Die heiße Spur

This is the perfect role for Hackman as the aging sports star unable to find his role in life once the playing days are over. He is the accidental jock, too sensitive to play the stereotype and so finding no sense of belonging. He has become a detective but he is a bumbling amateur compared to a Philip Marlowe type. He is shy and hestitant and is frequently made to feel discomfort by the seedy, untrustworthy people he comes into contact with. He has none of Marlowe's self assurance. It begs the question why has he become a detective? Maybe it is partly due to his abandonment by his father who years later Hackman tracks down only to fail in confronting him. He is condemned to search for people to whom he is of no importance.

This idea of the lonely seeker is Hackman's own turf. His affable charm conveys a sense of a lifetime's wrongheaded idealism. In the wrong job, deluding himself, looking for a way out. Eventually, he is able to see clearly and see how his drifting has allowed the people around him to manipulate him in their games. Unlike many of this film's peers such as 'Chinatown', 'Taxi Driver', 'The Long Goodbye', we are not left to be slightly repulsed by the lead actor's ways. Hackman plays the everyman character as an affable, amateur sleuth whose hestitancy and chronic lack of commitment give him a fallibility more recognizable to an audience.

I've seen Night Moves twice, 20 years apart. Both times, I felt strangely obligated to love this movie, for two reasons: (1) Gene Hackman is one of my favorite actors; and (2) I enjoy detective stories, especially those featuring Philip Marlowe or Lew Archer (the primary inspirations for Hackman's character, rather than Sam Spade, who is misleadingly name-dropped here).

Unfortunately, both times I was frankly bored by this movie and struggled to get into it. What's the problem? Well, detective stories are a funny genre. They tend to have very little action or incident, and instead rely on character development and witty dialogue to sustain interest. For this approach to work, the dialogue must sparkle, and the cast of characters must be really compelling.

Night Moves gets this all about half right. Some of the dialogue is sharp, but the seduction scenes have rather laughable "deep" and "sexy" lines. The movie is also weighed down by a protracted marital infidelity subplot that goes nowhere interesting.

I'll say this, though - the violent finale is terrific and really sticks in the mind.

In short, it's hard to write detective fiction as well as Raymond Chandler or Ross Macdonald, and this kind of pale imitation / updating of their work mostly just annoys me. Hackman is great, and the story kind of holds together, yet somehow this movie fizzles rather than frizzles.

Night Moves (1975)

An odd convolution of 1940s film noir and 1970s New Hollywood. The hero is a kind of watered down Bogart—not as romanticized, and with less exaggerated one-liners (which film noir lovers will miss but which those who like realism will appreciate). Gene Hackman is terrific, and he plays Harry Moseby, a down and out ex-football player with a drained candor that makes him pathetic as much as likable. He ends up mixed up in a Dashiell Hammett kind of plot, for sure, looking for the daughter of a rich woman and then getting way over his head.

The artifacts of New Hollywood liberation are plain to see: nudity (female only) and a kind of sexed up background even when the plot is going somewhere else. This was for the sake of an audience still astonished that the movies could do such things (they couldn't before 1967) and it's still kind of raw and edgy in a lasting way. It also feels dated, too, making you wonder if it was really so sexually liberated back then.

The trail for this daughter takes us to the Florida Keys and out into the ocean. There are mysterious motives everywhere, and it's only Moseby we trust. Completely. And we even feel him starting to get a grounding for his drifting self amidst these miscellaneous people. And we see a kind of generosity that is based on this selfish need to do something right, and all its conflicting meanings. So eventually the movie is less about who killed who for this or that reason, and more about this man and his quest for clarity.

But clarity has a cost, and the movie will take several surprising turns. Not all of the plot is supported very well. We are led along at times, and frankly told things that might have been better revealed through the plot. It's not a perfectly nuanced drama in this way. These are nitpicks, for sure, because the larger feeling takes over and is commanding. And that's the lasting reputation of the film, that it pulls off this kind of modernized noir world with originality.

The director is Arthur Penn, who's great "Bonnie and Clyde" kicked off the shift into New Hollywood sensibility. (Beatty is always given too much credit for that film's audacity because he starred and funded it, but the film was Penn's at heart.) This might be called the last of Penn's great cycle from the period, and if not the equal to his 1967 breakthrough, it is in many ways more delicately felt and mature. And so in a way more watchable today a second or third time. Hackman is the one great actor here, however, and if there's a key problem with "Night Moves," it's that he almost but not quite supports the film alone. The three or four secondary characters are all of them thin, or contrived to be types, and so it falters.

See it anyway. It surprised me the way "Point Blank" from this era did. Excellent.

Coming back to NIGHT MOVES a quarter of a century later is a confronting experience. I was admirer of Alan Sharp's (HIRED HAND and LAST RUN) and now it's easier to see how he'd distorted the American crime movie with the influence of the European art cinema. Much the same thing is happening in Sam Mendes' current films.

The process is knowing and resonant and the film shows Arthur Penn at the top of his game, though it didn't find the same public his most famous work. This dark intrigue stuff works, partly because it's too dense to be immediately absorbed and because the characters are so vivid - even if it is hard to believe that all these great women want to take off their shirts for Gene Hackman in his tan rug. It is however one of Hackman's best outings - whether he liked it or not.

Lots of great detail - the contrast between Hackman's study with the black and white TV where sports will kill his eyes and Yullin's tasteful home, which makes us share Hackman's loathing of the character, feeding dolphins, the glass bottom boat or the theatre viewing (which respects the different format of the two cameras for once.) The performances are consistently vivid, reflecting well on Penn, with soon to be stars Griffith (particularly memorable) and Woods running level with largely forgotten character people. Janet Ward, for one, really registers.

Even if it needs theatrical viewing to be appreciated, Bruce Surtees' dim lighting, characteristically shading eyes, is atmospheric but the post "New Wave" fad of dispensing with establishing shots and opticals is now confusing and jerky. The score irritates too.

The line about paint drying has now passed into common usage but I like "blind, Albino, s**t-eating alligators" as much.

I used to use this one to teach screen writing decades back. I rate that a good call.

Night Moves is an underrated Film Noir. Directed by Arthur Penn (Bonnie & Clyde) it is an absolutely outstanding genre piece. Gene Hackman plays an L.A. gumshoe who is hired by a well to do ex-actress to find and bring home her runaway daughter (Melanie Griffith in her first role!). What seems to be routine detective work soon turns out to be a complicated case which finally ends in murder and mayhem. There are some remarkable stunt and underwater sequences, well photographed by Bruce Surtees (Director of Photography of many Clint Eastwood action movies). Not only Melanie Griffith but also another of today's stars, James Woods, gave his screen debut in this film. See it, it is worth the while!