One Of The Best, Most Tragic Noirs Ever Made Is Finally Getting The 4K Treatment
50 years later, Night Moves is still a seminal noir thriller.
Night Moves can be a complicated, even confusing, mystery to piece together. “The plot can be understood, but not easily, and not on first viewing,” wrote Roger Ebert. This is by design. Just as private investigator Harry Moseby (Gene Hackman) finds himself swept up and cast adrift by the very case he’s meant to be in control of — constantly revising, recontextualizing and second-guessing what he knows to be true — so is the audience.
A sense of feeling unmoored is crucial to Arthur Penn’s 1975 neo-noir thriller, in which there are no easy answers, only an atmosphere of suffocating despair. The bodies pile up, but more pervasive is the moral blight that infects each of the characters to varying degrees. Even a corpse is only given consideration in terms of the loot that can be plundered from it.
The case Harry’s looking into is that of 16-year-old runaway Delly Grastner (Melanie Griffith). Hired to track her down by her mother, former actress Arlene Iverson (Janet Ward), what he discovers is a world full of predatory men and lonely, broken women. Older men exploit Delly sexually, justifying it by framing her as promiscuous, even as the film makes it heartbreakingly clear that the young girl is just starved of affection. The uncaring Arlene exploits her daughter economically — she will only continue to receive part of the trust fund set up for Delly on the condition that she lives with her, which explains why she even bothers reporting her daughter missing.
Harry finds Delly living with her stepfather (John Crawford) and brings her back safely, but the homecoming evokes a mood more melancholic than celebratory. He’s completed the job, and done it successfully — then why does it feel like it was precisely the wrong thing to do? He had noble intentions, but of what use are they in a cruel and unjust world?
The film’s title is a play on “knight moves,” a chess gambit that would’ve won its player a championship; only he couldn’t see it at the time, picked an alternative play and lost. Harry jokes about how regret would’ve haunted him had he been that player, but the story becomes tragically prophetic, applicable to everything Harry doesn’t, or can't see, all the chances he’s missed. Towards the end of the film, he becomes a mere pawn on the board, elegantly moved out of the way at a crucial moment.
Night Moves’ acute air of tragedy is deepened by Harry’s flawed-yet-innately-decent character. There’s not only a sense of him having fumbled the case, but him scrambling with the larger existential question of who he is. A former pro football player, he’s now a hollow shell of a man, investigating the deepest depravities of other men. When he discovers his wife (Susan Clark) cheating on him, he can only watch helplessly before his detective instincts kick in — tailing them, noting down her affair partner’s license plate. The film reveals that when his parents abandoned him as a child, he tracked them down too, and yet didn’t have the courage to confront or even meet them.
The job not only informs how he processes the world, but also how he evades it — he throws himself into solving Arlene’s case, in no small measure as compensation for how he can’t fix his flatlining marriage. At the same time, his preoccupation with his work is what corroded his marriage in the first place. The line between the person and the profession often blurs. “Do you ask these questions because you wanna know the answer or is it just something you think a detective should do?” he’s asked.
Gene Hackman’s P.I. Harry Moseby is a broken man.
The late Hackman seamlessly slips between his character’s alternate personas. In one scene, the authoritative posture of a detective melts into the pleading of a vulnerable husband when he confronts his wife’s lover. “I want to know what I walked into,” he begs, gesturing around with a helpless uncertainty. Likewise, he’s oblivious to the larger web of conspiracy he’s now become entangled in when Delly’s murdered.
It’s an outcome that feels both inevitable and shocking, bringing Harry’s chess story into sharp focus. What did he miss? Did he bring about her fate not only through the action of bringing her back home, but through the inaction of failing to listen to the last voicemail she left him?
Detective work is a profession inherently tied to misery, in which deceit, betrayal and lies are continually uncovered and the disillusionment is constant. Part of Harry’s investigation leads him to a film set, itself a place where illusions are constructed. And as he begins looking into the film’s second mystery, that of Delly’s demise, Night Moves gradually reveals that it’s him who’s been deceived. As the film moves from night to day, the visual mocks the breakthrough he thinks he’s achieved — there’s a darker fate in store for him.
The Criterion Collection cover of Night Moves.
By the end, he’s utterly failed, alone and bleeding out on a boat. The steering wheel is just out of his reach. His boat can only ineffectually circle the wreckage of his failures, symbolic of him being just as trapped, desperate and hopeless as any of the film’s other characters. Years on, Night Moves’ twisty plot might be hard to recall, but its final shot is indelible.
