NIGHT MOVES (Arthur Penn, 1975) R

Reviewed: April 17th, 2002

The most gratifying part of being a movie critic is having the opportunity to lobby for great movies not many people are familiar with. Today that film is Arthur Penn's Night Moves. I was lucky enough to watch a print of Night Moves last week. It's a beautiful little gem-- drenched in the 1970s, dark-as-hell, gritty, smart, potent and criminally underrated.
_______________________

Roman Polanski's Chinatown (1974), Robert Altman's The Long Goodbye (1973) and Night Moves (1975) are the three crucial, revisionist film noirs of the 1970s. These three films did more to update the traditionally 1940s genre than any others, thus paving the way for later, already destined to be classic, post-1990 noirs like David Fincher's Se7en (1995) and Christopher Nolan's Memento (2001). I don't think it's an overstatement to say that Chinatown, The Long Goodbye and Night Moves---infused by events like Watergate and the Vietnam War and JFK's assassination (which obviously made Americans feel disgusted, terrified, paranoid, powerless, confused and on and on)--made film noir a richer, more complex genre than it'd ever been.

After all, this Holy Filmic Trinity took the womanizing, powerful, smooth, macho, cold, hard-boiled private investigator archetype (pioneered by Humphrey Bogart as Sam Spade in John Huston's 1941 The Maltese Falcon) and turned him more realistic, more openly human. They also added these qualities to the noir genre as a whole. Disillusioned audiences of the 1970s recognized a newfound truth in revisionist noir and they responded accordingly (just as their disillusioned, postwar counterparts had in the 40s).

During its WWII period film noir peddled the notion that evil can be anywhere, but thankfully we have the private investigator-as-moral compass to rescue us. The film noir of the 70s upped the ante. It said not only is evil hidden anywhere, but it's everywhere, it's unstoppable and it will frequently prevail. Evil is too pervasive and omnipotent to be stopped by one man. It spoke more directly of a corrupt bureaucracy. Thus now, three decades later (when tragedy and evil and sadness and terror are as strong as ever obviously), as much as I love The Maltese Falcon I'll put Chinatown in my DVD player over it most days of the week (and I'm not alone-- currently in imdb's user poll of the Top 250 films of all time, Chinatown (#43) edges The Maltese Falcon (#46) out). Perhaps because The Maltese Falcon is idealized. Perhaps because it was explicitly born out of an America who still managed to believe that good can triumph over evil, that the Americans can beat the Nazis, that the world can be a better place. Tragic as this is to say, nowadays The Maltese Falcon feels somewhat naive and innocent.

The added 70s noir realism is found in the new flaws the Trinity gave their protagonists and in the additional texture that resulted. Altman introduced humor into film noir with The Long Goodbye. He made Elliott Gould's Philip Marlowe bumbling, sometimes incompetent. In Chinatown, Nicholson's J.J. Gittes is still a bit of a womanizer, yes (although he never even seems quite capable of returning Faye Dunaway's affection), but he's not that smooth and definitely not that cold. He's mostly just a nice, pretty polite guy, trying his best to help out some people he believes in, some people he believes deserve to know the truth. And he's not that macho either-- he tells dirty jokes and he knows how to be tough, yes, but as illustrated by the infamous bandage he wears across his nose for half the film (a blatant Freudian castration reference) and all the times he gets beaten up, he's vulnerable. Nicholson's masculinity in Chinatown seems to be part facade, whereas Bogart's masculinity always embodied every fiber of his being.
_______________________

Night Moves' Gene Hackman also plays a damaged PI., emotionally wounded, masculinity threatened. His Harry Moseby is not a womanizer because he's married, virtually unheard of up until Night Moves in NoirLand. And indeed what Night Moves does brilliantly is use Harry Moseby's marriage to turn his masculinity against him-- his wife is having an affair (perhaps the ultimate machismo horror story?). Plus, Moseby--while a competent, mildly successful detective--is not that talented (not even as talented as, say, Nicholson in Chinatown). Within the framework of the case Night Moves focuses on he is consistently unable to piece together the facts right in front of him. As he says at the film's end (I'm paraphrasing here, I can't remember the exact quote): 'I solved nothing. It all just fell into my lap.'

Night Moves isn't merely satisfied by these new twists it's placed on the typical private detective. It ups the interest level and the challenge even more by creating a detective more obsessed with the act of detecting than with discovering the truth (which is maybe one reason he isn't that good at his job and unable to help the people he ultimately wants to). Moseby speaks of never knowing his father while growing up and thus, as an adult, spending a long time tracking him down. When he finally found him, instead of confronting him, he just watched on from a distance. Then he left, never to see his dad again. Not only is lack of father figure another example of stripped down, injured masculinity, but it illustrates a fundamental flaw in Moseby's detective character. To be a great detective, you must be persistent. Can you imagine Bogart ever backing down from a case? (And again, not even Nicholson in Chinatown would. In fact, Gittes' stubborn relentlessness is what gets him into such a huge mess in the first place.)

Eventually Moseby is consumed with guilt re: the case Night Moves details, and does seek the truth. Inescapably at the core of film noir are private investigators as men with honor. Sure, they can be purchased, sure they're (especially in the Trinity) fallible, but they're inherently good men. It's just that, as Roger Ebert writes, they "seem to occupy human tragedy for a living."

The most important effect of Chinatown, The Long Goodbye and Night Moves' P.I. tinkering, is audience empathy. When Bogart is told in The Maltese Falcon his partner died, he barely bats an eye. I wouldn't be surprised if Hackman/Gould/Nicholson, told the same thing, broke down and started bawling. Distance versus sympathy.

I adore how 70s and dated Night Moves looks. It's not a film embarrassed by its period and makes no attempts to conceal its roots. (Unfortunately this may also be one of the reasons time has not been kind to the film and audiences have all but forgotten of its existence.) Films that are purposely period pieces, like Chinatown (set in the 1930s) or L.A. Confidential (made in 1997, set in the early 1950s) often age better than what become (as the decades advance) real-life period pieces. I'm not sure why exactly, but this probably has something to do with master production designers capturing a heightened timelessness in the process of artificially recreating bygone eras.

I also adore how screenwriter Alan Sharp found a perfect balance for the complexity of Night Moves' plot. It's not simple, but it doesn't near the byzantine nature of Chinatown and The Maltese Falcon's narratives. No, Night Moves' plotting is exactly what it needs to be, and by virtue of that fact, it's all the more tragic when Hackman can't piece things together faster.

Speaking of Hackman, watching his supremely deft performance in Night Moves I had one of my most pleasurably revealing viewer/actor experiences. That rare instance where you get to see yet another great performance by an actor who is already in your all-time favorite pantheon. Just when you thought you couldn't love them anymore, just when you thought that they couldn't possibly be any more brilliant than you already knew they were, they amaze you anew. (This also happened when I finally watched Dustin Hoffman in Kramer vs. Kramer. Having already seen his mind-blowing work in Lenny, Midnight Cowboy, The Graduate, Tootsie and All the President's Men, here I was now watching what is probably his best performance of them all.)

The ending of Night Moves is filmmaking at its apex. The last few sequences (some of them silent), the last few lines of dialogue and the last shot are all as in-their-own-way perfect as Chinatown's legendary close.

Arthur Penn's seminal 1967 masterpiece Bonnie and Clyde reinvigorated cinema, revolutionized genre concerns and was largely responsible for launching the 1970's "Golden Age" of cinema. His forgotten Night Moves is a further reminder of what the greatest filmmakers are capable of: taking what is familiar and crafting something wholly new.

Return home.