![]() Penn takes pains to keep the audience wallowing in Harry’s tangential marital woes (of the intimate neglect sort, not too far off from the Sinatra/Remick relationship in 1968’s The Detective). One side is just losing slower than other.” ![]() When his wife casually inquires who’s winning a football game he’s watching, he replies “Nobody. ![]() With only his dogged sense of integrity, which he uses as an excuse to remain a romantically inclined lone-wolf investigator, he isolates himself as a melancholic martyr. Sharp’s level of complex characterization is impressive in this nervous neo-noir, which finds Hackman’s Harry Moseby still dazed by the missed opportunities of his glory days as a pro football player. Penn, who was still running on the reputation of Bonnie & Clyde (1967), which was one of the iconic gamechangers ushering in a new era of Hollywood filmmaking, changed gears considerably with this contemporary commentary of an industry in which long-time success remains impossible for mavericks (like Penn). It was also the second of three prominent times Hackman would work with Penn, including in Bonnie & Clyde and later in 1985’s Target. Hackman filmed Night Moves prior to Coppola’s 1974 masterpiece The Conversation, a film which took home the Palme d’Or and features Hackman in a similar lead role as an out-of-his-league paranoiac (he would be nominated for back-to-back BAFTAs in the Coppola and Penn titles). Once he finds the flirtatious young woman, Harry finds himself enamored with Tom’s girlfriend Paula (Jennifer Warren), but gets caught up in something stranger as he figures out how to take Delly back to Los Angeles. Declining the latter, Harry tracks down Delly through a series of her love affairs, including with a smarmy mechanic (James Woods) and an airplane stunt man (Anthony Costello), who goads Harry into checking out the Florida Keys, where Delly’s stepfather Tom Iverson (John Crawford) resides. In the middle of catching his wife in the middle of an extramarital affair, Harry is hired by Arlene Iverson (Janet Ward), an aging Hollywood starlet who’s lost all her sex appeal but none of her seductive wiles in her attempt to secure his interests in finding her runaway daughter Delly (Melanie Griffith) as well as taking her to bed. Harry Moseby (Hackman) is a loner private eye in Los Angeles, mostly handling banal marital squabbles as he avoids opportunities to join bigger and better organizations, which his wife Ellen (Susan Clark) suggests he segue into. While finding the missing teenager results in a welcome escape from his troubled marriage, a more sordid, complex predicament unfolds as a black-market antiques ring fears exposure. A one-time pin-up gal hires a quixotic private eye to track down her runaway teenage daughter, a promiscuous sort whose well-being insures her mother’s access to the money left behind from her deceased movie mogul father. set mystery, informed specifically by the sprawling, infectious apathy of a disillusioned metropolis, screenwriter Alan Sharp models his convoluted narrative after the hard-edged prototypes developed by Hammett and Chandler. Released between a pair of revisionist Westerns (1970’s Little Big Man and 1976’s The Missouri Breaks), Arthur Penn’s 1975 neo-noir Night Moves remains an unsung gem from the New Hollywood period, helmed by one of the era’s progenitors and headlined by one of its most prolific actors- Gene Hackman.Īn L.A.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
Details
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |