Night Moves (film)

Night Moves
Cover art from 1992 videotape release
Directed by	Arthur Penn
Produced by	Gene Lasko Robert M. Sherman
Written by	Alan Sharp
Starring	Gene Hackman Jennifer Warren Susan Clark Melanie Griffith
Music by	Michael Small
Cinematography	Bruce Surtees
Editing by	Dede Allen Stephen A. Rotter (co)
Distributed by	Warner Bros.
Release date(s)	June 11, 1975 (1975-06-11)
Running time	100 minutes
Country	United States
Language	English

Night Moves is a 1975 detective film directed by Arthur Penn. The film stars Gene Hackman, Jennifer Warren and Susan Clark, and features very early career appearances by Melanie Griffith and James Woods.

Hackman was nominated for the BAFTA Award for his portrayal of Harry Moseby, a private investigator. The film has been called "a seminal modern noir work from the 1970s",^[1] which refers to its relationship with the film noir tradition of detective films.

Although Night Moves was not considered particularly successful at the time of its release, it has attracted viewers and significant critical attention following its videotape and DVD releases.^[2] Manohla Dargis described it recently 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."^[3]

Plot summary

Harry Moseby is a retired professional football player working as a private investigator in Los Angeles. He is dedicated to his job, but his dedication does not make him happy or powerful in his personal life, and his wife Ellen is unfaithful to him.

Aging actress Arlene Iverson hires Harry to find her trust-funded daughter Delly Grastner, distracting Harry from his marital problems as he tracks the lascivious runaway teen to Florida. In the Florida Keys, Harry has an affair of his own with Paula, and succeeds in locating Delly, even as he learns that finding her is only the beginning of a much larger case.

As the "accidental" deaths multiply, Harry discovers that everyone has his or her own motives and that he cannot do much to stem the tide of deep-seated depravity.

My Night at Maud's

The most quoted line from Night Moves occurs when Moseby declines an invitation from his wife to see the movie My Night at Maud's: "I saw a Rohmer film once. It was kinda like watching paint dry."^[4] The exchange from Night Moves was quoted in director Éric Rohmer's New York Times obituary in 2010.^[5] Penn himself is an admirer of Rohmer's films;^[6] Jim Emerson has written that, "Harry's remark, as scripted by Alan Sharp, is a brittle homophobic jab at a gay friend of his wife's."^[7] Bruce Jackson has written an extended discussion of the role of My Night at Maud's (1970) in Night Moves; viewers familiar with the earlier film may recognize that its protagonist and Moseby have related opportunities for infidelity, but respond differently.^[4]

Main cast

Actor	Role
Gene Hackman	Harry Moseby
Jennifer Warren	Paula
Susan Clark	Ellen Moseby
Ed Binns	Joey Ziegler
Harris Yulin	Marty Heller
Kenneth Mars	Nick
Janet Ward	Arlene Iverson
James Woods	Quentin
Melanie Griffith	Delly Grastner
John Crawford	Tom Iverson
Anthony Costello	Marv Ellman
Dennis Dugan	Boy
Max Gail	Stud

Critical response

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.^[8] 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."^[9] 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."^[10] 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."^[1] 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.^[11]

Night Moves has been classified by some critics as a "neo-noir" film, representing a further development of the film noir detective story.^[12] 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."^[13]

Box office and home media

Night Moves is not considered to have been a commercial success at the time of its 1975 theatrical release.^[2][14]

Night Moves was released in 1992 in the U.S. as a laserdisc^[15] and as a VHS-format videotape;^[16] the illustration above is from the videotape release. In 2005, it was released as a DVD in the U.S. and Canada (region 1).^[17] 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."^[18]

A region 2 DVD was released in 2007.^[19]

