A Year of Gene Hackman: NIGHT MOVES (1975)
By: Bryan Hickman
Tags: Pop Culture, Actors, Movies, Gene Hackman, Film

A Year of Gene Hackman: NIGHT MOVES (1975)

Neck deep in vintage 1970s Hackman

Gene Hackman is America’s greatest living actor. This is not an opinion, but an objective fact.

In recognition of this truth, I have committed to watching — or rewatching — one of his movies every week for an entire year. I intend to report back with my thoughts and nerdy analysis for each one.

NIGHT MOVES (1975)

I’m venturing into new territory with this latest stop on my trip through Gene Hackman’s filmography. Night Moves is the first movie in the series that was all new to me.

I hadn’t seen it before. In fact, I knew next to nothing about it, other than the fact that it was №2 on Roger Ebert’s top 10 list for 1975.

I’m not sure why it never showed up on my radar before I started this project.

In the five years leading up to the release of Night Moves, Hackman appeared in 14 films. He was nominated for an Oscar for his work in I Never Sang For My Father in 1970. He won his first Oscar a year later for The French Connection.

Over the next few years, he had his first and only leading role in a big budget event movie — The Poseidon Adventure. And he worked with Al Pacino — who was also at a peak in his career — in Scarecrow. Then he starred in The Conversation, which, if we’re parsing categories, belongs in the upper stratosphere of Hackman’s film roles.

In other words, Night Moves came out at the tail end of what was probably the most acclaimed period of his career. And his work in this film belongs in that same company.

In Night Moves, Hackman plays Harry Moseby, an ex-NFL player working as a private detective. He loves his job as a freelancer, following people around Los Angeles in a beat-up Mustang, and scribbling details into his notebook.

At one point refers to all this as his “lifestyle.” But no one takes that too seriously.

His wife — played by Susan Clark — is constantly prodding him into taking a job at a big investigative agency. She thinks it would somehow bring him into the modern world and make him a better husband. But, she doesn’t seem to be nagging. They appear — at least at the outset — to have a loving relationship.

Early in the film, Harry takes on Arlene Iverson — a former B-movie actress played by Janet Ward — on as a client. She’s both a widow and a divorcee who speaks openly about her sexual exploits and lonely person history. She wants Harry to track down Delly, her missing teenage daughter.

Shortly thereafter, we see Harry in the midst of a personal investigation. After declining to join his wife at a screening of an art film, he observes her leaving the theater with another man. After following them for a time, he confirms they’re having an affair.

The home-breaker is a college professor with a noticeable limp, which not so subtly implies that he’s no match for Harry physically. Harry shows up at his beach house in Malibu, acting remarkably detached and dispassionate. His only real question is whether the relationship is serious.

When Harry gets home, his wife has unsurprisingly heard about everything. They have an emotional argument, revealing complexities about their relationship that were previously unknown. It’s one of the best acted scenes in the movie.

This is all too much for Harry. So he skips town to go look for Delly.

First, he talks to Delly’s boyfriend Quentin — played by a very young James Woods — who says that Delly dumped him for a stuntman named Marv Ellman while they were working on a movie set.

Harry visits the set and talks to Marv — played by Anthony Costello — and some other seedy characters, most of whom have seedy things to say about Delly, who has already moved on to somewhere else. One surprise: It turns out Marv was old flame of Arlene’s.

This leads Harry to suspect that Delly may be trying to get revenge on her mother by hooking up with her former lovers. So, he heads to Florida to find Arlene’s ex-husband — and Delly’s stepfather — Tom Iverson.

When he arrives, he discovers Delly — played by a very, very young Melanie Griffith in her first onscreen role — living with Tom — played by John Crawford — and a mysteriously sexy woman named Paula, played by Jennifer Warren. It’s unclear just what kind of living arrangements and relationships these three have with one another.

To Harry, everything somehow seems both sinister and freeing at the same time. After all, given his own domestic troubles, Harry may just be in the market for a new lifestyle.

At this point, the movie is half over. It’s been a slow burn. Most of the scenes are drawn out with dialogue and exposition. It’s not boring. But, it’s also not entirely clear what kind of story is being told.

Things slowly start to change once Harry arrives in Florida. The pacing stays the same, but there’s a slight shift in tone. From that moment, it feels like everything is starting to unravel. I mean that in a good way.

There’s more going on here than just your typical teenage girl on the run. But, until the end — after a seemingly endless string of surprising reveals — it never feels like conspiracy. Even if it was, there’s no indication as to who is conspiring and what they’re conspiring about.

It’s just a bunch of vaguely shady people doing and saying some vaguely shading things.

The film uses this uncertainty to its advantage by remaining fully focused on the present moment. In almost every scene, the characters’ ideals and motivations collide with one another in interesting ways. And they’re never really hinting anything that might be going on elsewhere in the story.

One thing is clear throughout: Everyone other than Harry is lying about something. Yet, the lies, schemes, and machinations aren’t all that important. The movie’s focus is on the characters and their interactions.

As it all goes down, Harry is just as clueless as the audience. His hunches are almost always wrong, yet, in chasing them down, he stumbles into more and more elements of the truth. And, with every new revelation, things gets more complicated.

I’m fully aware that this all reads like I didn’t know what was going on in this movie. I admit it. Much of the time, I didn’t have a clue.

Near the end, I thought I had finally caught up, but, the last seconds contain at least a couple shocking bits of new information, calling everything we’ve learned up to that point into question.

While this may sound like bad writing, it’s really not. Or, to be more precise, if it is bad writing, the performances and direction more than make up for it.

Night Moves was directed by Arthur Penn, who also directed other solid features like Bonnie and Clide, Little Big Man, and The Miracle Worker. All of which, like this movie, are great in their own way. Yet, they also tend to be forgotten when people discuss the best films of that era.

Here, he navigates a complicated story by ignoring it and focusing on the characters. A daunting task that would likely fail to maintain the interest of those who consume today’s short-attention-span popular culture.

Aside from Hackman, Jennifer Warren’s performance is the one that stands out the most. I don’t know that I’ve seen her in any other films. So, she’s something of an unknown, which is befitting for her mysterious character.

Paula seems like a textbook oversharer. She talks openly about her past indiscretions and poor decisions, often in surprisingly graphic detail. Yet, it’s never clear whose side she’s on or what her true motives are.

Is she a seductive mastermind? Is she an exploited victim of a “free love” lifestyle?

I got all the way to the end and, like many other details, I don’t know that the movie gives a clear answer. All I knew for certain was that Paula was a truly unique character and Warren’s performance never stopped being interesting.

Hackman’s work in NIGHT MOVES

Like I said, this is a vintage Hackman performance. He’s in virtually every scene. So, unsurprisingly, virtually every scene hits the right emotional notes and serves the film’s broader arcs and objectives.

Harry is a wounded character. He harbors the pain of of his wife’s unfaithfulness, the injuries that ended his football career, and his inability to put all the necessary pieces together in this case. That vulnerability is always on display for the audience, even if the other characters aren’t picking up on it.

There’s no big monologue or prefabricated Oscar clips for Hackman in the movie. Just a pitch-perfect performance in a difficult role.

This performance falls squarely in the Post-Watergate Gene Hackman category. As an ex-pro athlete and a relatively effective private detective, Harry Moseby is the picture of skill and masculinity. All his potential rivals or antagonists’ flaws are much more apparent.

Yet, in an era where most popular art tried to throw notions of tradition and authority on their heads, the fact that Harry was objectively superior wasn’t enough. Even with his attempts to buck the system and look like a rebel, he was too establishment to win out in the end.

No, I didn’t spoil anything by saying that.