![]() ![]() Alan Sharp, A Writer Too Dark for Hollywood (February 2013) I suppose the country hoped its ordeals were over and was waiting for Jimmy Carter, too scared and too determined to stay in the daylight for Night Moves… It is a deeply upsetting film, and we seem to be ready for it again.” No one in the film critic business could surmise why it was not a success. It also had James Woods in his late twenties, jittery, brittle, and unreliable, and Melanie Griffith, just seventeen, carnal, amoral, and dangerous (most of all to herself). Gene Hackman gave one of his best performances as Moseby with support from Jennifer Warren, Edward Binns, Harris Yulin, Susan Clark and Kenneth Mars… see the film and you’ll find you know those faces. It had a team of experts making it: Bruce Surtees as cinematographer George Jenkins doing art direction Dede Allen editing and Michael Small writing the music. “Night Moves dared to have a very subtle plot, beautifully directed by Penn.A great cast includes Susan Clark, Jennifer Warren, a young James Woods, and a very young Melanie Griffith” Ultimately, in one of his best and most unsung performances, Hackman winds up hurting the people he is trying to help. The human impulses get darker and darker and Hackman’s character gets pulled in deeper and deeper, even as his own life is falling apart. But the case turns out to be something much larger: a smuggling ring of Mayan antiquities. Gene Hackman stars as a tired, aging private eye who, as a favor to a friend, agrees to track down a runaway teen. “This vastly underrated Arthur Penn film from the mid-1970s ranks as one of the era’s nastiest and most fascinating pieces of business, a detective story that shuttles back and forth between Hollywood and the Florida Keys, with a plot nearly as complex as Chinatown.Howard Michael Gould in 1970s Noir: The Cult Classics (August 2019, Crime Reads) ![]() Watching it again recently, I was astonished how many lines from Alan Sharp’s script I recalled just before they were spoken, signal that this movie wore a deep groove in my sensibility without my even realizing it, the mark of a quiet masterpiece.
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