In the Flesh: Night Moves

For the first forty minutes of its sleek 99-minute running time, Night Moves is more or less a standard noir mystery with a curiously rinky-dink score by composer Michael Small. Harry Moseby (Gene Hackman) is a private eye, a former football star with a chip on his shoulder and a marriage on the rocks, the kind of character you could pull off any airport book rack in the 70s and 80s. Hackman imbues him with life, warmth, and his particular working-class edge, and Melanie Griffith is immediately compelling as runaway heiress Delly, but there’s nothing here that Chinatown didn’t do better a year before Night Moves hit theaters. Then we get to the back half, once Delly has consented to accompany Moseby back from the Keys to LA and the custody of her mother, washed-up former actress Arlene Iversen (Janet Ward). All at once, the soundtrack is gone. Moseby leaves Delly in the middle of a screaming fight with Arlene and her creepy mechanic/lover, Quentin (James Woods). He rolls up his window and drives away.

The only problem is that he can’t shake it. In a masterful match cut, we skip ahead to that same night, Moseby still sitting in his car, still staring out at nothing. He has rolled the window back down. Still, no music intrudes. What follows is a tense, cold, terrifying back half interspersed with a string of deaths so grisly they feel like something taken from The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, rivaling and exceeding Faye Dunaway’s famous death in Chinatown. Director Arthur Penn keeps us largely in shadow for this second stretch, whether in the shimmering dark of the private projection room where Moseby watches footage of Delly’s “accidental” death in an automotive stunt performed by stunt driver Joey Ziegler (Edward Binns) or in the coastal gloom of Tom Iversen’s (John Crawford) Floridian hideaway, where the early detail of Tom’s lover, Paula (Jennifer Warren), training dolphins for sale to the privately wealthy no longer seems so quirky or charming.

When we do return to daylight, it’s bleach our eyes as the film unleashes its most astonishing single image, one that should exist in books of film history next to the drowned body in the car from The Night of the Hunter and the twin girls holding hands in the hall of the Overlook Hotel. Ziegler, exposed as Tom’s accomplice in the illegal sale of a stolen Meso-American artifact, follows Moseby and Paula out to sea as they prepare to recover the engraved stone slab. Ziegler shoots and injures Moseby. He kills Paula, either accidentally or on purpose, with the pontoon of his seaplane as he lands, a ghastly sight. But in its aftermath, as Ziegler crashes into Moseby’s boat and wrecks his own plane, he finds himself trapped in the cockpit under the glass bottom of the salvage boat, staring up through twin panes of glass as water floods his enclosure and Moseby looks down at him in silence. Streams of silver bubbles roar through the dark water. His arm injured, Ziegler cannot free himself. Like Delly, her death immortalized on B-roll, he is seen, but he is helpless to stop what’s coming.