Night Moves

Eddie Muller and Ben Mankiewicz hosted a TCM spotlight back in July on neo-noirs, movies from after the end of the traditional noir cycle that have a lot of the thematic elements of noir, minus the shadowy black-and-white photography. I did a post on Blood Simple several weeks back that I think was part of the spotlight. Recently, I watched another of the movies I had recorded during the spotlight, Night Moves.

Gene Hackman plays Harry Moseby, a former pro football player who, having to find work after his playing days, became one of those private detectives involved in cheap, tawdry cases like staking out straying spouses in divorce cases. Worse, he finds himself staking out his own wife Ellen (Susan Clark), who is having an affair with Marty (Harris Yulin). That's a subplot that underlies the rest of the movie, although as you might guess from the main character being a detective, we're about to get a mystery.

The mystery comes when Arlene Iverson (Janet Ward) contacts Harry. Arlene is a twice-divorced woman, with a daughter Delly (Melanie Griffith) by her first husband, who has since died. Arlene was one of those actresses who never quite hit the big time, married a producer, and retired from acting before the divorce. So when the first husband died, he left all the money to Delly in a trust fund. Arlene only gets to administer the fund as long as she's got custody of Delly and Delly is living with her.

And there's the problem. Delly has up and run away, and Arlene wants to find her. Not that Arlene has told Harry the whole truth, of course; just the part about Delly running away. So Harry dutifully gets a list of contacts who might know where Delly is, starting with Delly's sort-of boyfriend Quentin (James Woods). He's a mechanic who looks like he got into a fight recently, which he did, with a man on the set of a movie in New Mexico who put the moves on Delly and had been romantically involved with Arlene. It's on the set of the movie in New Mexico that Harry meets Joey Ziegler (Edward Binns), a stunt coordinator who befriends Harry and is even willing to offer him a job should Harry want out of the detective business.

Ah, but Delly isn't in any of these places. Thankfully, Harry is able to determine that Arlene's second husband (and Delly's stepfather), Tom Iverson (John Crawford), is in the Florida Keys, where he runs some sort of Z-grade Sea World type place, together with his girlfriend Paula (Jennifer Warren). There's a good chance Delly might have gone to Florida to see her stepfather, so Harry goes there. Sure enough, Delly is in Florida. He's able to bring her back to California, but only after a traumatic incident in which Delly finds a submerged airplane with the pilot still dead inside.

Now, since we're only about an hour into the movie, you know that they're not all going to live happily ever after. Harry is still trying to deal with his failing marriage, while one night at the office he starts listening to his answering machine messages and finds one from Delly wanting to talk to him. However, before he can do so, he learns that she's been killed. Harry wonders if the answer to the killing might still be found in Florida....

One of the comments Eddie Muller made in the wraparounds as part of the spotlight is that in a detective noir, the story is usually really more about the detective than it is about the actual mystery. I think he's quite right here. There's not much mystery to where Delly is, and after she's killed, there's only about another 20 minutes to wrap up the rest of the action, so nuch much time to delve into the second mystery. And if it weren't about the detective, I don't think we'd get the whole fairly substantial subplot about Harry's wife and her affair.

So if you're looking for a good mystery, I don't think you're really going to find it in Night Moves. If, however, you're looking for something that's more of a character study, you'll get it, thanks to another solid performance from Hackman and able support from all of the other actors. The locations, despite the Florida Keys setting, are suitably inglamorous, as befits people who are in many ways on the B-list of society, if that. Also in the film's favor is that, with the destruction of the Production Code several years earlier, movies could be more explicit in dealing with subject matter like infidelity and murder.

Night Moves isn't a perfect movie, but it's well made and definitely worth a watch.