![]() ![]() The plot can be understood, but not easily, and not on first viewing, and besides, the point is that Moseby is as lost as we are. Of course, we could fall back on the old filmcrit ploy, "we're not supposed to understand the plot." That worked for " Syriana." But in "Night Moves," I think it's a little trickier. I saw it a week ago with an audience at that holy place of the cinema, George Eastman House in Rochester, N.Y., and then I was joined in a discussion with Jim Healy, the assistant curator - we talked for an hour with a room full of moviegoers and we were left with more questions than we started with. It is probably true that if you saw "Night Moves" several times and took careful notes, you could reconstruct exactly what happens in the movie, but that might be missing the point. Now we have most of the characters on board, and I will stop describing the plot, not so much because I fear giving it away as because I fear I cannot. In Florida, Moseby finds her (played by Melanie Griffith in her movie debut) living with Tom and Tom's lover, Paula ( Jennifer Warren). His trail leads first to a movie location, where he meets a mechanic ( James Woods) who once dated Delly, and then a stunt pilot ( Anthony Costello) who took her away from the mechanic, and then a stunt pilot who says Delly is probably in Florida with her stepfather, the charter pilot Tom Iverson (John Crawford). The man is Marty Heller ( Harris Yulin), who lives out in Malibu, and later Harry confronts him, although in a curiously lukewarm way: "How serious is it?" When his wife finds out he knows, she makes it his fault: "Why didn't you ask me first?" He leaves town to work on the case as a sort of therapy. It was kinda like watching paint dry." Then he stakes out the theater and sees her meeting a man Harry doesn't know. His wife, Ellen ( Susan Clark), asks if he wants to go see " My Night at Maud's," but he tells her, "I saw a Rohmer film once. Harry takes the job but first does a little sleuthing on his own time. Her 16-year-old daughter, Delly, has run away from home, and she wants Harry to find her, although if Harry wants to have a drink with Arlene first, that would be nice. Arlene Iverson ( Janet Ward) is a onetime B-movie sweater girl who married a couple of rich guys - one dead, the other ex - and must be lonely, because she greets Harry dressed as if she's hired him to look at her breasts. It works as about two thrillers.As the movie opens, he is summoned to the kind of client who would be completely at home in a Sam Spade or Philip Marlowe story. By the movie's end, and especially during its last shock of recognition, we've been through a wringer. These are all the trademarks of the Lew Archer novels by Ross MacDonald especially the little-girl-lost theme, and Alan Sharp's screenplay uses them infinitely better than "The Drowning Pool" did - even though that was actually based on a Macdonald book. The plot involves former and present lovers of the girl and her mother, sunken treasure (yes, sunken treasure), conflicts across the generations and murders more complex by far than they seem at first. Miss Warren creates a character so refreshingly eccentric, so sexy in such an unusual way, that it's all the movie can do to get past her without stopping to admire. The mistress is played by a relatively unknown actress and sometime singer named Jennifer Warren, who has the cool gaze and air of competence and tawny hair of that girl in the Winston ads who smokes for pleasure and creates waves of longing in men from coast to coast. And from the moment he sets eyes on the stepfather's mistress, the movie, which has been absorbing anyway, really takes off. Harry traces the missing girl to her stepfather, a genial pilot in the Florida Keys, and goes there to bring her back. His confrontation with the man, like so many scenes in the movie, is done with dialog so blunt in its truthfulness that the characters really do escape their genre. ![]() Harry takes the case, pausing only long enough to track down his own missing wife - who is, it turns out, having a not especially important, affair with a man with a beach house in Malibu. He's a private detective for reasons, vaguely hinted at, involving his childhood.Ī Hollywood divorcee, clinging to the last shreds of a glamor that once won her a movie director (and half the other men in town, she claims) hires him to trace down her missing daughter. He's a former pro football player and a man of considerable intelligence, whose wife ( Susan Clark) runs an antique business. The eye this time is named Harry Moseby, perhaps with a nod toward Hackman's great performance as Harry Caul in " The Conversation," perhaps not. ![]()
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