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Rating: Five years had passed since "Little Big Man," and Arthur Penn had produced nothing more for the big screen. One of the fathers of New Hollywood, during its heyday in the early '70s, was giving no signs of life behind the camera. 1975 marks his return with a film, "Night Moves", that is difficult to classify and analyze, where Penn works once again on multiple levels, furthering his very personal path of genre deconstruction that made him one of the most important and innovative filmmakers of those decades.
Harry (Gene Hackman) is a private investigator who must find and possibly bring home the young Delly (an equally young Melanie Griffith). The turmoil between his private life and work complications makes Hackman's character a loser unable to react. To better understand "Night Moves," the film discourse must be intertwined with the historical context of the States: on the one hand, the now acknowledged failure of the Vietnam specter, and on the other, the all-American scandal of "Watergate" and the uncertainty of the post-Nixon era. Hackman is the chaos of America in the seventies.
Sharp's screenplay intertwines the double game of Harry's professional and personal life. A private investigator without any particular talent, aware of his weakness, exacerbated by problems with his wife Ellen (Susan Clark). A man in an identity crisis, like his country destabilized by internal crises ("Watergate") and external ones (Vietnam). Arthur Penn thus returns to play with American history to recount it with characters that are its ultimate and finished product. The genre, in this case, noir, becomes a vehicle through which the filmmaker conveys his ideas about the world and society. What only the greatest can do.
"Night Moves" is a film that says nothing to the viewer, gives no explanations, and uses no artifices to make itself understood. It is bare and symbolic, as cold as the cinematic style of the era. The characters are symbolic elements to describe other things beyond the story being staged, and Penn's greatness lies in letting images and actors speak, he who could direct sacred monsters like few others. Gene Hackman is the great loser of the '70s and is perfect in rendering his character alone and destined to remain so, unable to pull himself out of that tunnel drowning him toward complete annulment, both affective and professional. But even young actors like James Woods or the debuting Melanie Griffith seem to be seasoned veterans under Penn's skilful direction.
The almost annoyingly "cold" nature of the film and its work on cryptic symbolism make Penn's work one of his most obscure and difficult to assimilate. There is a distance from the fierce criticism of "The Chase," there is a detachment from the epic force of "Bonnie and Clyde" and "Little Big Man," but again there is the gaze of a director who mixes the seventh art and politics, societal analysis, and reflection on cinematic genres.
Another chapter in the coherent narrative and thematic trajectory of Arthur Penn, who with "Night Moves" once again signs a work destined to influence American cinema of the seventies.
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