Night Moves

 In John Ford's Western, My Darling Clementine, in the first twenty minutes, the director sets up the fundamental conflict that will motivate the shoot-out in the last reel with Ike Clanton and Clanton brothers.  Then, Ford relaxes and lets a little domestic comedy play out over 50 or so minutes -- nothing much happens in that part of the movie, but it's pleasantly atmospheric, a sort of pastoral involving lots of drinking and courtin' (as they used to say) that gradually mutates into the violent gunfight that serves as the movie's climax.  This is the same structure that organizes Night Movies, a picture starring Gene Hackman, some staples of TV action shows (whose names I don't know but whom I immediately recognized) and the 16 year old Melanie Griffith.  Robert Altman in The Long Goodbye employs a similarly relaxed and languid pace.  Arthur Penn, who directed Night Moves, attacks the plot hard and fast in the first half-hour, then, forgets about it, for 45 minutes.  The ending is rushed:  the conflict with which the movie began is pushed back into the forefront and we have some killings before the story is resolved.  The story itself doesn't make much sense and I wasn't able to figure out who was killing whom or why.  If you are interested in this film, and I recommend it with reservations, the part of Night Moves that really sings is the middle part in which nothing much happens -- it's an exercise in brooding atmospherics and steamy tropical lust that is the real raison d'etre of the picture.

We have mostly forgotten about Arthur Penn, but there's no doubt, that he was one of the most exciting American filmmakers in the sixties through the nineteen-eighties.  After that period, Penn lost his touch and his movies aren't just bad, they're embarrassing.  Penn was famous for his work on the Gore Vidal script The Left-Handed Gun, an early Paul Newman picture (it's about a homosexual Billy the Kid); he made some impressive art films in the sixties before directing his magnum opus Bonnie and Clyde.  (Bonnie and Clyde (1967) is a masterpiece and, if you haven't seen it, you must do so at all costs.)  Little Big Man about Custer and the Indians is very good, with some spectacular set pieces.  Night Moves is chaotic and makes no sense --  this is surprising because the film was written by one of Hollywood's most accomplished screenwriters, Alan Sharpe who penned Ulzana's Raid, one of the best Westerns ever made.  After Night Moves, Penn directed the wildly idiosyncratic Western, The Missouri Breaks, starring an uncontrollable but very funny and menacing Marlon Brando as a cross-dressing regulator (gunfighter).  After that Penn couldn't find his metier and everything made later is dull or cringeworthy.

In Night Moves, woman who acts like a slatternly Messalina (she's middle-aged and grimly sexually promiscuous) hires Gene Hackman a private eye to hunt down her 16 year old daughter (Melanie Griffith). Hackman has a little porno actor's moustache and he plays the romantic lead -- this is improbable due to his pudgy shapeless face, but he's in good shape in this picture and channels his inner Burt Reynolds.  The job involving the nymphomaniac mother and the lost daughter morphs into some kind of plot involving a group of two or three stuntmen, all of whom have slept with the mother (and, maybe, also with the nymphet played by Melanie Griffith.)  The plot doesn't make sense and is completely implausible -- it involves smuggling a Mayan or Aztec idol out of the Yucatan for sale to some one or some several rich collectors.  Ths "Maltese Falcon"-style narrative is underwritten and hard to follow.  It involves a dead man with fish eating his eyes sunk under the Gulf of Mexico off Key West.  The plot has some intricate twists and turns, but they're not worth discussing and would be spoilers in any event.

At the center of the movie are some nude and sex scenes featuring Melanie Griffith (the production of the film had to be paused until she could reach 18) and Jennifer Warren.  If you are my age, Jennifer Warren will be instantly recognizable to you from TV although you won't be able to recall her name.  In the idyll at the center of the movie, Jennifer Warren's character is the wife or girlfriend of a stuntman who has retired to remote bay somewhere near Key West.  She is raising dolphins for people who are so depraved that they want a dolphin for a pet.  Her much older husband or boyfriend spends his days out on the ocean game-fishing, presumably with tourists.  He spends as little time at home as possible because he has been fondling the little girl and fears that he will be unable to control himself with the child.  Jennifer Warren looks frighteningly severe in her first appearance, but softens as the movie progresses:  with her hair under a hat shielding her from the sun, she looks like a man.  Later, she lets her hair fall free and turns into a seductress.  She offers herself to Hackman's private dick who is becalmed in the little compound where the woman and ex-stuntman live on the water with the nubile nymphet.  This entire sequence is languid, goes nowhere, and exists primarily I think to show Melanie Griffith diving naked in the limpid waters of the lagoon; the sequence also features a sexual encounter with Jennifer Warren's somewhat tarnished and bored siren.  (It turns out that she has bedded Hackman, who is rather implausible as a sex symbol, to distract him from shenanigans out at sea.)  Melanie Griffith has a high-pitched squeaky voice, but exudes raw, unbridled sexuality -- she knows her power over men and exercises it.  I can recommend Night Moves for the strange, soporific sequence at the Keys -- water laps against rotting piers, the sun blasts the lagoon and, at night, the sound of insects is deafening.  It's the kingdom of the Lotus-Eaters and the movie barely escapes from it.  And, indeed, when the escape is consummated, the picture is far less interesting.