“He Played Something Else, and He Lost”: Arthur Penn’s Night Moves at Fifty (Preview)
by Jonathan Kirshner

Night Moves, Arthur Penn’s astute, introspective neonoir, flew largely under the radar upon its release in 1975, despite catching the eye of some savvy critics. Over the ensuing decades, however, its reputation has grown steadily, and it is increasingly recognized as a distinguished and exemplary film of the 1970s and of that era’s “New Hollywood.” A new 4K restoration from The Criterion Collection will only enhance the standing of Night Moves as one of the great achievements in that extraordinary decade of American filmmaking.

Criterion’s special edition (available in both 4K UHD and Blu-ray editions) is well timed, coinciding both with the movie’s fiftieth anniversary and, on a more melancholy note, the recent passing of Gene Hackman at the age of ninety-five. One of the signature actors of the New Hollywood era, Hackman, following an impressive supporting turn in Penn’s watershed Bonnie and Clyde (1967), appeared in a dozen films from 1969 to 1974, including Downhill Racer (1969), The French Connection (1971), Cisco Pike (1972), Prime Cut (1972), Scarecrow (1973), and The Conversation (1974). On the strength of those roles alone, Hackman, whose career stretched across a half-century, would take his place as one of the great screen actors in the history of American cinema. His performance in Night Moves, especially when considered in contrast with the contemporaneous The Conversation, stands out as some of the best work in his prolific, luminous oeuvre.

On the surface, the nominal plot of Night Moves seems standard issue. Harry Moseby (Hackman), running a threadbare, one-man, private-eye agency, is hired to track down the runaway daughter of a well-heeled client. With consummate professionalism, he follows the trail from Los Angeles to New Mexico to the Florida Keys, and after surmounting a few colorful obstacles, gets the job done. Subsequently, a tragic twist of fate requires Harry, well-versed in the unwritten code of the private eye, to revisit the case, and he is drawn into, and is compelled to get to the bottom of, a larger conspiracy.

That all sounds like off-the-shelf Chandler, which was surely intentional. But Night Moves, whether as a neonoir or a revisionist film noir, is much more than that, as the familiar genre is deployed as a vehicle to explore deeper mysteries. Notably against convention, Harry is married, and the movie is much more interested in exploring his relationship with his wife than it is about solving the mystery (something about smuggling). Ten scenes feature Ellen (Susan Clark), and two of the film’s most riveting scenes are marital confrontations. As Clark observed in a recent interview with me, those episodes, in the kitchen (an argument of breathtaking intensity) and the bedroom (featuring a cathartic revelation), are “the two places where they meet as equals.”

More generally, and, again, against convention, Night Moves is distinguished by its rich, complex female characters. Arlene Iverson (portrayed by New York stage actor Janet Ward), who hires Moseby for the job, could be written off as another stock character, the gold-digging alcoholic. Yet, Penn, in an interview with me years ago, praised Ward’s performance as “masterful” and notes that “she has something to say”—especially in her final confrontation with Harry, a bitter exchange in which she arguably fights the film’s protagonist to an emotional draw. Her daughter Delly (Melanie Griffith, very fine in her first role), also transcends the two-dimensional teen-temptress caricature, especially in one wrenching scene, during which that facade crumbles, revealing the vulnerable child within.

And then there is Paula (Jennifer Warren), who in a different picture might have been the femme fatale, but here, along with Ellen, represents the two paths that Harry’s life might take after the case is closed. Paula, a drifter and a survivor who surely has her own issues to sort out—in an interview with me, Warren described her character as “laying low and hiding out [in Florida] before catching my breath”—flashes a keen and savvy intelligence. The movie also stops in its tracks so that Paula might give a summary of her own life experiences: “I taught school, I kept house, I waited tables, I did a little stripping, I did a little hooking”—a tidy summary of the range of options society had to offer a woman with her background at that time.

Still, despite these very distinct elements, Night Moves is explicitly and purposefully a neonoir, part of the holy trinity of such Seventies films, along with Robert Altman’s The Long Goodbye (1973) and Roman Polanski’s Chinatown (1974). Each of these exceptional efforts approached the genre from a distinct angle. Chinatown, set in 1937, took a nihilistic Seventies sensibility and transported it back to the classical era. The Long Goodbye took the opposite approach, imagining a world in which Chandler’s Philip Marlowe is transported directly from the 1940s into the 1970s (Altman dubbed his character “Rip Van Marlowe”)…

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Jonathan Kirshner, a professor in the political science department at Boston College, is author of Hollywood’s Last Golden Age: Politics, Society, and the Seventies Film in America.

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