![]() ![]() ![]() Moseby is a man always running behind events, falling further back every time he uncovers another piece of the puzzle, and most unfortunately oblivious to his own incompetence. All the time he is obsessed with replaying and demonstrating a chess match where a winning strategy involving clever knight moves was missed and the game lost. He thinks he is saving Delly by depositing her back with her mother, but that proves to be the worst possible move. This is a man who could not detect his own wife having an affair, and later cannot untangle the relationship between Tom and Paula. The signs are clear early on that Moseby's detective skills fall short. The focus is on Harry Moseby standing witness to his family life and career crumbling around his ears, while he intellectually believes that there is something he can do about it. ![]() ![]() The story of Night Moves is littered with holes, ill-defined motivations and at least one incredible coincidence. Instead Penn conjures up a companion piece to The Big Sleep, stripped of even the pretense of thorny heroism. With some jarring editing, audacious risks and a plot that scribbles on the periphery of character disintegration, the movie could have dissolved into irrelevance. A grisly underwater discovery suddenly makes the case a lot more complicated.ĭirected by Arthur Penn and written by Alan Sharp, Night Moves is a beautiful mess. Harry is attracted to Paula but struggles to make sense of what is going on and is unsure if he should return Delly to her mother. Tom appears to have already been ensnared by Delly's sexual charms, but his partner Paula (Jennifer Warren) is nevertheless curiously still standing by him. Learning that Delly is an uninhibited sexpot who is sleeping her way through her mother's former lovers, Harry makes his way to the Florida keys where he finds Delly hanging out with Arlene's second ex-husband Tom Iverson (John Crawford). He pushes on regardless and starts to uncover the web of Delly's friends, including greasy mechanic Quentin (James Woods), caustic movie stunt director Joey Ziegler (Edward Binns) and handsome stunt pilot Marv Ellman (Anthony Costello). Just as he starts his investigation Harry stumbles on his wife Ellen (Susan Clark) having an affair under his nose with a man called Marty Heller (Harris Yulin). Arlene is less interested in Delly's well-being and more in need of the money generated by her daughter's trust fund. Through his friend Nick (Kenneth Mars), Los Angeles based former pro footballer and now private detective Harry Moseby (Gene Hackman) is hired by has-been movie starlet and multiple divorcée Arlene Iverson (Janet Ward) to find her runaway 16 year old daughter Delly (Melanie Griffith). The film was seen as a metaphor for the end of Watergate, when a hopeless America didn't know what to think.but it also serves as a pretty shocking spin on the noir, with everything you understand being skewed enough so that by the twisty ending you can't trust anything that comes next.A neo-noir detective thriller, Night Moves is an engrossing character study ironically elevated by an almost incomprehensible plot featuring large gaps and plenty of edges. The film ends in bright daylight, with Harry shot down by a man he'd assumed to be innocent but who is, in fact, part of the conspiracy he's stumbled across, and with Harry just inches away from a steering wheel that could get him home.except he can't reach it. This is also the case with Night Moves, which slowly drowns Harry in this world, immersing him in a world obsessed with sex, particularly a number of leering older men driven to grave sin while lusting after a teenage Melanie Griffith ( Night Moves would not be able to be made today without getting crucified on Twitter), and a duplicitous Jennifer Warren as a woman you can't pin down (it's not entirely clear even as she dies what she had planned next with a treasure about to board her ship, and a boat with only one other guy in the middle of the ocean). ![]()
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