# Night Moves (1975 film)

Night Moves is a 1975 American neo-noir thriller film directed by Arthur Penn from a screenplay by Alan Sharp. It stars Gene Hackman as an ex-professional football player turned Los Angeles private investigator who uncovers a series of sinister events while searching for the missing teenage daughter of a former movie actress. The cast also features Susan Clark, Edward Binns, Jennifer Warren, James Woods and Melanie Griffith in her film debut.
The film was released by Warner Bros. on June 11, 1975. It received positive reviews from critics, but a lukewarm commercial reception. Gene Hackman was nominated for a BAFTA Award for Best Actor in a Leading Role for his performance.
Although Night Moves was not considered particularly successful at the time of its release, it has attracted viewers and significant critical attention following its home media releases. The film has been called "a seminal modern noir work from the 1970s."

## Plot

Harry Moseby (Gene Hackman) is a former professional football player working as a private investigator in Los Angeles. He incidentally learns through his friend Nick (Kenneth Mars) that a fortune can be made in Mexican artifacts, as the country is cracking down on the theft of its Native American legacy. Harry isn't interested.
He accidentally finds out his wife Ellen is having a love affair with a man named Marty Heller (Harris Yulin).
Aging former actress Arlene Iverson (Janet Ward) hires Harry to find her sixteen-year-old daughter Delly Grastner (Melanie Griffith). Arlene's only source of income is her daughter's trust fund, but it requires Delly to be living with her. Arlene gives Harry the name of one of Delly's friends in Los Angeles, a mechanic and spurned paramour named Quentin (James Woods). Quentin tells Harry that he last saw Delly at a New Mexico film location, where she started flirting with one of Arlene's old flames, stuntman Marv Ellman (Anthony Costello). Harry realizes that the injuries to Quentin's face are from fighting the stuntman. He travels to the film location and talks to Ellman and stunt coordinator Joey Ziegler (Edward Binns), an old crony. Before returning to Los Angeles, Harry is surprised to see Quentin working on Ellman's stunt plane.
Harry travels to the Florida Keys, where her step-father Tom Iverson (John Crawford) lives, and finds Delly staying with Tom and his girlfriend Paula (Jennifer Warren). Tom admits having gotten intimate with Delly, and agrees she should return to her mother. Harry, Paula, and Delly take a boat trip to go swimming, but Delly becomes distraught when she finds the submerged wreckage of a small plane with the decomposing body of the pilot inside. Paula marks the spot with a buoy. They return to the shore and she appears to report the find to the Coast Guard. Later that night, she visits Harry's bungalow and the two have sex.
Delly agrees to go back to her mother in California; Harry delivers her to Arlene Iverson and picks up his check. As he leaves, he sees them arguing angrily again. Harry gets together with Ken and Joey to go to a football game in LA, where Joey indicates he'd arranged for Delly to get a SAG card as a favor to Arlene, an old friend. Later Harry listens to an answering-machine message from Delly apparently offering a tip, but he turns it off mid-message to focus on patching up his marriage. He tells his wife he will give up his occupation, which has come between them.
Harry soon learns from Ellen that Delly has been killed in a car accident on a movie set; she seeks to comfort him. Harry questions the driver of the car, his friend Joey, the stunt coordinator, who was seriously injured and is in a cast. Joey lets him view footage of the crash, raising Harry's suspicions about Quentin the mechanic. Harry goes to the home of Arlene Iverson, who now stands to inherit her daughter's wealth, and finds her drunk by the pool. He tracks down Quentin, who denies being the killer but says that the dead pilot in the plane was involved in smuggling and was Ellman. Quentin gets away before Harry can learn more.
Harry and Ellen attempt to work towards reconciliation. He decides to pursue the case and returns to Florida, where he finds Quentin's dead body floating in the dolphin atrium of Delly's step-father Tom Iverson. He accuses Tom of the murder; Tom confesses, they fight, and Tom is knocked unconscious. Paula admits she did not report the dead body in the plane because the aircraft contained a valuable relic treasure they were smuggling piecemeal from the Yucatan to the United States.
Harry and Paula set off in a boat to retrieve the relic. They arrive at its location, marked by a buoy, and Paula dives to retrieve it. A floatplane appears and flies by the boat. Its pilot starts strafing the boat with a submachine gun, injuring Harry in the leg. The floatplane waterlands and taxies towards the boat. As Paula surfaces with the sculpture, the pilot taxies over and decapitates her, but the plane crashes into the sculpture. The plane flips over next to the boat. As the cockpit submerges near the boat, Harry is able to see through the floatplane's windshield the drowning pilot. It's Joey Ziegler.
Bleeding profusely, Harry manages to start one engine of the boat, but collapses in pain, as the boat is idly circling on the spot.

## Cast

* Gene Hackman as Harry Moseby
* Susan Clark as Ellen Moseby
* Jennifer Warren as Paula
* Edward Binns as Joey Ziegler
* Harris Yulin as Marty Heller
* Kenneth Mars as Nick
* Janet Ward as Arlene Iverson
* Melanie Griffith as Delly Grastner
* James Woods as Quentin
* Anthony Costello as Marv Ellman
* John Crawford as Tom Iverson
* Ben Archibek as Charles
* Dennis Dugan as boy
* C.J. Hincks as girl
* Maxwell Gail, Jr. as Stud

## Production

Night Moves was shot in the fall of 1973, but since Melanie Griffith was just sixteen at the time her underwater nude scenes were filmed, the movie was not released until 1975. The role of Ellen, played by Susan Clark, was originally offered to Faye Dunaway who turned it down to star in Chinatown. Dunaway had just split from one of the film's stars - Harris Yulin - after a two-year relationship. Night Moves's original title, Dark Tower, had to be changed so as to not confuse the film with the 1974 blockbuster hit The Towering Inferno. The house belonging to James Woods' character Quentin was owned by Phil Kaufman, road manager for Gram Parsons at the time of Parsons's death. Kaufman's subsequent actions became the basis for the 2003 film Grand Theft Parsons. The cast and crew of Night Moves were shooting at the house on the day the police came to question Kaufman, and as they were taking him away, Arthur Penn turned to Gene Hackman and said, "Man, we're shooting the wrong movie".

### My Night at Maud's

A line from Night Moves occurs when Moseby declines an invitation from his wife to see the movie My Night at Maud's (1970): "I saw a Rohmer film once. It was kinda like watching paint dry." The exchange from Night Moves was quoted in director Éric Rohmer's New York Times obituary in 2010. Arthur Penn was an admirer of Rohmer's films; Bruce Jackson has written an extended discussion of the role of My Night at Maud's in Night Moves; its protagonist and Moseby have related opportunities for infidelity, but respond differently.

## Reception
### Box office

Night Moves was not a commercial success at the time of its 1975 theatrical release.

