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Night Moves (1975)
(SPOILERS)
On the surface, Night Moves follows all the basic
conventions of the private detective noir genre.
1) The protagonist is a world-weary man of integrity.
Harry (Gene Hackman) works hard for his clients and has a sense of
decency, but never makes much money because he's the world's most
honest guy. Like all his role models from the fiction of the 30s and
40s, he does exactly what he's hired to do and in return wants only
his per diem plus expenses.
2) The detective starts out with a simple assignment
which escalates into a complex criminal conspiracy. In this case, as
in so many, Harry is hired for a missing persons job and ends up
involved in multiple murders and smuggling.
Harry is called to the swanky house of a former movie
starlet. Her daughter (Melanie Griffith) is missing. Harry follows
the trail, finds out that the daughter is a very lusty young woman
who has proceeded from lover to lover, and each of her beaus has
been somehow involved in the stunt work side of movie making. One is
a mechanic, another a pilot, another a stunt coordinator. The trail
is fairly straightforward, and leads to the home of the missing
girl's stepfather in the Florida Keys. Harry brings her home. When
all of that is resolved, you can look at your DVD player and see
that 62 minutes of the film have passed uneventfully. That is all
there is to the first two thirds of the movie. No special mystery,
no dramatic tension, just a character-based missing persons case
with some world-weary dialogue like this:
"I can't hear myself think."
"Lucky you."
Or this:
"Who's winning?"
"Nobody, but one side is losing slower than the
other."
One strange event did happen during the first sixty
minutes, but no special significance was attached to it. While out
on a midnight swim with the missing daughter, on the night before
taking the girl back to her mother, Harry encountered a submerged
place with the dead pilot still trapped inside. At the moment, that
did not seem related in any way to Harry's case.
While the plot and atmosphere are those of a 1940s
detective noir, everything unfolds in a classic 1970s way, with a
lot of kooky characters, discussions of relationships, and
existential angst. In the background is the fact that Harry catches
his wife cheating on him, and this more or less gives him permission
to have a one-night stand with a woman in the Keys, specifically the
pilot of the boat that finds the submerged wreck.
The last thirty minutes of the film seem to be in a
completely different film. Just a couple of days after Harry returns
the runaway daughter to her mother, the girl is killed the course of
a failed movie stunt - in a car with one of the people he met
on the case, a car which is maintained by another guy (James Woods)
Harry met on the girl's trail. Harry is no longer on the case, of
course. His job is done, and the check is in his pocket. Since he is
the official honest movie detective, however, he naturally resolves
to solve the mystery, because he reasons that the girl would still
be alive if he hadn't brought her back to mom. This is where the
film stops being an existential character sketch and becomes a true
thriller. As Harry retraces his earlier investigation, he finds that
he had misinterpreted almost everything he saw, and had failed to
see the connections between events that were related. Moreover, he
regrets not having realized that many of the mother's and daughter's
ex-lovers all knew each other, having worked together on various
films. Of course, Harry could not have been expected to see all
these things because everything seemed straightforward and simple.
He found the girl and brought her home. He had no reason to expect
any foul play of any type, and yet he feels responsible for the fate
of the girl he "rescued."
The film finally turns the genre on its ear, because
Harry manages to "solve" exactly nothing, and makes nothing better
with his involvement. As he retraces the investigation, bodies
continue to show up. Everyone he suspects of having harmed the
daughter soon turns up as dead as she is, and ol' Harry can do
nothing about it. In the final analysis, he's not an all-knowing
1940s movie detective, but just a real guy like those of us in the
audience. He generally can't see what's going on any more clearly
than we can, and he ends up just about the same way we would if we
were in his shoes.
The director of the film is Arthur Penn, a largely
forgotten but once highly respected director. His filmography from
the sixties and seventies is short, but impressive.
Even the lowest-rated film on that list is an
interesting failure. I found Night Moves a rewarding film to watch,
although the first 62 minutes can seem at times to be a very
laborious process of character introduction. I think I like it
better when Dr. Evil simply calls his henchmen around the table and
introduces them to one another, thus reducing all character
exposition to about two minutes of monologue. Despite the languid
pacing of that first hour, however, the film doesn't really drag
because the dialogue is clever, the characters are credible, and the
film is sexy and sad.
The last half hour moves at break-neck speed. In
addition to the string of murders which begins with the daughter's
death, much of the final act consists of explaining the things which
happened behind Harry's back in the first part if the film, so the
entire 100 minutes of plot and red herrings are packed into that
last 38 minutes. The grand finale of the film consists of one of the
greatest action scenes I've ever seen, followed by a curiously
lugubrious and maddeningly indefinite conclusion. Faux-Chinatown.
Very existential. Very 70s.
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Nudity
Melanie Griffith (1,
2,
3)
Other Stuff:
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