Night Moves

Between 1968 and 1980, every major director working in Hollywood wanted to remake Howard Hawks’ “The Big Sleep”. (The appeal of this film extends beyond that period as well -- “The Big Lebowski” is also a remake of the Hawks’ classic.) “Chinatown” is a version of that film, however, sufficiently remote to disguise the Bogart and Bacall movie’s influence. Robert Altman’s “The Long Goodbye” is closer to Hawks’ prototype. Ivan Passer’s “Cutter’s Way” adapts Hawks’ pervasive sense of corruption, but shifts the paradigm toward an exploration of post Vietnam rot in America. The least-known of these neo-noir films, Arthur Penn’s “Night Moves,” released in 1975, comes the closest to literally remaking the Hawks’ picture -- although Penn’s film is distinctively perverse and curiously mired in the loopy, marijuana-inflected culture of the early seventies. It’s a period piece combining Cassavetes’ style method acting with wild and painful psycho-drama, long improvised sequences, and highly stylized dialogue -- the script was written by the great Alan Sharp and every half-dozen lines there’s a great zinger or a poignant moment of revelation, a little whiff of Tennessee Williams here and there. Like “The Big Sleep,” the plot involves a private eye (played by Gene Hackman grinning while his heart is breaking) hired by an elderly debauchee to track down a missing child. The detective, called Mosby, has been gum-shoeing his wife and catches her involved in a love affair. Mosby is a tough guy who was once a famous college football player and he’s a man’s man -- but his heart is broken by his wife’s affair and the film’s subplot, action parallel to the film’s detective narrative, involves the hero’s attempts to reconcile with his cheating spouse -- this being the seventies, everyone is sleeping with everyone else. “Night Moves” is also similar to “The Big Sleep” in that the plot is so complex that it is impossible to determine whether it makes any sense or can even be deciphered at all. It suffices to observe that by the end of the film every single character (with the exception of the depraved fading movie star -- a character that should have been played by Gloria Swanson) is dead or dying. Why all these people were killed and by whom remained totally obscure to me, but the story isn’t the point of the film -- rather, the movie is about establishing certain moods, playing out certain scenarios that are dream-like riffs on classic film noir motifs from the late forties and fifties, a Technicolor variation on black and white themes. The purpose of the movie is to expose its female characters in various postures of lust and seduction -- the faded movie star is always half-naked and flashing herself at Hackman’s private eye; her daughter, played by a very young Melanie Griffith, is naked throughout most of the film and all the male characters, seedy leisure-suit lounge lizards to a man, have had sex with her. Jennifer Warren, a curiously equine-looking actress, seduces Mosby to keep him from trailing her lover, a nasty, hairy old gent who has been interfering sexually with his step-daughter (Ms. Griffith) -- Warren’s character makes picturesque remarks about her nipples to detain Mosby while her gangster husband pilots his boat from the Florida Keys on obscure business in the Gulf of Mexico. The women are all needy and ready to hop into bed with the hero at the drop of a hat. The men are completely vicious, drunk, and murderous. The film features a wonderful scene with the faded starlet, denouncing her daughter who has been murdered as a “little bitch” while Hackman looks on with an expression mingling sorrow and contempt -- the retired ex-starlet’s house is in the Hollywood Hills overlooking LA and the shot is as much about the bright light, the bright swimming pool and the steep hillside as anything else. There’s a big fight between Hackman and the stepfather that deteriorates into childish looking, if bloody, flailing around and the action takes place in squalid locations in the Florida Keys and the rim of Hollywood, sets that are so vivid that you can almost smell them. Sharp’s dialogue delivers dozens of Oscar Wilde style epigrams, dumbed down into seventies’ diction and the characters are vivid and believable in a dismal sort of way The camera-work is Hawksian -- it doesn’t interfere with the story such as it is and Hackman delivers a subtle, wounded performance. Some critics rate “Night Moves” as Arthur Penn’s greatest film -- better these critics think than “Bonnie and Clyde” or “Little Big Man” or “The Miracle Worker”. My view is that the picture is a curious failure -- like “The Big Sleep,” I think, a mood piece masquerading as a detective picture, too idiosyncratic and flawed to be great, but, probably, the last really personal and effective film that Penn was able to direct.