Shot in 1973 on the tail of a writer's strike and unreleased by Warner Bros. until 1975, Night Moves had the misfortune to follow Roman Polanski's Chinatown (1973), Robert Altman's The Long Goodbye (1973), and Francis Ford Coppola's The Conversation (1974) into cinemas; it emerged during a glut of so-called "neo-noirs" (among these, Dick Richards' Farewell, My Lovely, Stuart Rosenberg's The Drowning Pool, Robert Benton's The Late Show, Michael Winner's The Big Sleep, and Walter Hill's The Driver) films that recalled the postwar noir thrillers but with a contemporary edge. Lost in the shuffle of Byzantine plot mechanics, sundry deceptions, twists, and double crosses was Penn's ruminations on identity and the guttering of American self-respect. The filmmaker infused elements of his own life into the Night Moves script and his feelings of failure within the Hollywood community. Audiences and the majority of the major critics were apathetic to the plight of a private investigator who is unable to solve his big case because he is handicapped by his inability to see his own life with honesty. Nine days after Night Moves opened across the nation, Steven Spielberg's Jaws (1975) premiered at the head of a $2 million publicity blitz. Penn made one more feature - the similarly maligned revisionist western The Missouri Breaks (1976) - before retreating for a time to theatre.
Seldom revisited but never forgotten, Night Moves has enjoyed a slow appreciation of its critical market share over the course of forty years. Key to the film's happy reappraisal is its atypicality and freshness, a quality gained by willful forfeiture on the part of Penn and cinematographer Bruce Surtees of the standard noir curlicues - the high contrast shadows, the smoke-filled rooms, the canted angles - which would have rendered the film at best rote or at worst kitsch. Hackman's lumpen gumshoe Harry Moseby has lost nothing in topicality over the course of four decades but it is the minor players who sell the story, none more so than Jennifer Warren as the quirkiest, most conflicted, and yet most oddly appealing femme fatale in the crime film canon. (A long-standing rumor maintains that Faye Dunaway turned down Night Moves to costar opposite Jack Nicholson in Chinatown; in fact, Dunaway's manager, Sue Mengers, used a nonexistent offer from Penn as a bargaining chip to win her client the role in the Polanski film over short list rival Jane Fonda.) Night Moves also provided early work for rising stars James Woods and Melanie Griffith. Six months after the film came and went at the box office, singer-songwriter Bob Seeger had a Billboard Hot 100 hit and near overnight success with his - allegedly unrelated - single "Night Moves."
Sources:
Arthur Penn: American Director by Nat Segaloff (University Press of Kentucky, 2011)
Arthur Penn interview by Jean-Pierre Coursodon, Cinema (May 1977)
The Grove Book of Hollywood by Christopher Silvester (Grove Press, 2002)
By Richard Harland Smith
