1975's Night Moves Is A Lot of Fun But It’s No Picnic
Night Moves is a 70s private detective movie (which is kind of a 70s genre) and it’s actually quite good and it’s really quite fun but I tell you what pal- it’s no picnic. The 70s were fun, sure, we all accepted that myth. Everyone watched Dazed and Confused and thought it was cool. But I guess my generation, the iPhone fake-news generation, never really appreciated the post Watergate dread that dominated the early 70s. It’s definitely present here though, in a strange movie that is quirky and odd but also strangely humorless.
You got Gene Hackman, playing this tough guy PI type Harry Moseby, a spin off of Jack Nicolson’s Jake Gittes from Chinatown. And he's a nice enough guy, loves his wife, takes his job seriously. He’s no Richard Nixon, which was a big deal back then. But Moseby can’t catch a break-his beloved short haired wife is cheating on him with another guy who is something of a pretentious bum and it’s a bad situation. Apparently it’s his fault for working so late doing private detective things. And in classic detective fashion, even though it’s eating at him, instead of spending some quality time fixing the relationship, he decides to sink into his cases even more.
So he gets this new case-aging actress Arlene Iverson, who is 45 going on 60, hires him to bring her daughter back. The daughter in this case, is 16 and has been running around with a stuntman who used to date her mother. Arlene isn’t worried about the whole “my daughter is 16 screwing a grown man” component of this situation, she just needs Delly (the daughter in question) back so she can live off her trust fund. Moseby tracks the situation from the stuntman down to “Florida in the 70s”, a place that, if it was as depicted in the film, is so absurd it almost gives modern day Florida a run for its money.
Down in “Florida in the 70s”, Moseby finds out that little Delly is stirring things up with her stepfather Tom and his wife Paula down in the Florida Keys. Things proceed to get weird. So, obviously Delly is sleeping with her stepfather, I mean it’s heavily implied. There’s also his girlfriend Paula, who is very nice, welcoming and warm and apparently doesn’t care her boyfriend is sleeping with his stepdaughter. The couple is not only completely fine with a private detective showing up unannounced, they invite him to stay in a guesthouse. The couple like to take their boat out and drink heavily throughout the day. There’s a chess subplot. Our lead man Moseby beds Paula. This happens right after a scene where Paula, Moseby and Delly take the boat out at 9:00 at night to go swim and then the stuntman Delly was supposedly with from earlier crashes his plane into the ocean, which is also interesting because he is based in California and L.A to the Florida Keys seems like a hell of a flight. If that’s a lot to unpack, don’t worry. It works in the end.
This Florida in the 70s sequence is interesting. Maybe not flawless writing but I liked it a lot. It went places that enriched the movie and lingered the appropriate amount of time. It’s a very important sequence and I would argue it’s the heart of the movie. It’s weird, kind of slow, a lot of character development that is more lateral than horizontal. It’s a good pacing change but most importantly, it’s weirdly immersive. Night Moves starts you with this saunter through L.A, picking up pace slowly then it drops you off into an even slower Florida section that leaves you wondering what the movie is actually about. Our attention spans are so short these days that I was just sitting there, beer in hand, wondering “What’s the crime? Where’s the crime?”
This whole actionless Florida sequence is fascinating to me-it’s something of a time capsule of degeneracy that points at a larger moral degradation. It seemed to encapsulate the 70s erosion of the existential yet heavily mystic 60s carefree nature. If the 60s was like a decade of college, the 70s of Night Moves shows when everyone graduates but still keeps being self destructive. The 60s were full of artistic sexual expression and unmooring, often as a cathartic response to a culture (Americans) that had for so long been outwardly repressed. It was an eye opening-there had always been dirt and grime on American life-the InkSpots were just as down bad as the Animals but the 60s was when we saw that. The 70s, like we see in Night Moves, is when people got used to seeing the grime.
To his credit, Moseby is taken aback slightly by the entire Florida adventure, but probably not as much as I was. He actually manages to convince Delly to return to L.A and the movie pivots back to booting up. It’s impressive how the film can grab your attention despite being a little directionless on the first watch. Back in L.A. the movie continues at its snail's pace. He returns Delly and goes back to pouting about his wife, who kind of sucks. Then in this 25 minute last section everything happens at once.
Delly dies in a car crash with the stunt director of a movie, the same stunt director who oversaw the stunt guy who flies planes into water. Odd. Moseby looks into it. Turns out Delly’s age appropriate boytoy Quentin was working on the car. From Quentin, Moseby finds out about the stuntman crashing the plane in Florida (before he thought it was some random guy). Then he heads back down to “Florida In The 70s.” Not going to over spoil the ending-just know everything ends up being a mess. Unclear but tremendously satisfying end to a good movie.
Night Moves is not for everyone. That friend of yours who can’t sit on the couch without someone being bludgeoned to death on screen, it’s not for them. Your casual wino chik or benzo PEZ may not like it. It’s not a film that grabs you and shakes you down. It slowly pulls you into its time and era, like someone hit ‘Rewind” on a cool ocean breeze. It’s a film that is acutely aware of what it is and what it does. Its portrait of life is compelling but jaggedly real. It’s unnerving, like two late night hippies in 70s Florida, drunk in their Keys house, just a boat away from Cuba. The past is so far yet so near. Perhaps that is why the movie feels strangely haunting, especially in its depictions of Florida and Hollywood.
The ending doesn’t leave you with much to look forward to and frankly for the tone of this movie that seems about right. It’s a bleak but refreshing trip down a memory lane that’s not our favorite stretch of the 70s to park and it feels all the more accurate because of it. Between post Watergate blues and stagflation (when inflation meets unemployment), it’s hard to find that stretch of 70s that was actually fun a la carte like Dazed and Confused. Harry Moseby, as a character, has got a little bit of an edge, but more than anything he’s kind of beaten down. Between his wife and the craziness of the people he interacts with it’s clear that Moseby needs a break. And just when you think the movie’s got things wrapped up, oh no, all hell breaks loose.
The ending of this film is truly something to behold. It’s a fast paced dive, especially compared to the slow pace of the first 2/3rds of the film. We go from knowing nothing to knowing everything and it’s underwhelming but understandable all at once. It’s a classic case of “when keeping it real goes wrong”, as Dave Chapelle would say. Frankly it’s all Delly’s fault, which is ironic because she’s the little bird Moseby is trying to protect for most of the movie.
Basically, 70s Florida Man is trying to smuggle an artifact in by flying piece by piece to the Keys. Outlandish, yes. But this by itself is probably not a crime. The murders and so forth that go forth into keeping it a secret are, in fact, a crime. The coverup is always worse than the crime and since no one did anything about the 16 year old sleeping around with old men, it must be a hell of a crime. And it ends up being so. No more spoilers.
