie? Why, even now, is it considered in many quarters a neglected gem?

Perhaps the answer lies underneath that shimmering surface, deep in the damaged psyche of its central character, in Harry Moseby's troubled private eye. Perhaps, even in 1975, the mainstream audience still wanted its heroes to resemble the ones they grew up with, the stoic American male vanquishing the dark forces of treachery. Like Elliot Gould in Robert Altman's The Long Goodbye (1973, another exemplary film that achieved little box office success) Moseby represents both an homage to the hard-boiled film noir heroes of the fifties, and a repudiation of them. Clearly, Penn and Sharp are not interested in simply updating the traditional private eye to modern L.A. Instead, they transform a prototype - the grizzled but always triumphant gumshoe - into a more recognizable man: they dare to show his vulnerability. And perhaps this is what the audience rejected. Who could imagine Sam Spade as a husband, much less one who discovers his wife in bed with another man?

Thanks to the craftsmanship of cinematographer Bruce Surtees and legendary editor Dede Allen, Night Moves is seamless - a quilt of arresting images woven together by the thread of narrative drive - and yet it's the individual moments that linger in the mind. Hackman comforting the emotionally battered Griffith or describing to Warren his passion for chess, a game he plays, not surprisingly, alone. The fuselage of an airplane suddenly appearing, in the glow of a boat's running lights, on the bottom of the sea. And then, of course, there is the final sequence, a masterstroke of light and water, sound and silence, tension and release.

Every film, good and bad, is a collaboration, a joining of many disparate talents, but beyond its technical accomplishments Night Moves, from the first shot to the last, belongs to Hackman. What other American actor of the last forty years has given us so many consistently entertaining performances? From Popeye Doyle to Royal Tennenbaum, Buck Barrow to Little Bill, Hackman's characterizations, so intricately observed, appear to be effortless, and all too real. Time and again he reaches his audiencewhere it matters - in their hearts - precisely because he doesn't seem to be trying to.

Reviewed by Tim Applegate