The first thing we see in Night Moves, the scene that plays under the opening credits, is private detective Harry Moseby, played by Gene Hackman, receiving a telephone message about a case involving a missing girl. The audience immediately knows what kind of movie they’re going to be watching, who the protagonist is, and what he’s going to try and do.
Except, it doesn’t really all work out that way. In most detective movies the gumshoe is the least intriguing character, but in Mosley’s case the audience is brought to ponder his past history, his psychology and his motives just as much as Moseby ponders those involved in the cases he investigates. Unlike Sam Spade, being a detective isn’t what he is, it’s what he does… or at least tries to do.
The thing is that Mosley isn’t a very great detective. The second big way that Night Moves subverts the detective genre is that people only start dying after he’s solved his case, and the harder he tries to solve the murders, the more of them there are.
Mosley is never shown to make truly ignorant mistakes or blunders; he’s no real intellectual, but he isn’t portrayed as a lummox either. When he can’t solve the mystery at the end of the film, in spite of great determination, and even courage, the film leaves us with a sinking feeling of confusion and despair, and more questions than answers.
Night Moves feels very much like a product of the mid-seventies, from Moseby’s moustache to his wife’s crocheted blouses, from long scenes involving reel-to-reel answering machines to the ruminations on the deaths of the Kennedys, and especially to the feeling that the “free love” ideals of the ‘60s have turned to decay. I felt like audiences in 1975 would have felt an intimate connection with this movie, and its weary cynicism still has bite today.
There are bits that have not aged well, though. This movie includes The Most Seventies Scene Ever, in which Gene Hackman is lying in bed with his wife, caressing her gratuitously bare breasts with his foot as he eats cheese fondue out of a little home fondue pot. I am not making that up. The soundtrack is made up almost exclusively of watery synths, and it is very, very bad.
In the closing moments, however, I had a glimpse of what Night Moves might have been life if the sound cues were chosen by Martin Scorsese. Someone’s cell phone went off behind me, the only time in movie history when a cell phone has improved a movie, and the ring tone was Bob Marley’s version of All Across the Watchtower. As Mosley helplessly watches a man drown, a man he trusted until this very moment, and as he sees all the meaning he had built up around this case washed violently away, I thought the song fit the film and the tenor of the times it was conveying perfectly.
“There’s too much confusion here, and I can’t get no relief.”
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