Hello,
You ever find yourself in one of those positions where you want to watch, and re-watch, the same movie repeatedly? I did that last weekend with Arthur Penn’s Night Moves, watching it four nights in a row. (The last time I did that was in 1999, at the MacDowell Colony, where I watched Chinatown eleven times, though in that case it was because it happened to be the only DVD anyone had handy.) I don’t know why I went so hard for Penn’s movie. It wasn’t just because it was leaving the Criterion Channel—it’s viewable on other platforms easily enough—but something about Night Moves just set its hooks in me. Maybe it’s the ease and cool economy of the film’s opening sequence: Gene Hackman drives a green Mustang convertible down a cruddy-looking stretch of LA boulevard I can’t quite identify—is it Fairfax? Pico?—parks in front of a vacuum store, then steps inside his shitty PI’s office.
Movie star aside, it could almost be the opening to a period-appropriate (1975) television show, with Michael Small’s vibe-laced theme not a million miles from Barney Miller’s. But something about it draws me right in. Maybe it’s the speed of it—Penn doesn’t dawdle, even for a second—or maybe it’s just Hackman himself, with his washed-blue windbreaker like a variant on the Canadian tuxedo. There are a million neo-noirs, a million PI movies with identical setups—we’re less than a minute into the picture when the phone call comes, advising Hackman’s Harry Moseby that (wait for it) a teenage girl has gone missing, that her mother is (again, wait for it) the wealthy widow of a Hollywood producer—and yet . . . something is off. The pacing is off—there’s no languid search for cat food, the way there is in the opening of The Long Goodbye, or even the slow wind-up to a dirty (if, alas, racist) joke as there is in Chinatown—but also . . . Moseby is off. He locks his gun in a drawer, then skips out to see his wife, who works in an antique store and invites him to see an Eric Rohmer film. It’s like Harry doesn’t quite take the job seriously. He knows he’s an antique, unlike Elliott Gould’s revisionist Marlowe—he knows being a gumshoe in the moral swamp of the 1970s is an embarrassment, that poking around other people’s marital scandals while being incapable of avoiding or managing his own is ridiculous, and yet he can’t help it. It gives him something to do besides loll around in the ruins of his former glory (Harry is, of all things, an ex-NFL player who once caught a memorable pass in the Pro Bowl), or—the one plausible alternative, apparently—going to work for his friend’s more modern PI agency. He doesn’t want to do the latter (“That’s not an agency, that’s an information factory,” is how Harry puts it when his wife prods him), and so he’s off on a wild goose chase of his own, chasing the missing girl even after he’s aware—he follows his wife to that Rohmer film, after all—his own marriage is disintegrating.
Night Moves is a movie about missing the point. Which is part of what makes it so watchable, and re-watchable—the information that’s right there in front of Harry (and right there in front of us) turns out to be misleading every time, until it’s apparent that the only way to avoid going in circles is to deny the chase altogether—but only a part. The movie is stubbornly—almost defiantly, it seems in a contemporary context—analog, as characters struggle with grocery bags, eat sandwiches in the dark, play answering machine tapes (or, as in one crucial sequence, fail to listen to them all the way through). They live, in a way that seems strangely impossible from a 2021 perspective: all these normalcies seem instead like poetry, now that we are all working in the information factory, so to speak; now that we are all digital to within an inch of our lives. To romanticize this sort of analog cruft—to grow nostalgic for the sorts of gestures people no longer perform in the movies—is nonsense, of course, particularly when those characters seem every bit as miserable as we are now, and yet . . . Night Moves seems almost to anticipate that dilemma too. In the end, Harry can’t get any closer to the truth than we do: he’s left beating on a pane of glass that feels suspiciously like a screen, while the life he seeks—the answers, the completion—sinks dreadfully beneath him.
There are a million reasons to watch Night Moves. Besides a typically phenomenal Hackman performance, there are strong ones from Jennifer Warren, Susan Clark, and a very young Melanie Griffith; there is also the always-stirring sight of James Woods getting pushed around (in fact, that sight’s so enjoyable you can feel free to refresh yourself with it here as well), there’s a way, way above-average script from Alan Sharp, there’s the story’s hopscotching between yesterday’s Los Angeles and the dreamy, queasy Florida Keys, which provide a few crucial narrative jolts, moments of legitimately startling violence. I love neo-noirs, and I love them from that period especially, where they reckon over and again with Watergate and the other political calamities of the age. (“Where were you when Kennedy got shot?” Jennifer Warren asks Moseby, to which the latter responds, tellingly, “Which Kennedy?”) But I like them best when they’re pointedly anachronistic, when it’s not just the characters’ stubborn moral compasses that are out of true with the times, but the characters themselves are too. (This is why Altman’s 1975 The Long Goodbye works where 1969’s James Garner-starring Marlowe and 1978’s Robert Mitchum-toplining version of The Big Sleep both feel drably archaic, I reckon.) It’s a reminder that the world is always a mess, and that the knight-errant (by which, in the back of my mind, I suppose I mean the artist, the writer too) is always a fool, and yet the chase remains inescapable. When it’s good, in fact, that chase is the most vital thing there is.
Rounding up a few loose ends here, I’ve been greatly enjoying Lili Anolik’s new podcast Once Upon a Time at Bennington College, which delves into the origins of Bret Easton Ellis, Donna Tartt, and Jonathan Lethem on the heels of her also-excellent, fascinatingly Cubist telling of the Traci Lords story last year. It’s a lot less insular than you might expect—far more than just a bit of literary myth-making—as it delves deep into the geographic and aesthetic roots of its subjects to mesmerizing effect. If you’re still craving fresh audio content when you get to the end of that (and you will be: Lili, Bret, and Jonathan—along with a sprawling cast of supporting characters—are their usual fascinating selves), well, you might check out the audiobook of Always Crashing in the Same Car. I read it myself this time around, and it happens to be cheap as chips ($5.99 at the moment on Google Play), so . . . why not, right?
Lastly, having not done a single in-person event for the launching of the book in July, I’m happy to note that I will at last be doing exactly one, in conversation with my friend Dean Wareham at the excellent Des Pair books in Echo Park on October 14th. Dean’s phenomenal new album drops that week likewise, so in addition to reading a bit I’m hoping to turn the tables to discuss that some, as well as his memoir Black Postcards, which touches on some of the same themes as Crashing and remains one of my favorite rock and roll documents. (In fact, if you were to subscribe to Dean and Britta’s Patreon, you’d gain the added pleasure of hearing Dean read it himself, which rises to Robert Evans-like heights in places. Extra-recommended.) If you happen to be in Los Angeles, won’t you come out for this? It’s going to rule.
All for now. Usually, I realize, I leave you with a themed playlist . . . no such, this time around, but I’ll leave you with this one banger. Consider it a slant rhyme off Night Moves’ title, which in the case of Penn’s movie puns off of a chess sequence Harry Moseby shows off, though we’re all old enough, alas, to remember its more popular application.
For now,
Matthew
I watched Night Moves recently when it came on HBO Max. The most disorienting thing about the movie to me was the way it shifted back and forth between LA and the Florida Keys, as if the two places occupied the same contiguous geography within this alternate reality.
Great post. I always think of The Conversation in relation to Night Moves. Harry Caul being a cinematic twin brother to Harry Moseby. Even sharing the same name.. both sucked in. And both films sharing heart wrenching closing images...