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Must See Movie...

It's no definitive masterpiece but it's damn close.

It's the kind of movie you'll want to see a second time with someone who hasn't seen it yet, to remember what it was like to watch it for the first time.

Private eye Harry Mosby (Gene Hackman) in Los Angeles is hired to bring back the daughter of a former film star and has to go to the Florida keys to get her. Melanie Griffith in her first film role as the daughter is reluctant but goes back with Mosby but there is more - a sunken treasure and a few people who make movies are involved before a surprising finale occurs. And Mosby is just as surprised as the audience every step of the way. Harry Mosby is in the tradition of an incorruptible hero in the midst of the muck. I think that the ending could be considered optimistic, but it is open to interpretation. It's a dark film, as in "Chinatown" land, when the protagonist ends up in a boat going around in aimless circles with a flesh wound to the leg. Since Mosby and his wife have reconciled earlier in the film, I think it's fair to assume that they will try to make a go of it together, rather than ending up dead or lost, like every other character in the movie. Gene Hackman's lone foray into the private eye genre is fortuitous. Like Bogey and Paul Newman, he is especially deft at put downs of smarmy guys and gals. And Alan Sharp's generally well written screenplay gives him ample opportunity to display this skill. Arthur Penn's direction is well paced and does not draw undue attention to itself. Occasionally, the film gets a bit pretentious. For example, I could have done without the not especially revealing anecdote that Harry relates about his father, and any time chess is mentioned in a private eye flick the pomposity level goes up. But mostly it's good seventies noir.

If you're a detective, you should know about the clues, and wrap it up. In "Night Moves", it's not that simple. Gene Haman plays Los Angeles detective Harry Moseby. A P.I. who was once a football player who is assigned to retrieve a runaway (Melanie Griffith)from Florida. A simple job to do, right? Wrong. While in Florida, more mysteries are uncovered which makes the daughter want to go back to her mother. Once that mission was done, he goes on to the next assignment. However, he's not happy about what he has done. After discovering the downed plane in Florida, and meeting the mechanic(James Woods) earlier. After returning Delly (Griffith) to her mom, she is killed in a stunt car accident. Moseby heads back to Florida, only to find the mechanic dead in the water. Paula(Jennifer Warren) who tends the dolphins, explained what is in the plane. She and Tom were dealing with artifacts. One of them is worth a lot of money. Manipulation seems to be the key of this. This movie is like playing a game of chess, which I don't mind playing. Talk about a mystery. A rare gem. Need to watch. A also a keeper. 4.5 out of 5 stars.

Don't worry - I'll warn you before I reveal any spoilers. Read on in good faith.Arthur Penn: Great. 18-year-old-naked-Melanie-Griffith: Excellent. Gene Hackman: Awesome. This film: pile of garbage. The acting is great, the filmography is wonderfully dark and moody, most of the dialog is solid. I don't understand how the whole can be so much less than the sum of its parts, but this film manages to pull it off somehow. For context, I am a huge fan of the 1970's European-inspired cinema veritas movement and some of my favorite films are from this time period, and some are by Arthur Penn ("Little Big Man", "One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest", "Rocky"). But this steaming pile of a film takes "cinema veritas" to the level of "cinema literal": everything you see is exactly what you think it is. The only reason I gave this film a 5 instead of a 1 is because all the individual parts were so good that it kept me watching.Before I get all spoilery, let me recommend some films that you should watch instead of "Night Moves" (which you should NEVER watch, IMO). If you want to see Arthur Penn at his best, watch "Little Big Man" and "Bonnie and Clyde". If you want to see a mix of American cinema veritas at the top of its form watch "Chinatown", "Taxi Driver", and "Easy Rider". If you want to see the reason that Gene Hackman is probably one of the best American actors EVER, watch "The Conversation", "The French Connection", "Unforgiven", "Hoosiers", hell almost anything other than "Night Moves".SPOILERS AHEAD!===========================================I wanted to point out two specific things that I found particularly terrible about this film. The Plot: As I said above, everything you see is exactly what it is. Does it seem like a girl is having a sexual relationship with her step-father? She is. Is a guy crawling underneath car just before it crashes messing with the brakes? You bet. Is the greedy mother setting up her daughter to be killed to inherit her fortune? Absolutely! If the plot itself wasn't so dead-simple and obvious, this might have been forgivable. But when you know exactly what happened before it even happens, it's a travesty. For example, "Chinatown", which this film desperately wants to be, did this very well.The Ending: WOW, I have rarely seen a contrived ending as blatant as this one. It's clear that Penn wants Moseby to pay for his sins, but the behaviors of the characters in the last 15 minutes of the film are completely unbelievable. There was absolutely no reason for Paula to take Moseby to the smuggled loot. There was no reason for Joey to skim the plane along the water and run over Paula. There's no way that Paula wouldn't hear the plane coming! There's no reason that Moseby couldn't have crawled into the driver's seat and piloted the boat. He had one 9 mm bullet wound to the thigh - this would in no way be debilitating enough for his lazy performance at the end of the film, putting the boat into a symbolic circular course and laying down to die. Seriously, this was the worst part of an already terrible film.

Night Moves (1975)An odd convolution of 1940s film noir and 1970s New Hollywood. 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). 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. 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.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. 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. It also feels dated, too, making you wonder if it was really so sexually liberated back then.The trail for this daughter takes us to the Florida Keys and out into the ocean. There are mysterious motives everywhere, and it's only Moseby we trust. Completely. And we even feel him starting to get a grounding for his drifting self amidst these miscellaneous people. And we see a kind of generosity that is based on this selfish need to do something right, and all its conflicting meanings. 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.But clarity has a cost, and the movie will take several surprising turns. Not all of the plot is supported very well. We are led along at times, and frankly told things that might have been better revealed through the plot. It's not a perfectly nuanced drama in this way. These are nitpicks, for sure, because the larger feeling takes over and is commanding. And that's the lasting reputation of the film, that it pulls off this kind of modernized noir world with originality.The director is Arthur Penn, who's great "Bonnie and Clyde" kicked off the shift into New Hollywood sensibility. (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. And so in a way more watchable today a second or third time. Hackman is the one great actor here, however, and if there's a key problem with "Night Moves," it's that he almost but not quite supports the film alone. The three or four secondary characters are all of them thin, or contrived to be types, and so it falters.See it anyway. It surprised me the way "Point Blank" from this era did. Excellent.