USA,
1975, 95 min
Shown in 1996
CREDITS
- dir
-
Arthur Penn
- prod
-
Robert Sherman
- scr
-
Alan Scharp
- cam
-
Bruce Surtees
- editor
-
Dede Allen
- cast
-
Gene Hackman, Melanie Griffith, Jennifer Warren, John Crawford, James Woods
-
COMMENTS
Arthur Penn appeared in person to receive the 1996 Akira Kurosawa Award.
As time passes, it becomes evident that Night Moves is among the great films of the ’70s. Like Altman’s The Long Goodbye and Polanski’s Chinatown, it presents us with a Los Angeles private eye who is no longer as sublime or effective as Chandler’s Philip Marlowe. Harry Moseby in Night Moves doesn’t crack the case—or not until he and his world are also broken. He isn’t sensitive enough to recognize the failure in his own marriage, and so he doesn’t fathom the intrigue that begins with a missing teenage girl and ends in some racket in the Florida Keys. His enquiry is weighed on by his own emotional neediness, and so he brings about the death of the ambiguous woman who might be a new love. Intelligence and heroism are overwhelmed by duplicity and the creeping chaos of the world. The film is based on an original script by Alan Sharp; the music is by Michael Small; and Dede Allen supplies the broken moods of the editing. Penn’s pessimism is without flourish, but made all the graver by the sympathetic depth of the performances: Gene Hackman as the befuddled Moseby; Jennifer Warren as the treacherous seductress; a very young Melanie Griffith as the cause of the trouble; and all kinds of ordinary weakness as demonstrated by John Crawford, Edward Binns and James Woods. For Penn, this is the film in which energy loses confidence and succumbs to isolation and paranoia.
—David Thomson
FACTOID #51
The first silent film screened at the Festival (now an annual tradition) was The Scarlet Letter (1924) by the great Swedish director Victor Sjöström, on October 24, 1968. The film’s star, Lillian Gish, was honored with an in-person tribute two days later.
