Within such a context, a quintessential Penn “folk” character like Paula, however corrupt, serves more as a spokesman for the film’s values than Harry, if only because of her relative flexibility and lack of illusions. Absurdist anarchy and a search for roots, the thematic poles common to all of Penn’s features, figure implicitly in the sardonic, fleeting references to American history in the dialogue (Washington, Franklin, the Kennedy assassinations) - wistful epitaphs to lost purposes in a post-Watergate climate that the film is at some pains to describe. Thus one is only half-engaged in the seductions of a game while intermittently scoring off points against the featured player, although Hackman makes Harry likeable enough to keep this tension interesting for a while, as long as he can remain a step or two ahead of the film’s impending sermon about the folly of his ways. Distanced by a brittle and heartless muzak score that ironically reflects genre expectations, the plots its focus almost equally between what Harry uncovers and what he “misses” - or is in flight from. Thanks to an efficient script by Alan Sharp, and clean direction by Arthur Penn that lingers over seemingly peripheral matters only further to drive a bitter moralistic message home, Night Moves effectively subverts the Ross Macdonald formula that it partially appropriates - runaway child of wealthy, corrupt household saved from perdition by fatherly detective, who sets all the closet skeletons in order - by making its detective as much of a “runaway” as the child, and a virtually “solved” mystery as oddly unedifying and irrelevant as an unresolved one. Alone, Harry navigates the boat in circles around the wreckage.īeneath the complicated unraveling of a mystery, an anti-mystery, with the hero’s detection registering as an evasion of his own problems beneath a densely charted intrigue of betrayals and cross-purposes, a cryptic void, like that ambiguous trophy of treasure and wreckage around which Harry is drifting in the final shot. While she is diving for the statue, a seaplane appears Harry is sounded by gunfire and Paula killed just before the plane crashes Harry sees that the pilot is Joey Ziegler.
There he finds Quintin has just been killed by Tom after a fight with the latter, Harry sets off in his boat with Paula, who explains that she, Tom, Ellman, and Quentin had been smuggling archaeological remains out of Yucatan, and admits that she was seducing Harry while Tom was diving for a statue in the wrecked plane. Hoping to save his marriage, and closing down his detective office, Harry nevertheless insists on flying back to Florida when he learns that Ellman’s death hasn’t been reported to the Coast Guard.
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Shortly after Harry returns Delly to Arlene, she dies in a movie car stunt with Ziegler at the wheel suspecting foul play, Harry goes to see Quintin, who reveals that Ellman was the corpse in the wrecked plane. Delly refuses to come home, until she comes across a corpse in a wrecked plane while swimming at night and changes her mind later the same night, Paula comes to Harry’s room and seduces him. There he meets Tom, and his girlfriend Paula and Delly, who appear to be involved in a ménage à trois. There is an angry scene with Ellen, just before Harry leaves leaves to look up Ellman, also meeting and befriending stuntman Joey Ziegler, who directs him to Delly’s stepfather, Tom Iverson, on the Florida keys. After speaking to Delly’s previous boyfriend Quentin, a movie stuntman who explains that she went off with Marv Ellman, another stuntman, Harry surreptitiously follows his own wife Ellen as she leaves a cinema with another man, Marty Heller, and later confronts Heller in his flat. 99 mins.įormer football star Harry Moseby, now working as a private detective, is hired by Arlene Iverson, a promiscuous former starlet, to find her runaway teenage daughter Delly. ( Stud), Susan Barrister and Larry Mitchell ( Ticket Clerks). l.p-Gene Hackman ( Harry Moseby), Jennifer Warren ( Paula), Edward Binns ( Joey Ziegler), Harris Yulin ( Marty Heller), Kenneth Mars ( Nick), Janet Ward ( Arlene Iverson), James Woods ( Quentin), Anthony Costello ( Marv Ellman), John Crawford ( Tom Iverson), Melanie Griffith ( Delly Grastner), Susan Clark ( Ellen Moseby), Ben Archibeck ( Charles), Dennis Dugan ( Boy), J. ed-Craig McKay, Robert Reitano, Richard Cirincione. This review of Night Moves appeared in the May 1975 issue of Monthly Film Bulletin.
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