Die heiße Spur

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!

NIght Moves falls into that category of movies that was not so loved when it came it but since time has passed, people have come around to it. It also benefits from being from that new golden era of cinema, the 70s, where the films showcase a gritty side to characters, often played by some of the best anti-hero actors of all time -- Hackman, in this case. Night Moves is a good movie and a lot of fun but it has some limitations which keep it from being more than that.

First of which, the story really doesn't make sense. It's clear when the case is more or less solved about an hour in that the movie is really going to be about something else. In this case, it's more about Hackman's character, a guy who despite his love of things like chess, can't seem to really figure stuff out. So we are taken through his marriage, his wife's infidelity. an attempted reconciliation, etc. All that stuff is great for a great actor like Hackman who makes you feel how lost he is.

The problem is that the ties that connect that to the real story, that of the art smuggling, which is the real mystery, are very thin. Also, the ties that connect the plot points of the smuggling story are very week. Too much coincidence, too many people happen to be exactly where they need to be. Too much crossing the country - - LA to Florida in the blink of an eye. One second Gene Hackman is chasing James Woods around LA on a motorcycle. The next scene, he finds him in Florida.

I read that the film was shot in 1973 and then shelved until 1975, meaning that there must have been issues with it then. There must have also been a lot scenes cut, because a lot is in there, it's just hidden very deeply with no way to get at it. I think this is a film to check out and enjoy for some very good elements. I just don't think we can put our blinders on and make it a 70s classic. Good film. Worth a watch.

In Los Angeles, the private detective and former athlete Harry Moseby (Gene Hackman) is hired by the retired obscure Hollywood actress Arlene Iverson (Janet Ward) to find her 16 year-old missing daughter Delly Grastner (Melanie Griffith). Harry discovers that the runaway girl has a promiscuous life and uses drugs, and he tracks down her last boyfriend Quinten (James Woods), who works as a mechanic on the sets. Meanwhile, Harry finds that his wife Ellen Moseby (Susan Clark) is cheating him and he has difficulties to handle the situation. Then he visits the stuntman Marv Ellman (Anthony Costello) and the stunt coordinator Joey Ziegler (Ed Binn) and follows the new lead, heading to Florida Keys, where Delly would be living with her stepfather Tom Iverson (John Crawford). Harry is welcomed by Paula (Jennifer Warren), who works with Tom in a boat and has an open relationship with him. After seeing an accident in the sea, the reluctant Delly surprisingly accepts to return to Los Angeles with Harry to live with her mother. Harry and Ellen have a long conversation trying to solve their marriage problems. When Harry learns that Delly has died in a car crash, he suspects of Quinten. But sooner he finds that the initially missing person case is actually a complex smuggling operation of a valuable artifact.

With the recent death of Arthur Penn, I decide to see again "Night Moves", a movie that I watched in the 80's and was forgotten in my collection. "Night Moves" is a different and complex detective story, supported by an engaging and flawed screenplay and great characters development. The top-notch actor Gene Hackman in the top of his successful career performs a detective that snoops the lives of other people and is incapable to see that his marriage is deteriorating. The 18 year-old Melanie Griffith in her first credited role is extremely sexy and beautiful, undressing easily along the film. It is also interesting to see James Woods also in the beginning of career in a supporting role. It is also great to see again the gorgeous vanished actresses Jennifer Warren and Susan Clark. My vote is seven.

Title (Brazil): "Um Lance no Escuro" ("A Bid in the Dark")

Note: On 26 October 2014 I saw this movie again on DVD and now my vote is eight.

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.