It’s the best detective movie of the 1970s, now on 4K. Arthur Penn and Alan Sharp give us a ‘Southern California Sordid’ tale of a sleuth doing his best to return a missing girl, not knowing that her delinquency touches on larger crimes and vices by Hollywood fringe folk. It’s a superb performance from Gene Hackman, with Jennifer Warren, Susan Clark and Janet Ward; the seductive brat on the loose is played by a very young Melanie Griffith.

Night Moves 4K
4K Ultra HD + Blu-ray
The Criterion Collection 1255
1975 / Color / 1:85 widescreen / 100 min. / available through The Criterion Collection / Street Date March 25, 2025 / 39.95
Starring: Gene Hackman, Jennifer Warren, Melanie Griffith, Susan Clark, Edward Binns, Harris Yulin, Kenneth Mars, Janet Ward, James Woods, Anthony Costello, John Crawford, Dennis Dugan.
Cinematography: Bruce Surtees
Production Designer: George Jenkins
Film Editor: Dede Allen, Stephen A. Rotter
Original Music: Michael Small
Screenplay Written by Alan Sharp
Produced by Robert M. Sherman
Directed by Arthur Penn

In college we missed a lot of movies we now revere, and only caught up with gems like  The Outfit and  Cutter’s Way years later, often on cable TV. But Night Moves was a must-see. We new right away that it was special. The previous year’s  Chinatown had primed us for new movies with screenplays worthy of classic Hollywood. Screenwriter Alan Sharp delivered a detective thriller that has withstood ten viewings, and is still yielding new revelations.

We didn’t expect Night Moves to be a prime candidate for the jump to 4K Ultra HD. Warner Bros. theatrical prints were appropriately not pretty … only the Florida Keys offer beautiful images, that make the film’s loner detective hero feel even more out of his natural element. Is this the first Criterion disc to remaster a title previously released by the Warner Archive Collection?  The disc extras tell us that Night Moves’ box-office failure was due to being released in the immediate wake of Steven Spielberg’s blockbuster  Jaws.

Alan Sharp’s thriller plays with profound ideas without getting its fingers burned. It’s one of those ’70s pictures that gets better the more one sees it. Little indebted to what has come before, it goes right to the heart of the problem raised by the words ‘solve the mystery.’ Most everyone appreciated the previous year’s Chinatown, which had a big star-power romance and all that nostalgic ’30s glamour to sell. Alan Sharp’s view of contemporary Hollywood isn’t flattering and the thriller action has a melancholic air, like a post-Watergate  Key Largo.  Details that elsewhere might seem pretentious — a boat is named ‘Point of View’ — here seem just right.

Independent investigator Harry Moseby (Gene Hackman) takes a job retrieving teenage runaway Delly Grastner (Melanie Griffith) from the rotten Beverly Hills home life provided by her ex-starlet mother Arlene Grastner (Janet Ward). Moseby becomes distracted emotionally when he catches his wife Ellen (Susan Clark) in an affair. He successfully tracks Delly to a lazy charter plane service in the Florida Keys, run by Delly’s ex-stepfather Tom Iverson (John Crawford). There he is attracted by Tom’s girlfriend Paula (Jennifer Warren), an independent woman with a shady past. Harry completes his mission, but is the situation he sees in Florida how things really are?

Harry Moseby is a fairly macho ex- pro football star, and beams when people remember his glory days. He knows he’s in an irrelevant line of work. His own wife wants him to quit, and do anything but snoop for people he doesn’t respect. His friend Nick (Kenneth Mars) keeps offering a place at his big detective agency. Harry can’t imagine not being independent, even though he barely scrapes by. But this is California, where everyone’s second job is maintaining an illusion of success.