### Critical response

The film currently holds a score of 84% on Rotten Tomatoes based on 25 reviews.
Roger Ebert gave the film a full four stars and called it "one of the best psychological thrillers in a long time, probably since Don't Look Now. It has an ending that comes not only as a complete surprise — which would be easy enough — but that also pulls everything together in a new way, one we hadn't thought of before, one that's almost unbearably poignant." Ebert ranked Night Moves at No. 2 on his year-end list of the best films of 1975, behind only Nashville. Vincent Canby of The New York Times wrote that he had "mixed feelings" about the film, elaborating that the characters "seem to deserve better than the quality of the narrative given them. I can't figure out whether the screenplay by Alan Sharp was worked on too much or not enough, or whether Mr. Penn and his actors accepted the screenplay with more respect than it deserves." Gene Siskel of the Chicago Tribune gave the film three stars out of four and stated that the protagonist is the "kind of mixed-up character" that "seems to be Hackman's specialty", while Alan Sharp's screenplay "provides the character of Paula (Jennifer Warren) with some of the best scripting for any woman this year". Arthur D. Murphy of Variety called the film "a paradox. A suspenseless suspenser, very well cast with players who lend sustained interest to largely theatrical characters ... There's little rhyme or reason for the plot's progression, and the climax is far from stunning. But the curious aspect about the Warner Bros. release is that it plays well." Kevin Thomas of the Los Angeles Times described the film as "a stunning, stylish detective mystery in the classic Raymond Chandler-Ross Macdonald mold," as well as "a fast, often funny movie with lots of compassionately observed real, living, breathing people.
This handsome Warners presentation is still another triumph for ever-busy, ever-versatile Gene Hackman, director Arthur Penn and writer Alan Sharp." Gary Arnold of The Washington Post was negative, stating, "The fatal weakness is Alan Sharp's screenplay, a pointlessly murky, ambiguous variation on conventional private-eye themes ... we're supposed to be so impressed by the dolorous, world-weary tone that we overlook some pretty awesome loopholes and absurdities in the story itself, which never generates much mystery, suspense or credible human interest."
Night Moves continues to attract critical attention long after its release. Film critic Michael Sragow included the film in his 1990 review collection entitled Produced and Abandoned: The Best Films You've Never Seen. Stephen Prince has written, "Penn directed a group of key pictures in the late 1960s and early 1970s (Bonnie and Clyde (1967), Alice's Restaurant (1969), Little Big Man (1970), Night Moves [1975]) that captured the verve of the counterculture, its subsequent collapse, and the ensuing despair of the post-Watergate era." In his monograph, The Cinema of Loneliness: Penn, Stone, Kubrick, Scorsese, Spielberg, Altman, Robert Kolker writes, "Night Moves was Penn's point of turning, his last carefully structured work, a strong and bitter film, whose bitterness emerges from an anxiety and from a loneliness that exists as a given, rather than a loneliness fought against, a fight that marks most of Penn's best work. Night Moves is a film of impotence and despair, and it marks the end of a cycle of films."
Dennis Schwartz characterizes the film as "a seminal modern noir work from the 1970s" and adds, "This is arguably the best film that Arthur Penn has ever done." This remark is telling in the context of Penn's earlier film, Bonnie and Clyde (1967), which is now considered a classic by most critics. Roger Ebert added the film to his "Great Movies" list in 2006. Jack Hawkins of Slash Film listed Night Moves among the most underrated films of the 1970s, describing the film as "a brilliant neo-noir that teems with salacious, jaded energy."
In 2010, Manohla Dargis described it as "the great, despairing Night Moves (1975), with Gene Hackman as a private detective who ends up circling the abyss, a no‑exit comment on the post-1968, post-Watergate times."
Griffith's appearance in the movie garnered particular controversy for one racy nude scene that was shot when she was only 16 years old, though she also appeared nude in other films such as Smile which was released the same year.
Night Moves has been classified by some critics as a "neo-noir" film, representing a further development of the film noir detective story. Ronald Schwartz summarizes its role: "Harry Moseby is a man with limitations and weaknesses, a new dimension for detectives in the 1970s. Gone are the Philip Marlowes and tough-guy private investigators who have tremendous insight into crime and can triumph over criminals because they carry within them a code of honor. Harry cannot fathom what honor is, much less be subsumed by it."

### Awards and nominations

| Award | Year | Category | Nominee | Result |
| British Academy Film Award | 1975 | Best Actor in a Leading Role | Gene Hackman | Nominated (shared with French Connection II) |
| New York Film Critics Circle Award | 1976 | Best Actor | Gene Hackman | Nominated |

## Home media

Night Moves was released in 1992 in the U.S. as a LaserDisc and as a VHS-format videotape. In 2005, it was released as a DVD in the U.S. and Canada (region 1). The DVD was favorably reviewed by Walter Chaw, who writes, "Shot through with grain and a certain, specific colour blanch I associate with the best movies from what I believe to be the best era in film history, Night Moves looks on Warner's DVD as good as it ever has, or, I daresay, should." A region 2 DVD was released in 2007. The film was released on Blu-ray in 2017 by Warner Archive Collection.