The Hackman Files: 'Night Moves' Explains the 1970s
The most tit-obsessed movie I've ever seen, starring the late, great Gene Hackman.
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When Gene Hackman died, I knew I’d want to celebrate him by trying to catch up on some of his most definitive roles. This naturally presented the problem of where to begin. Gene Hackman has been a staple of my movie viewing literally from the time that I was toddler movie watching Superman movies on Betamax to being a budding annoying film pedant wearing out The Royal Tenenbaums on DVD in college. The sheer breadth of types of movies he was in and the different kinds of characters he played in them is truly staggering.
Vic from the Jortscenter podcast I did this past week submitted Hackman’s voice work in Antz as one of his most terrifying roles, and as stupid as that sounds I’m inclined to agree. That Hackman’s voice performance could be so memorable that it stood out even in the second-best animated bug movie of 1998 (behind A Bug’s Life) kind of says it all. He’s irreplaceable.
That I know Hackman from so many different roles belies the fact that he was busiest before I was even born. And so again, where to start? I’d already revisited The French Connection and The Conversation relatively recently, so when a reader suggested Night Moves, from 1975, (sorry that I’m forgetting who this was) I thought it sounded like a great idea.
Night Moves turns out to be a perfect rewatch. Whereas a lot of the best films, your “stone cold classics” — like the aforementioned French Connection and The Conversation, but also your Godfathers, Casablanca, etc — are essentially timeless, this one, while solidly entertaining, is so decidedly of its time that it almost becomes the key to understanding an entire era. Night Moves offers a heavy dose of “they don’t make ‘em like that anymore,'“ for better or worse. It’s both a solid yarn and possibly one of the most 1970s-ass movies ever made.
Directed by Arthur Penn (previously of Bonnie and Clyde, a supposed classic of the “new cinema” that I never much liked), Night Moves stars Hackman as Harry Moseby, a Los Angeles private dick who is also an ex-professional football player for the Raiders. The famous Bob Seger song of the same name wouldn’t come out for another year, and according to Seger, was actually based on a different movie, American Graffiti (1973). In this movie, “night moves” is actually a chess pun, with Hackman at one point mansplaining how the “knight moves” across the chess board to a sexy lady. That led me down a whole other rabbit hole, wondering whether Seger singing “ain’t it funny how the night moves” was also a chess pun. The knight does move notably strangely, when you think about it (two up and one across, like an L). Pretty sure the song isn’t about chess, but it’s kind of a funny coincidence, isn’t it? Maybe???
Anyway, the “hard-boiled private dick” genre that originated with Ray Chandler and Dashiell Hammett in the 20s and 30s came back in a big way in the 70s and 80s. Night Moves is very much of a piece with that, possibly even early to the neo-noir trend. I’m just old enough to remember reruns of Barnaby Jones and Hunter, and later Magnum PI and Remington Steele. The 70s and 80s had more shows about private eyes than the 90s and 2000s had about hospitals.
True to the genre, in Night Moves, the story all starts with an evil old slut. Arlene Iverson (Janet Ward) is a rich ex-starlet (“I was down on my knees for every guy in this town”) living in a sumptuous mansion who wants to hire Moseby to track down her 16-year-old daughter, Delly Grastner (played by a then-16-year-old Melanie Griffith) — possibly so that she can keep skimming off Delly’s trust fund.
Now, when I say that this is the most tit-obsessed movie I’ve ever seen, you’re probably thinking that I’m just projecting. But truly, every female character in Night Moves is introduced through her tits, starting with Arlene. Janet Ward is the only actress in it who doesn’t actually appear nude onscreen, and yet one of the first things she says to Moseby is how beautiful her tits used to be, before inviting him to join her for a bath. It’s almost like the horny version of the old Poochie the Dog bit from The Simpsons. Every time tits aren’t on screen, all the other characters should be asking, “Hey, what about tits?”
Night Moves’ Scottish screenwriter Alan Sharp was apparently a bit of a cad himself, with the Guardian reporting, in a profile of his second wife, the novelist Beryl Bainbridge, that Sharp “showed up for Rudi's birth, but then went downstairs saying he was going to get a book out of the car and never came back.”
Bainbridge apparently wrote a novel based on him — Sweet William, published in 1975. They made a movie out of that one too, in 1980, starring Sam Waterston. It’s hard to imagine a better 70s movie pedigree than that: a movie about a ramblin’ man written by a ramblin’ man.
Anyway, Moseby declines Arlene’s bath offer and heads out to track down her daughter, Delly. But not before stopping off to say hi to his wife at work. Ellen Moseby (Susan Clark) works at a tony antique shop with her gay best friend (major Bronson Pinchot in Beverly Hills Cop vibes). She’s on the phone when Harry arrives, so he sneaks up behind her and puts his hands down the front of her shirt. Again, tits.
Moseby’s investigation eventually takes him to a sleazy mechanic who Delly used to smoke grass with, Quentin, played by James Woods, Hollywood’s go-to sleazy ex for about three decades. Moseby treats Quentin like a piece of shit even before he reveals himself to be one, wishing Delly the worst and sporting a big black eye that Moseby quickly traces to a stunt man Delly dumped this guy for. Still, Moseby can’t help but bond with Quentin a little, on account of they’ve both being mistreated by capricious women. Turns out, Ellen has been cheating on Moseby with some rich poindexter, Marty, played by the inimitable Harris Yulin (you might not remember his name, but you’ll know him when you see him).
Moseby tracks down the stuntman who gave Quentin the black eye, some movie cowboy who tries to screw anything that moves, including Delly’s mom, Arlene. He gives Moseby some weird shpiel about how cool it is to bed both a mother and daughter, and Moseby quickly surmises that Delly is on a nation-wide tour to screw all her mom’s exes as a way of getting back at her. Probably only in a seventies detective movie written by a man could this be a plausible plotline, but this hunch soon takes Moseby out to the Florida Keys, where shit really gets weird.
If everyone’s favorite thing in the 1970s was hard-boiled private eyes, their second favorite thing was weird sexual situations. Night Moves speaks volumes about seventies sexual politics, an exhilarating time when all the prudish old rules no longer applied, even some of the actually-good ones. The first person Moseby meets in the Keys is Paula, played by Jennifer Warren, who is first depicted and nearly always appears wearing a tight t-shirt with no bra and visible pokies. “I may not look like much to you, but around here I’m hot stuff,” Paula tells Moseby.
Women in Night Moves are always discussing their own looks right off the bat, presumably because that’s the main thing its screenwriter wants to convey about them. I don’t want to do the boring scold thing and judge old movies by modern standards of propriety, but Night Moves’ tit-first approach is impossible not to notice. Accepting its overt chauvinism though, even the less-believable dialogue is executed with an obvious poetry that makes it hard not to enjoy. The spoken word has been degraded to the point that everyone mumbles now as a matter of course (consider the difference between Tupac or Ice Cube and Drake or your average auto-tuned xanny rapper), but back in the olden times, filmmakers were proud of their words, so much so that they took pains to make sure you heard them all. That was nice (fuck you for this, Christopher Nolan). And so even in scenes that are kind of horseshit on the face of things, it’s fascinating watching Gene Hackman and whichever actress or actor flirt and spar.