If California is a place to pretend you’re not a loser, Florida is a place where losers go to die . . . or cook up illegal schemes. Harry is confronted by an array of Hollywood old-timers in denial about their faded dreams. The most disturbing is Delly’s mother, the vulgar alcoholic Arlene. She still boasts of the coup she pulled off twenty years before, when she married a wealthy producer:

“I got lucky and grabbed off one of the big guns.”

Arlene’s second ex-husband and his friends are all ex- stunt players and second unit directors, restless men also approaching old age without nest eggs to fall back on.

At the center of these Hollywood jackals is Delly, a predatory brat who at sixteen is already an accomplished seductress. There’s no love lost between mother and daughter — Arlene only wants Delly back because her alimony arrangements require family stability. Almost every man Delly knows has been her lover, except perhaps Joey Ziegler (Edward Binns), a friend of the family still actively employed as a stunt director. Harry gets along well with the interesting Joey. But Delly has been sleeping with Marv Ellman (Anthony Costello), an insufferable stud of a stunt pilot. Joey doesn’t hold back when describing Marv’s morals:

“He’d fuck a woodpile on the chance there was a snake in it.”

Delly has apparently made the rounds of Joey Zeigler’s associates in the stunt pilot business. She is also involved with the unhappy Quentin (a young James Woods), a stunt mechanic. Quentin has nothing but scorn for Delly, but keeps turning up in her life like a bad penny. Most disturbingly, Delly has been playing around with her stepfather Tom. Harry’s first order of business is to get Delly out of this compromising situation … but is she better off with Arlene back home?

The New Hollywood of the ’70s occasionally hit upon truly edgy subject matter. The next year’s  Taxi Driver would benefit from publicity about Jodie Foster’s ‘dangerous’ portrayal of a teenage prostitute at the mercy of a Times Square pimp. Delly’s situation is just as shocking, as the men using and abusing her are supposed to be responsible adults. The ’70’s third mainstream use of an underage actress in a controversial part has to be young Brooke Shields in Louis Malle’s  Pretty Baby.

Moseby falls in with this fascinating group of characters with the mistaken notion that he’s getting a fair picture of what’s going on. He’s forever asking questions, but as Paula chides, they’re the wrong questions. This is where the potentially pretentious content sneaks in. Harry thinks he can solve other people’s problems yet he can’t ‘solve’ the obvious problems in his own life. When he catches his wife Ellen sleeping with another man (Harris Yulin), he follows her as if she were a surveillance subject. He confronts them directly, forces an emotional showdown … and then realizes he has nothing to say to her.

Ellen continually asks Harry to question what he’s doing, an honest attempt at communication that he takes as criticism. She is mystified to learn that Harry once spent weeks tracking down his estranged father, only to purposely avoid contact once he found the little old man. Harry has this naïve belief that getting at the truth cures all ills, that it accomplishes something. The women in his life keep trying to tell him that they already know the truth, and he should be doing something else.

Harry is an ethical man. As the one man who doesn’t try to hit on Delly, he earns her respect and reaches her in a way that her hateful mother cannot. But Harry foolishly lets another woman get under his skin. Paula can match Harry’s jokes quip for quip. She flatters him with Humphrey Bogart imitations while pretending to be a ‘fallen woman’ in need of tender loving care. Paula also advises him to stop being so damn serious about this detective business — to further her own selfish aims. Harry never realizes what is easy for us to guess — that Paula might herself be part of the corruption. She’s looking for the payday that will allow her to keep moving, just like the sharks that must swim to live.

Night Moves is about switching appearances; even the title is a trick. Chess fan Harry shows Paula an historic chess showdown involving ‘three little knight moves’ that spelled doom for a famous player because he never saw them coming. Harry admits that he feels guilty about the famous chess defeat, even though he wasn’t even born when it happened.

Paula relates to this sense of dislocated responsibility, a regret for things over which we have no control, like the Kennedy assassinations. Meanwhile, Harry keeps approaching his problems like a football player, going straight for the goal when he should be looking more carefully to the left and right. He’s unaware that he’s missing knight moves happening right under his nose. He figures out the puzzle pieces but is consistently one step too late in putting them together.

