There he meets Paula (Jennifer Warren, who is simply fantastic), another world weary woman who’s seen too much and done too much. Moseby gets to work and, in short order, figures out where Delly is hiding and eventually goes across the country and to Key West (another homage, I suppose, to a film like Key Largo) to get and retrieve her. Arlene is the embodiment of the golden age of film’s darker side, a bitter alcoholic who is all too wise to the way women are used and abused in this ”magic” town. Moseby is hired, as in The Big Sleep, by wealthy Arelene Iverson (as opposed to wealthy General Sternwood), an older woman who was once a minor figure in Hollywood’s golden age, who says her very wild step daughter, Delly Grastner (a very young an alluring Melanie Griffin) is missing (In The Big Sleep, Detective Phillip Marlowe is hired to check in on the very wild Carmen Sternwood). Now normally I wouldn’t be too happy about a movie taking so much from other works, but in this case they did it in mostly clever ways. Having said all the above, what delighted me about the film was the realization -something I didn’t known way back when- was that the plot of Night Moves hews very closely to both Raymond Chandler’s The Big Sleep and, especially in the movie’s wrap up, to Dashiel Hammet’s The Maltese Falcon. That, in a nutshell, is the movie’s way of telling you Moseby is in for a similar circumstance. Moseby notes how the chess player missed a certain move and how he likely regretted it his whole life. Later in the film and with another character, Moseby shows off a chess moves (it too is shown briefly in the trailer above) involving a ”knight” that was played in a professional match back in the 1920’s (Knight moves, so to speak!). The trailer above gives this away but its only the first instance where Moseby is unaware of what goes on around him. Moseby’s lack of awareness is presented early on when (MILD SPOILERS) Moseby quite by accident (again, showing his general lack of awareness) find out his wife is cheating on him. I suppose I’m spoiling things a bit by saying the case he’s involved in does eventually get ”solved”, but if one thinks about it Moseby’s presence may have made things far worse for everyone concerned rather than any better. This is the central theme of Night Moves, though its presentation is done in sometimes very subtle ways. Harry Moseby is an intelligent man who tries his best to do what’s right but, in the course of the movie, we find he’s misses things that us regular mere mortals would likely also miss. Regarding the later, they often see through situations and other characters with an almost god-like understanding. They are often very sardonic/sarcastic but insightful. Women are attracted to them and they know how to use their fists and/or weapons. If you’ve followed these classic detective works, there are certain things many of the detectives in the works have. He wasn’t in the class of a, say, Inspector Clouseau and the film does not ridicule his faults, but this winds up being an interesting reversal of one of the more standard cliches of the pulp detective fiction genre. I recalled that, while he was a very decent man and he tried very hard to do what was right, he missed clues, both subtle and obvious. What I remembered about Night Moves was that Gene Hackman’s detective character, Harry Moseby, was something of a failure as a detective.
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