- Arthur Penn's Night Moves is a deceptively great film. I say "deceptively" because it starts off as a superficially goofy 70's detective story and slowly deepens into a subtle neo-noir. Its star, detective Harry Moseby (Gene Hackman), is an affable washed-up football player who makes his living as a freelance detective. When the local agency farms out a lead, Moseby follows it to the palatial home of retired actress Arleen Iverson (Janet Ward). Iverson was "never big" as an actress, but she appears to have made a second career out of marrying into money and bedding any man with a pulse. Her 16-year old daughter, Delly (short for Delilah, and played by a young Melanie Griffith), seems to have found a rather troubling way to follow in her mother's footsteps, and now Mrs. Iverson wants Moseby to track her daughter down. "Are you the kind of detective who, once you get on a case, nothing can get you off of it?" she asks. "That was true in the old days," he jokes, "before we had a union." The light jazzy music underscores the playfulness of the dialogue. Nothing serious going on here, right?
- The first hint of deeper problems arrives not from the Iversons, but rather through Moseby himself. After trailing his wife Ellen (Susan Clark) to a movie theater, the detective discovers that she is cheating on him with the cultured sophisticate Marty (Harris Yulin). In a great scene, he confronts Marty at his beachfront home. Did Ellen tell you, Marty asks? No, Moseby was following her around. Maybe he should be asking Ellen these questions? "Let's pretend I'm asking you," the barely restrained Moseby replies. Even in his personal life, Moseby takes the "Sam Spade" approach, alternating between interrogations and wisecracks. The lenses in Marty's windows suggest a certain distortion of perspective, but the story about Moseby's search for his estranged father confirms it. Moseby can't distinguish his life from his work, and that's going to cause him problems in both departments.
- Moseby begins his search for Delly by visiting a "creep called Quentin" (James Woods), who reluctantly directs him to the sleazy stuntman, Marv (Anthony Costello). The amusingly despicable Marv ("He'd fuck a woodpile on the chance there was a snake in it") is a fan of both Iversons, but the stunt coordinator, Ziegler (Edward Binns), tried to discourage Delly from pursuing him. Moseby's next stop is to the Florida Keys, where Arleen Iverson's most recent husband, Tom (John Crawford), captains a boat with the help of his live-in assistant, Paula (Jennifer Warren). Sure enough, young Delly is staying there, but Tom is surprisingly eager to get rid of her. Although Paula's corny hard-boiled dialogue wins points with Moseby, their relaxing nighttime boat ride is interrupted when Delly spots a drowned pilot underwater. Is it just me or does that sunken aircraft look like the one Marv used to fly? As the body count increases, Moseby starts to feel like that tragic chess player who never saw the "knight moves" and regretted it for the rest of his life.
- To fully explain the plot of Night Moves, if that is even possible, would be to miss the point completely. Like Moseby, the audience is stuck in the middle of something we can't completely understand, and it's impossible to maintain the right perspective. By the time we realize this, the film's early daytime shots and upbeat vibraphone music have been replaced by dimly lit night shots of an ocean whose waves provide the only soundtrack. The film's characters are always interesting and never what they seem, and the finale is appropriately unfathomable. The final shot leaves poor Moseby going around in circles as the jazzy score resumes, this time providing a stark contrast to one of the most memorable and bleakest noirs ever made.
- Kenneth Mars also had a minor role in the film as the agency man, Nick.
