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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.

Night Moves is not a bad film. It's actually quite good. It is also off-beat and a just a little bit odd but not quirky.

It is not hard to figure out why a young girl has run away from home when we see her mother, a washed up, alcoholic living in the Hollywood Hills. What is odd is trying to figure out the relationship between her, her stepfather and his girlfriend in the Florida Keys where she has gone to live. It is hinted that the stepfather is not just a stepfather.

Even stranger is Jennifer Warren's odd, abrupt, salty behavior in the film and the the strange dialog written for her. At one point, Gene Hackman even tells her he is tired of her "ping-pong talk". Was that written for the benefit of the audience or did he improvise? I felt puzzled by much of her performance.

It is also painful, really painful to watch Gene Hackman's wife struggle with their relationship and her learning new things about her husband.

Yes, a strange, strange little film. The acting is almost too revealing. I can't quite wrap my brain around the whole thing. I think it will be appreciated by fans of films from the 70's.

Private investigator Harry Moseby (Hackman) has his hands full retrieving a teen runaway (Griffith) from the Florida Keys back to Los Angeles. A routine case shuffled off to him by a rival, the matter nevertheless evolves into a complicated multiple murder plot. Normally distant Harry has difficulty separating his personal feelings from the facts.

The first half of this film is such a dull and plodding downbeat soap opera that it challenges the patience of the viewer. The relationships of a group of emotionally broken people hinting at personal guilt over sordid pasts thrown together by less than ideal circumstances don't always tie in with the actual narrative. But they aren't really meant to.

The real mystery of the story rests within the human interactions and what is important vs what is trivial. Harry is in fact a very poor detective. He lets those few emotional connections he is able to make with people cloud his judgments whilst assuming guilt on the part of those he doesn't like. What makes him a hero nevertheless is that he doesn't quit even if it means discovering personal betrayal.

Telling moments are rife. The way different people react differently from each other is a continual source of confusion for Harry. His inability to connect with his own wife on an emotional level has made her feel alone even in their most intimate moments together. Yet he lets his guard down with the wrong kinds of complete strangers. It certainly isn't by choice that he has chosen misread both the situation and the people surrounding it..

This is a more sophisticated form of detective story in that it offers an examination of the mindset of the detective - one who happens to be emotionally vulnerable and even a tad fragile.

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!

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.

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.

During the first hour not much happens in this movie. A two-bit private investigator named Harry Moseby (Gene Hackman), who has problems with his wife, goes in search of a runaway sixteen year old girl. Then, after about an hour into the story, one of the characters dies. And the plot picks up. Yet, even with this major story event, the film never really takes off.

The main problem with "Night Moves" is the script. I think they tried to make Harry Moseby, himself, the main focus of the film, and make the PI mystery strictly ancillary. A lot of time is spent on Harry: his personality, his problems, his general outlook, and so on. An enormous amount of time is wasted on Harry's marital troubles.

Meanwhile, the rather complex mystery element gets relatively little screen time, with plot elements left unexplained at the end. When you mesh a character study with a complicated murder story, the result is likely to be a patchwork of this and that, a film that comes across as indecisive about its overall intent.

Visually, the film has a very made-for-TV look and feel. Its 1970's era setting is clearly apparent. Background music sounds cheap, canned, and nondescript.

"Night Moves" may be a great movie for fans of Gene Hackman, who does a nice job in his role. Indeed, I would describe the film as a Gene Hackman cinematic vehicle. All other characters orbit Hackman's character, and exist solely to give Harry Moseby a reason to exist.

But I was more interested in the film's mystery element, and that was left muddled, convoluted, and poorly plotted. About the best I can say for "Night Moves", apart from Hackman's good performance, is that there is some technically well-done stunt work near the end, involving a small plane on pontoons.

"Night Moves" was a surprise to me. I assumed it could be a far more simple mystery/action film, but the whole thing caught my attention and really amazed me. What a great study in murder, infidelity, cruelty, sex, and relationships between strangers. A kind of film noir with dark overtones and a slow but effective suspense, the story starts as a simple investigation about a runaway teenager, but grows more and more into a complex drama plenty of unexpected twists. Gene Hackman is superb as the rude detective, the rest of the cast is also in fine form, but the real shock is to see a very young, hot (and naked) Melanie Grifith doing a terrific performance. James Woods is also here, with less impact but great to see too. An excellent film, one of the finest 70's underrated movies.

Night Moves is directed by Arthur Penn and written by Alan Sharp. It stars Gene Hackman, Jennifer Warren, Susan Clark, James Woods, Melanie Griffith, Edward Binns, Harris Yulin, Kenneth Mars and Janet Ward. Music is by Michael Small and cinematography by Bruce Surtees.