Alan Sharp’s dialogue reminds us of good hardboiled detective fiction. People talk clever because they’re trying to impress each other. When Harry and Paula are trying to be funny we get a number of class-A zingers. At one point Harry is trying hard to hold in his temper, angry that his wife’s lover is trying to be ‘diplomatic’ with him:

“All Harry knows is that if you call him Harry one more time he’s going to make you eat that cat.”

Another quip about boredom has found a permanent place in the language. Harry confesses that for him,

“Watching an Eric Rohmer film is like watching paint dry.”

Night Moves’ story threads converge in a near-absurd conflict out on the Gulf — of Mexico. Harry finds himself in a predicament far worse than any faced by Sam Spade or Philip Marlowe … a few simple distractions, and everything goes crazy. He learns the truth and the mystery is solved, but that’s never enough. It all ends in personal and professional disaster.

Arthur Penn directs Night Moves with a breezy looseness that becomes extra-sharp in the tense scenes. Contrasting locations in the San Fernando Valley, Malibu, on Sunset Boulevard and at a pro football game are all captured perfectly, making the film a time capsule of the Los Angeles scene. One questionable death must be pieced together from the evidence of film cameras on a movie set, in a creepy pre-echo of the tragic Twilight Zone case. A nighttime underwater diving scene is frightening in a way that  Jaws never was; a glass-bottomed boat provides a distracting window for a macabre revelation.

Gene Hackman chalks up another memorable performance with his ’70s haircut and bushy sideburns. Melanie Griffith is directed to form a painful portrait of a sexually liberated teenager — beneath all the sass and bravado, Delly is a frightened kid trying to protect herself. At the time of filming Griffith was borderline underage, which makes us uncomfortable. Griffith’s mother Tippi Hedren had allowed her to appear opposite Don Johnson in The Harrad Experiment, an exploitative movie about a New Age co-ed college where sex is encouraged. But by 1975 the industry was moving away from New Hollywood grit, to themes more compatible with the family mainstream.

Veteran actors Edward Binns, John Crawford and Kenneth Mars sketch excellent characterizations, as middle-aged men who use bluff and macho posing to variously con our hero. James Woods acquits himself well, and even Dennis Dugan from The Rockford Files TV show has a memorable bit. Creepy Anthony Costello makes a perfect grinning jerk with an annoying laugh, only to be turned into an aquatic ringer for our old friend Mrs. Bates. Keep on smiling, Marty.

In just two brief scenes Janet Ward does wonders with the tough role of Arlene Grastner, nailing the tragic illusions of a boozy ex-starlet with an advanced case of nymphomania. Because she has money, Arlene can ‘contribute to the delinquency of a minor’ yet not lose custody of Delly. It’s a demanding part, and one that could easily collapse into parody. Ms. Ward made pictures infrequently, but her brief appearances in two Sidney Lumet films are gold. She’s the panicked Mrs. Grady in  Fail-Safe, the Air Force wife who screams to convince her pilot husband to abort his atom-bomb run on Moscow. In Lumet’s The Anderson Tapes she’s an upscale Manhattan wife brutalized during a robbery.

Jennifer Warren’s Paula is a unique creation, a complicated woman fulfilling the destiny of a number of film noir sirens that desert their scruples in exchange for an elusive security. For Paula, staying with a crook requires no more reasoning than

“he’s the kind that gets nicer as he gets drunk.”

Arthur Penn gives us the lowdown on Paula with expressive camera angles that intimate that she has something to hide . . . she’s repeatedly seen peering from behind various partial screens — a screen window, laundry blowing on the line.

Alan Sharp is the screenwriter of the superior genre gems  Ulzana’s Raid and  Rob Roy, the very good  The Last Run and the less worthy  The Osterman Weekend.  Night Moves is an excellent example of a screenplay with classic lines, in an unconventional structure. Success for Harry isn’t a simple question of catching the clues. He has excellent insights for what miscreants will do next, but he isn’t so good at putting together the big picture.

