Night Moves

Sun, sex, scuba and skulduggery.

Gene Hackman is superb as Harry Moseby, ex-football-star turned private eye, tying to resolve his menopause and his marital problems by cracking the case. It begins straightforwardly - return a runaway teenage girl to her mother - but veers to a murder cover-up, with Moseby very much an innocent among cheats.

Arthur Penn directs to the lighter side of Alan Sharp's screenplay; the Greenock writer had a bleaker end in mind, and indicated that Night Moves was about the US being unable to solve its own crime - yet another film reference to JFK. Sharp moved to the states in the 70s and despite the dearth of cowboys on the Clyde, penned some important westerns, notably Ulzana's Raid with its Vietnam subtext passionately espoused by Burt Lancaster. Though his range is broad (e.g. The Year of Living Dangerously and much TV) Sharp is comfortable scripting philosophical actioneers where characters 'get off their horses and talk'. Speaking in Edinburgh in 1992, he was pleased to acknowledge that there are no small parts (just small dramatists?) in his films - which benefits a young James Woods and a young, slim (and naked) Melanie Griffith in Night Moves. Sharp also revealed a droll attitude to sex in movies - an inherent con he dislikes, and which Moseby voices in an acutely observed affair with Jennifer Warren. Propelled by some acid one-liners, and by Dede Allen's fine editing, Night Moves is a resonant reworking of straight film noir; it buzzes in the mind, and it's different.

Review by Gio MacDonald
Taken from EUFS Programme 1994-95