Former footballer turned private detective in Los Angeles Harry Moseby (Hackman), gets hired by an ageing actress to track down her trust- funded daughter Delly Grastner (Griffith), who is known to be in Florida. With his own personal life shaken by his wife's infidelity, Harry dives into the Grasten case with determination. Unfortunately nothing is as it first seems and it's not long before Harry is mired in murky goings on...

It sounds kind of bleak. Or is it just the way you tell it?

The locale is often bright and sunny but that's about the only thing that is in this excellent neo-noir. Harking back, and doffing its cap towards, the noir detective films of the classic cycle, Night Moves is ripe with characters who are either dubious or damaged. Protagonist Harry Moseby is thrust into a melancholic world that he has no control over, but he doesn't know this fact. As the mystery at the core of the dense plot starts to unravel, there's a bleakness, a 1970s air of cynicism, that pervades the narrative. Culminating in a finale that's suitably dark and ambiguous.

Harry thinks if you call him Harry again he's gonna make you eat that cat!

Alan Sharp's (Ulzana's Raid) terrific screenplay is appropriately as sharp as a razor. Dialogue is often hardboiled or zinging with wit, and the conversations come with sadness or desperation. Be it chatter about a fateful chess move, sexual enlightenment or the pains of childhood and bad parenting, Sharp's writing provides fascinating characters operating in a tense thriller environment.

Listen Delly, I know it doesn't make much sense when you're sixteen. Don't worry. When you get to be forty, it isn't any better.

Arthur Penn brilliantly threads it all together, as he hones a great performance out of Hackman and notable turns from the support players, he smoothly blends action with pulsing unease. There's nudity on show, but in Penn's hands it is never used for gratuitous purpose, it represents dangerous fantasies or dented psyches. Small's jazzy score is a fine tonal accompaniment, and Surtees' Technicolor photography provides deft mood enhancements for the interior and exterior sequences.

Biting and bitter, Night Moves is essential neo-noir. 9/10

It was an interesting & unusual detective movie. Entertaining but confused me & left me unsatisfied.

Harry Moseby (Gene Hackman) is a terribly flawed L.A. private detective and former football star. His wife Ellen is having an affair. He gets a case from Arlene Iverson looking for her missing 16 year old daughter Delly Grastner (Melanie Griffith). He discovers that failed actress Arlene needs Delly for her trust fund left to her by her late studio mogul father. Her friend Quentin (James Woods) reluctantly sends Harry to stuntman Marv Ellman. Harry follows the clues to the Florida Keys to her stepfather Tom Iverson and a mother figure in Paula. Harry and Paula are on a boat with Delly diving when she finds a dead man in a crashed plane.

This is a lesser known gem from Hackman in the same era as his classic 'The Conversation'. He brings out another compelling character. There is a murky story but the central story is never lost. There are a couple of future stars including a very young Melanie Griffith. This is a world of murky morality and paranoia of secrets.

Although filmed more than 30 years ago, "Night Moves" is still a fascinating film-noire. The plot starts in a rather straightforward way: We have a former footballer, Harry Moseby (Hackman), who now makes his living as a private detective, and gets hired on to what seems a standard missing person case. His employer is Arlene Iverson (Ward), a rather unknown aging actress, who wants him to find his missing stepdaughter (Griffith). As Moseby starts his investigation however, he realizes that nothing is as straightforward as it seemed; if you add the complication that his marriage has got into serious trouble, then you can realize that he is probably in a situation which he can barely handle...

Although the plot is quite fascinating in itself, providing us with several twists until the very end, the secret of the film's attractiveness lies in psychology: Director Arthur Penn does a magnificent job in showing us how a beaming, full of dynamism and self-confidence Moseby, is getting entangled in a situation which progressively drives him to successive bottoms. He cannot see clues which are in front of his eyes, and in the end the truth is revealed to him only by mere luck; even when he finds out about his wife's cheating in the early part of the film, it is simply because he just happened to be there. Moseby is not the talented detective of the Hercule Poirot's class: He is simply an average, well-intentioned guy who just happens to be a detective, and who has got into something that is well-above his skills.

Hackman is superb in his role, as one would of course expect from this very talented actor: He is ideally suited to portray the complex character of Harry Moseby. The film offers other good performances as well, including the young James Woods and Melanie Griffith who are in the beginning of their careers.

"Night Moves" is also full of subtle symbolism, with Penn providing us with plenty of arty material. Sometimes, this gets a bit too far, making the film a bit slow. Still, the overall result is satisfying.

Of course, the fact that the film was filmed in 1974 is something we cannot completely overlook: "Night Moves" has its age, whether we like it or not. That is one of the main reasons that I give it a 7/10, when it could get even higher.