We long ago acquired the well-written screenplay for Night Moves. The finished film follows the text faithfully, deleting only two scenes. The first is a prologue that shows Harry’s latest humiliating job, watching the house of a man who wants proof that a neighbor is purposely targeting his front lawn when walking his dog. Warner Bros. possibly found that opening a bit too sordid. The second cut scene takes place just before Harry rushes back to Key West, when he plays back the voice message from Delly that he didn’t bother to listen to a few days before. I don’t know why that scene was dropped. It provides Harry with yet another personal failure to regret, plus a solid reason to avoid the police and solve the crime on his own.

The bottom line is that lovers of mysteries, detective fiction and film noir can’t go wrong with this adult thriller.

The Criterion Collection’s 4K Ultra HD + Blu-ray of Night Moves 4K is a new digital restoration. It has a fresh look on 4K, one possibly closer to the original film. We have no personal memory of that first theatrical viewing in 1975, so we defer to Criterion’s liner notes saying that an original Technicolor print was used as a guide. As a rule, IB Tech prints don’t fade.

The opening is a bit more grainy, owing to the optical to insert the main titles. We can certainly appreciate the contributions of cameraman Bruce Surtees, and editor Dede Allen. The music also works well, often running in counterpoint to a scene’s tone. Composer Michael Small scored a long string of notable New Hollywood-era titles, by Alan J. Pakula, Paul Williams, Sidney Lumet and Walter Hill. His modest jazz score here uses a recurring riff that sounds like a vibraphone.

The old Warner Blu-ray had only a featurette and a trailer. Criterion’s disc producer Elizabeth Pauker rounds up several excellent older video items. The commentary is by Matthew Asprey Gear, the author of a book about neo-noir that uses Night Moves as a focus point. Gear points out that director Penn and author Sharp never came to an agreement as to how sympathetic the Harry Moseby character should be played. We’re perfectly happy with Gene Hackman’s interpretation of Moseby as a nice guy with emotional issues, particularly when Trust is involved.

Jennifer Warren is heard in an audio commentary, relating her experience on the picture. The older extras include one featurette and two separate Arthur Penn interviews. Penn interviews are always a good listen. His candid talk about the supposed failure  The Chase is so interesting, we liked the picture all the more.

We also like the cover illustration by Greg Manchess, who chooses the film image that we think best represents the movie. Good ol’ Harry finally sees through to the truth, as if a glass-bottomed boat has transformed into an X-Ray machine.

The lack of critical enthusiasm for Night Moves is difficult to account for — Arthur Penn didn’t get half the credit he deserved. Perhaps audiences were sick of seedy films about low-key corruption, or maybe they responded negatively to the awful marketing campaign with its faux- Ingmar Bergman tag line:

‘Maybe he would find the girl . . . Maybe he would find himself.’

The show does flirt with pretension once or twice, as when silverware grinding in a garbage disposal becomes a background for a domestic argument. We still think it’s one of the best detective movies ever.

Reviewed by Glenn Erickson

Night Moves 4K
4K Ultra HD + Blu-ray rates:
Movie: Excellent
Video: Excellent
Sound: Excellent
Supplements:
New audio commentary by Matthew Asprey Gear
New audio interview with actor Jennifer Warren
Interview with director Arthur Penn from a 1975 episode of Cinema Showcase
Interview with Penn from the documentary Arthur Penn: A Love Affair with Film (1995)
Behind-the-scenes featurette The Day of the Director
Trailer
An insert essay by critic Mark Harris.
Deaf and Hearing-impaired Friendly? YES; Subtitles: English (feature only)
Packaging: One 4K Ultra HD + Blu-ray in Keep case
Reviewed: March 26, 2025
(7297move)

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