And so in a way more watchable today a second or third time. (Beatty is always given too much credit for that film's audacity because he starred and funded it, but the film was Penn's at heart.) This might be called the last of Penn's great cycle from the period, and if not the equal to his 1967 breakthrough, it is in many ways more delicately felt and mature. The director is Arthur Penn, who's great "Bonnie and Clyde" kicked off the shift into New Hollywood sensibility. And that's the lasting reputation of the film, that it pulls off this kind of modernized noir world with originality. These are nitpicks, for sure, because the larger feeling takes over and is commanding. It's not a perfectly nuanced drama in this way. We are led along at times, and frankly told things that might have been better revealed through the plot. Not all of the plot is supported very well. But clarity has a cost, and the movie will take several surprising turns. So eventually the movie is less about who killed who for this or that reason, and more about this man and his quest for clarity. And we see a kind of generosity that is based on this selfish need to do something right, and all its conflicting meanings. And we even feel him starting to get a grounding for his drifting self amidst these miscellaneous people. There are mysterious motives everywhere, and it's only Moseby we trust. The trail for this daughter takes us to the Florida Keys and out into the ocean. It also feels dated, too, making you wonder if it was really so sexually liberated back then. This was for the sake of an audience still astonished that the movies could do such things (they couldn't before 1967) and it's still kind of raw and edgy in a lasting way. The artifacts of New Hollywood liberation are plain to see: nudity (female only) and a kind of sexed up background even when the plot is going somewhere else. He ends up mixed up in a Dashiell Hammett kind of plot, for sure, looking for the daughter of a rich woman and then getting way over his head. Gene Hackman is terrific, and he plays Harry Moseby, a down and out ex-football player with a drained candor that makes him pathetic as much as likable. The hero is a kind of watered down Bogart-not as romanticized, and with less exaggerated one-liners (which film noir lovers will miss but which those who like realism will appreciate). It works as about two thrillers.Night Moves (1975) An odd convolution of 1940s film noir and 1970s New Hollywood. By the movie's end, and especially during its last shock of recognition, we've been through a wringer. These are all the trademarks of the Lew Archer novels by Ross MacDonald especially the little-girl-lost theme, and Alan Sharp's screenplay uses them infinitely better than "The Drowning Pool" did - even though that was actually based on a Macdonald book. The plot involves former and present lovers of the girl and her mother, sunken treasure (yes, sunken treasure), conflicts across the generations and murders more complex by far than they seem at first. Miss Warren creates a character so refreshingly eccentric, so sexy in such an unusual way, that it's all the movie can do to get past her without stopping to admire. The mistress is played by a relatively unknown actress and sometime singer named Jennifer Warren, who has the cool gaze and air of competence and tawny hair of that girl in the Winston ads who smokes for pleasure and creates waves of longing in men from coast to coast. And from the moment he sets eyes on the stepfather's mistress, the movie, which has been absorbing anyway, really takes off. Harry traces the missing girl to her stepfather, a genial pilot in the Florida Keys, and goes there to bring her back. His confrontation with the man, like so many scenes in the movie, is done with dialog so blunt in its truthfulness that the characters really do escape their genre. Harry takes the case, pausing only long enough to track down his own missing wife - who is, it turns out, having a not especially important, affair with a man with a beach house in Malibu. He's a private detective for reasons, vaguely hinted at, involving his childhood.Ī Hollywood divorcee, clinging to the last shreds of a glamor that once won her a movie director (and half the other men in town, she claims) hires him to trace down her missing daughter. He's a former pro football player and a man of considerable intelligence, whose wife ( Susan Clark) runs an antique business. The eye this time is named Harry Moseby, perhaps with a nod toward Hackman's great performance as Harry Caul in " The Conversation," perhaps not.
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