References

1. ^ ^{a b} Schwartz, Dennis (December 5, 2000). "Night Moves". Ozus' World: Film Reviews. http://homepages.sover.net/~ozus/nightmoves.htm. Retrieved 2010-08-21. 
2. ^ ^{a b} Slifkin, Irv (2004). VideoHound's groovy movies: far-out films of the psychedelic era. Visible Ink Press. p. 545. ISBN 9781578591558. http://books.google.com/books?id=nfCsh3yCpz0C&pg=PA545. "Now considered a classic of modern noir, the downbeat and disturbing Night Moves failed at the box office and was met with indifference by the critics." 
3. ^ Dargis, Manohla (October 8, 2010). "Arthur Penn, a Director Attuned to His Country". The New York Times. http://www.nytimes.com/2010/10/10/movies/10dargis.html. 
4. ^ ^{a b} Jackson, Bruce (July 11, 2010). "Loose Ends in Night Moves". Senses of Cinema (55). http://www.sensesofcinema.com/2010/feature-articles/loose-ends-in-night-moves-2/. 
5. ^ Kehr, David (January 11, 2010). "Éric Rohmer, a Leading Filmmaker of the French New Wave, Dies at 89". The New York Times. http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/12/movies/12rohmer.html. 
6. ^ Penn, Arthur; Chaiken, Michael; Cronin, Paul (2008). Arthur Penn: Interviews. Univ. Press of Mississippi. p. 114. ISBN 9781604731057. http://books.google.com/books?id=kb3a9Mkjc38C. 
7. ^ Emerson, Jim (January 11, 2010). ""I saw a Rohmer film once...": The truth behind the Night Moves meme". The Chicago Sun Times. http://blogs.suntimes.com/scanners/2010/01/i_saw_a_rohmer_film_once_the_t.html. 
8. ^ Sragow, Michael (1990). Produced and Abandoned: The Best Films You've Never Seen. Mercury House. ISBN 9780916515843. 
9. ^ Prince, Stephen (2002). A New Pot of Gold: Hollywood Under the Electronic Rainbox (1980-1989). University of California. p. 232. http://books.google.com/books?id=_M3nR4wI99AC&pg=PA232. 
10. ^ Kolker, Robert (2000). The Cinema of Loneliness: Penn, Stone, Kubrick, Scorsese, Spielberg, Altman (3rd Edition). Oxford. p. 21. ISBN 9780195123500. http://books.google.com/books?id=AdyNbhlu2MsC&pg=PA21. 
11. ^ Ebert, Roger (August 3, 1998). "Bonnie and Clyde (1967)". Chicago Sun Times. http://rogerebert.suntimes.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/19980803/REVIEWS08/401010306/1023. Retrieved 2010-08-20. "When I saw it, I had been a film critic for less than six months, and it was the first masterpiece I had seen on the job. I felt an exhilaration beyond describing. I did not suspect how long it would be between such experiences, but at least I learned that they were possible." 
12. ^ Sanders, Steven; Skoble, Aeon G. (2008). The Philosophy of TV Noir. University of Kentucky Press. p. 3. http://books.google.com/books?id=WqDm82G3co0C&pg=PA3. "Some of the more noteworthy achievements of the neo-noir period dating from the late 1960s includes films as dissimilar from one another as Bonnie and Clyde (Arthur Penn, 1967), Point Blank (John Boorman, 1967), and the unjustly neglected Pretty Poison (Noel Black, 1968). These and other neo-noir films modulated classic noir themes into new frequencies. Chinatown (Roman Polanski, 1974), The Conversation (Francis Ford Coppola, 1974), and Night Moves (Arthur Penn, 1975), three of the most accomplished examples of neo-noir of the mid 1970s, externalized the violence and turned up the volume." 
13. ^ Schwartz, Ronald (2005). Neo-noir: The New Film Noir Style from Psycho to Collateral. Rowman & Littlefield. p. 31. ISBN 9780810856769. http://books.google.com/books?id=VRCgRGFV0ycC&pg=PA31. 
14. ^ Kemp, Philip. "Arthur Penn". filmreference.com. http://www.filmreference.com/Directors-Mi-Pe/Penn-Arthur.html. "Penn established his reputation as a director with Bonnie and Clyde, one of the most significant and influential films of its decade. But since 1970 he has made only a handful of films, none of them successful at the box office. Night Moves and The Missouri Breaks, both poorly received on initial release, now rank among his most subtle and intriguing movies, and Four Friends, though uneven, remains constantly stimulating with its oblique, elliptical narrative structure." 
15. ^ Night Moves (laserdisc). Warner Home Video. October 21, 1992. ISBN 0790713098.  100 minutes. See "Night Moves (1975) [11102]". LaserDisc Database. http://www.lddb.com/laserdisc/09298/11102/Night-Moves-%281975%29. 
16. ^ Night Moves (VHS tape). Warner Home Video. April 1, 1992.  100 minutes. See "Night Moves [VHS] (1975)". amazon.com. http://www.amazon.com/dp/630026887X/. 
17. ^ Night Moves (DVD). Warner Home Video. July 12, 2005.  100 minutes. See "Night Moves (1975)". amazon.com. http://www.amazon.com/dp/B0009GX1CE/. 
18. ^ Chaw, Walter (April 14, 2010). "Night Moves". Film Freak Central. http://www.filmfreakcentral.net/dvdreviews/nightmoves.htm. 
19. ^ Die heiße Spur (DVD). Warner Home Video. 21. September 2007.  96 minutes; German and English soundtracks. See "Die heiße Spur". amazon.de. http://www.amazon.de/dp/B000TAHD4C. 

Further reading

• Berman, Emanuel (2001). "Arthur Penn's Night Moves: A Film that Interprets Us". In Gabbard, Glen O.. Psychoanalysis and Film. Karnac Books. p. 83. ISBN 9781855752757. http://books.google.com/books?id=CEmQcw9zTHAC&pg=PA83.  Emanuel Berman's extended interpretation of the film's screeplay.
• Meyer, David N. (May 3, 2009). "Any Kennedy: The Merciless, Blinding Sunshine of Night Moves". Film Noir of the Week. Archived from the original on 2010-08-25. http://www.webcitation.org/5sFvoZAUr.  David N. Meyer's review includes a fairly rare effort to parse Night Moves in terms of the contributions of its screenplay, directing, acting, etc.. Meyer particularly credits Gene Hackman's performance, Alan Sharp's writing, and Dede Allen's editing.

External links

• Night Moves at the Internet Movie Database
• Night Moves at AllRovi