Catching his wife Ellen sleeping with another man (Harris Yulin), he forces an emotional showdown and then realizes he has nothing to say to her. Harry thinks he can solve other people’s problems yet he can’t ‘solve’ the obvious problems in his own life. This is where the potentially pretentious content sneaks in. He’s forever asking questions, but as Paula chides, they’re the wrong questions. Moseby falls in with this fascinating group of characters with the mistaken notion that he’s getting a fair picture of what’s going on. Most disturbingly, Delly has been playing around with her stepfather Tom Iverson (John Crawford), a paunchy ex-movie pilot possibly tangled up in the smuggling game. But Delly is running with Marv Ellman (Anthony Costello), an insufferable stud of a stunt pilot of whom Joey says: “He’d fuck a woodpile on the chance there was a snake in it.” Yet another unhappy ex-lover is Quentin (a young James Woods), a stunt mechanic who behaves as if he’d like to see Delly dead, but keeps turning up in her life like a bad penny. Harry gets along well with the interesting Joey. Almost every man she knows has been her lover, except perhaps Joey Ziegler (Edward Binns), a friend of the family still actively employed as a stunt director. Arlene’s second ex-husband and friends are all ex- stunt players and second unit directors, restless men also approaching old age without nest eggs to fall back on.Īt the center of these Hollywood jackals is Delly, a predatory nymph who at sixteen is already an accomplished seductress. She still boasts of her coup of ‘grabbing off a big one’ twenty years before when she married a wealthy producer. The most disturbing is Delly’s mother, the vulgar alcoholic Arlene. Harry is confronted by an array of Hollywood old-timers who are also avoiding facing up to faded dreams. In this picture California and Florida are taken as places where losers go to die. Everyone else seems to be doing well, even Nick (Kenneth Mars) a detective at a big agency who keeps offering him work. He’s a fairly macho ex- pro football star in a dead-end existence. Harry Moseby knows he’s in an irrelevant line of work his own wife wants him to quit, to do anything but snoop-work for people he doesn’t respect. Harry is also attracted to Paula (Jennifer Warren), an independent woman with a shady past, and foolishly thinks that what he sees in Florida is how things really are. He successfully tracks Delly to a shady charter plane service in the Florida Keys, run by Delly’s ex-stepfather Tom Iverson (John Crawford). Moseby becomes distracted emotionally when he catches his wife Ellen (Susan Clark) in an affair. Independent investigator Harry Moseby (Gene Hackman) takes a job retrieving Delly Grastner (Melanie Griffith), a runaway from the rotten Beverly Hills home life provided by her ex-starlet mother Arlene Grastner (Janet Ward). This view of Hollywood isn’t flattering and the thriller action has a melancholic air, like a post-Watergate Key Largo. Little indebted to what has come before, it goes right to the heart of the problem raised by the words “solve the mystery.” Most everyone appreciated the previous year’s Chinatown but Alan Sharp’s contemporary story skips over the glamor angle. It’s one of those ’70s pictures that gets better the more one sees it. Night Moves is a superb detective thriller that plays with profound ideas without getting its fingers burned. Starring: Gene Hackman, Jennifer Warren, Melanie Griffith, Susan Clark, Edward Binns, Harris Yulin, Kenneth Mars, Janet Ward, James Woods, Anthony Costello. Street Date Aug/ available through the WBshop / 21.99 Gene Hackman tops a sterling cast in the film that introduced most of us to Melanie Griffith.ġ975 / Color / 1:85 widescreen / 100 min. Gumshoe Harry Moseby compartmentalizes his marriage, his job, his past and the greedy Hollywood has-beens he meets, not realizing that everything is interconnected, and fully capable of assembling a world-class conspiracy. Arthur Penn’s detective movie is one of the best ever in the genre, one that rewards repeat viewings particularly well.
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