Night Moves (1975)

Film: Night Movies (1975)

Stars: Gene Hackman, Susan Clark, Jennifer Warren, Edward Binns, Harris Yulin, James Woods, Melanie Griffith

Director: Arthur Penn

Oscar History: No nominations, though Hackman did get a BAFTA nomination so it was probably in the running.

Snap Judgment Ranking: 4/5 stars

Throughout the month of June, in honor of the 10th Anniversary of The Many Rantings of John, we will be doing a Film Noir Movie Marathon, featuring fifteen film noir classics that I'll be seeing for the first time.  Reviews of other film noir classics are at the bottom of this article.

We're not quite done yet with our monthlong blog marathon.  While I initially wanted this to be only in June, the month slightly got away from me, and as a result I'm going to bleed into this weekend.  I owe you (after this article) five articles that I had said would be part of our month, and we'll get to all five of them by Sunday plus the kick off of our July star, which will officially end our anniversary celebration.  This is a part-time blog, after all, and I don't want to shortchange you, but I also have to admit that sometimes other priorities get in the way.  Today, we're going to move our film noir marathon firmly into the direction of neo-noir, with one of the quintessential dark detective dramas of the 1970's, Arthur Penn's Night Moves.

(Spoilers Ahead) The movie is focused on Harry Moseby (Hackman), who is a retired pro football player who now makes his money doing divorce cases & looking for runaways.  He finds out in the opening of the film that his wife Ellen (Clark) is cheating on him, largely because he's neglected her for his work.  Instead of tending to his marriage, Harry instead is working on his latest case, working for a drunken divorcee's daughter Delly (Griffith), who has run away from a terrible home...but her mother wants her back because she's her child support meal ticket.  This sets off a dangerous game, as we soon learn that the world that Delly has run into, filled with sexual depravity, art smuggling, & frequent murders, is far more than Harry could've bargained for.

One of the key distinguishers between the film noir of the 1940's & 50's and the neo-noir craze that would dominate the 1970's & 80's was the lack of the Hays Code.  This wasn't just a way to have more violence & nudity (which Night Moves has), but it's also a way to play with the formula.  Noir always had the bad guy get caught, the hero either live or die heroically, and the girl getting what was coming to her (either a big kiss, or if she was too evil, the wrong end of a bullet).  Neo-noir didn't have to play by these rules.  The femme fatale could get away with it, the villains might win, the detective might not be the better for it (or die trying to get to the truth).  You saw this in films like Body Heat, The Long Goodbye, and the greatest film of the era, Chinatown.

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).  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.  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.

1940's: The Big Sleep, The Blue Dahlia, Blues in the Night, Brighton Rock, Criss Cross, Crossfire, Daisy Kenyon, Dead Reckoning, Detour, Fallen Angel, Gilda, High Sierra, I Walk Alone, I Wake Up Screaming, The Killers, The Lady from Shanghai, Leave Her to Heaven, Moonrise, Murder My Sweet, Nightmare Alley, Out of the Past, The Postman Always Rings Twice, Ride the Pink Horse, Scarlet Street, The Strange Love of Martha Ivers, They Won't Believe Me, Too Late for Tears, The Woman in the Window, The Woman on the Beach

1950's: Affair in Trinidad, The Asphalt Jungle, Beat the Devil, The Big Combo, The Big Heat, The Blue Gardenia, The Burglar, Cast a Dark Shadow, The Crimson Kimono, Gun Crazy, The Hitch-Hiker, House of Bamboo, In a Lonely Place, The Killing, Kiss Me Deadly, Murder by Contract, Night and the City, On Dangerous Ground, Pickup on South Street, Slightly Scarlet, Sudden Fear, Sweet Smell of Success, They Live By Night, While the City Sleeps

Neo-Noir: Blade Runner, Body Heat, Farewell My Lovely, Fargo, From Afar, The Long Goodbye, Nightcrawler