12/4/2023 0 Comments Night moves 1975 plotGene Hackman as private eye Harry Moseby plays chess with himself (knight moves, anyone) during a stakeout Griffith makes quite an impression, and I distinctly remember wondering if this girl's helium voice would change when she grew up. A nymphet role of the sort she would play again in Paul Newman's The Drowning Pool (1975) and likely incite picket lines today. Seventeen-year-old Melanie Griffith, making her film debut, is cast as the sexually precocious daughter. The detective in question, Harry Moseby (Gene Hackman, who, like Karen Black, seemed to be in every film made in the '70s), is adrift, both personally and professionally, when hired by a fading movie actress to locate her runaway teenage daughter. The plot of Night Moves is ostensibly an update of the typical '40s film noir detective thriller, only with a post-Watergate deconstruction of the American hero myth thrown in. It was simply icing on the cake that Penn's solemn approach to the detective film genre so suited my post-adolescent self-seriousness. ![]() for the plot of Night Moves is a real puzzler that benefits from repeat viewings. I was thrilled Night Moves opened in the theater where I was employed, allowing me the opportunity to see it countless times (for free!). In the summer of 1975, I had just graduated high school and my summer job was ushering at a movie theater in San Francisco while waiting to start film school in the fall. In the case of Night Moves, an updated noir bathed in the same chic nihilism as Francis Ford Coppola's The Conversation (1974), the "significance" is there in abundance. Kubrick is great for icy misanthropy, and Woody Allen is ideal for.well, Woody Allen.Īrthur Penn ( Bonnie and Clyde) is a director whose name I so associate with serious themes and deep social commentary that even when he directs a simple little detective drama like Night Moves, it's difficult not to attach to it a profound, pithy significance that may not even be there. If I see a David Lean film, I expect sweeping spectacle If I see Bogdanovich, I expect film school redux. ![]() For some of us film fans, certain directors come with their own baggage.
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