![]() “What’s the setup here?” Harry asks, obviously intrigued. She’s trouble, this one, currently working her way through her mom’s ex-boyfriends in what Harry surmises is “an attempt to even the score.” He eventually finds her in the sunshine state, shacked up with her former stepfather (John Crawford) and a mysterious woman named Paula (Jennifer Warren) who speaks in enchantingly flirty and elusive aphorisms. The kid’s name is Delly – short for Delilah – played by a then-16-year-old Melanie Griffith in her first credited film role. He skips town, getting himself good and lost in New Mexico and then the Florida keys while trying to track down the runaway teenage daughter of a washed-up former Hollywood starlet. Being cuckolded is enough of an affront to Harry’s fragile masculinity, but being cuckolded by this guy? This is why he’s so confounded to find her sleeping with an effete, bookish colleague played by Harris Yulin, a man so physically unimposing he walks with a limp. His bristling insecurity about being another antique in her collection prompts him to play-act as a bully, bowing out of an outing to go see an Eric Rohmer film so he can stay home and watch the game. We can feel Harry’s antsy discomfort around his wife’s sophisticated homosexual friends from the art world. Just beneath that gruff, macho bluster lurks an almost child-like sensitivity. The key to Hackman’s genius is that he was always one of our most vulnerable actors. You can tell how well his business is going when he walks into his wife’s office mid-afternoon – she’s a successful antique dealer – and asks for some cash. But Harry would rather tail people in his Mustang, scribbling clues in his pocket notebook like an old-school dick. His wife wants him to take a job at a more prosperous agency that uses newfangled computers and hi-tech surveillance equipment. His ratty office and business card reading “Moseby Confidential” (“At least it doesn’t have a picture of an eye on it,” he quips) are from another era altogether. Much like Philip Marlowe in Robert Altman’s “The Long Goodbye,” Harry is awfully out of place in the swinging 1970s. Jokingly referred to as “a movie about a private detective who doesn’t detect shit,” the film stars Hackman as Harry Moseby, former pro football player turned down-on-his-luck gumshoe who stumbles into a conspiracy he can’t comprehend, let alone solve. “One side’s just losing slower than the other.” There are at least two dozen as good in Alan Sharp’s acerbic screenplay, but this one succinctly sums up a gloriously bummed-out era of American cinema, and few films embody those bad vibes better than Night Moves. His wife walks in and asks who’s winning. The most oft-quoted scene in Arthur Penn’s Night Moves finds a disconsolate Gene Hackman slouched in front of the television, half-watching a football game on a small black-and-white set in his den.
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