Long time followers of Mid Century Cinema know that we are, uh, somewhat fond of Arthur Penn’s neo-noir masterpiece Night Moves, which derives from an original screenplay by Alan Sharp and features an outstanding cast led by Gene Hackman, Susan Clark, and Jennifer Warren. We have previously written a review of the DVD release, posted about it here, and wrote at length about it in Hollywood’s Last Golden Age (which benefitted from gracious and generous interviews with Penn and Warren). It is on the list of our twenty-five favorite films (check out the company it keeps.)
So it was with eager anticipation – and a hint of envy (more than a decade ago we pitched a Night Moves monograph for the BFI series, and you can deduce how that turned out) – that we cracked the covers of the hot-off-the-presses Moseby Confidential: Arthur Penn’s Night Moves and the Rise of Neo-Noir, by Matthew Asprey Gear.
We shy away from “reviews” here, alert always to Lou Reed’s admonition: “could you imagine working for a year” making an album and then “you get a B+ from some asshole in the Village Voice?” But there is little doubt that Moseby Confidential will become an essential resource for anyone with an interest in Night Moves, as well as neo-noir, and the seventies film more generally. Diligently researched with a close attention to the existing literature, archival material and supplemented by new interviews (including with Clark and Warren, and relatives of Penn and Sharp), Gear uncovers information about the movie’s development, production, and post-production that will be eye-openers for even the most avid fans of the film.
We were especially pleased to learn more specific details about some of the small cuts Penn made to the film after a preliminary screening of the movie for the legendary “New York Friends” (a group that included Bob Rafelson, Robert Towne and Terrence Malick), and were enthralled by the discussion of a crucial bedroom scene, where Harry (Hackman) finally tells his wife Ellen (Clark) the true story of what happened when he tracked down the father who had abandoned him. Through over forty takes, Penn, inches away, right next to the camera, “ran [Hackman] through the mill on that scene,” pounding the floor with his hand, asking for more, until Hackman finally said “I can’t do any more.”
Of course, any movie worth watching offers the promise of animated contestation, and that holds true for books as well. In that exuberant spirit, we come away from Moseby Confidential with a debate to engage. As Gear recounts, Penn and Sharp often did not see eye to eye about key aspects of the picture, and Penn routinely ordered re-writes (Sharp was on set for much of the production), and as well as cuts to various pieces of business. Sharp restored most of these in his subsequent novelization of the movie, which is much closer to his original treatment. In adjudicating these disagreements, our sense is that Gear is with Sharp—but we are with Penn. As we have argued elsewhere, Night Moves has much to say about America—and Harry is a personification of the country, dispirited and adrift in the post-Vietnam, post-Watergate ruins of the mid-1970s. (Penn referred to the characters in Night Moves as “the mourners of the Kennedy generation”—certainly he was; shattered, especially, by Bobby’s assassination.) It has always been our sense that Sharp, a Scotsman, looks at America (and Harry), as a censorious, erstwhile friend, whereas Penn is more of a bereaved brother.
To our reading, almost every change made or cut ordered by Penn was wise, or at the very least was consistent with his vision. Big things like the re-written airport scene (moving instead of dismissive), little things such as shaving a clumsy, jokey, line from the kitchen confrontation (an astonishing scene of uncommon emotional power), and even seemingly trivial tweaks (like Penn’s perfect-on-every-level change from a Chabrol to a Rohmer reference)—each of these are suggestive of a more complex, introspective Harry. This is Penn, for whom the movie was about “some kind of interior investigation,”—that is, it is about the detective, not the mystery. From this perspective, Harry must matter—his character must be one worth saving, or at least trying to save, otherwise that interior investigation has no significance, or stakes. Sharp, on the other hand, doesn’t seem to like Harry at all, as evidenced by the way in which he puts back in every possible crudity, blemish and disparagement of the character in his novelization (right down to restoring his original, incongruous Chabrol movie).
Indeed, Sharp’s novelization presents something of a mystery in itself: how can someone who wrote one of the great screenplays of the seventies (if revised in collaboration with Penn) – and littered with a countless gems including “Me and my parents . . . we had a different arrangement” and “I know what you didn’t mean” – write such an undistinguished, pedestrian novelization? It must be something about the difference between screenplays and novels—and about the magic of the movies.
And Night Moves is one of those magical movies. So watch it again. And read Moseby Confidential. And argue about every last detail, over and over again.
