Arthur Penn | Night Moves / 1975

circles

by Douglas Messerli

 

Alan Sharp (screenplay), Arthur Penn (director) Night Moves / 1975

 

Gene Hackman has almost made a career out of playing doleful outsiders who attempt to bring meaning and order into a world they are afraid to enter. Particularly in Harry Caul in Francis Ford Coppola’s 1974 masterwork The Conversation and in the following year’s Arthur Penn-directed role of Harry Moseby in Night Moves, Hackman conjures up a world where no one and nothing can be trusted—from one’s wife to the walls of one’s apartment. What appears to be truth is almost always a series of lies projected into the world by interlinking acquaintances, who, for often inexplicable reasons, would just as soon destroy one another. Welcome to the post-Watergate world where a heavy dose of paranoia simply makes good sense.

     In both of these works, and particularly in Penn’s study in despair, people tend to gather round one another in terrifying circles, a bit like buffaloes defending themselves from attack, and to separate one of these beasts out from others results in a kind of herd collapse, resulting in a series of destructive and deadly actions.

     Working as a cut-rate version of the soon-to-be extinct breed, the touch American detective, Harry focuses little energy on the comes committed by the figures he encounters, but concentrates, instead, on their location in time and space and their reasons for behaving as they do. And in the sense, accordingly, although he obviously believes order can be restored, Harry is oddly amoral. Life is seldom improved by his actions: indeed, because of his fear of involving himself with others, he often does not even carry through with what might be seen to be the goal of his tracking. Years ago, as a young man, he tracked down his own missing father only to watch him briefly on a park bench, action like all the other old men. His very action, he realizes, has resulted in nothing.

      In Sharp’s and Penn’s dark tale, Harry is recommended by his fellow friend, Nick (Kenneth Mars) to take on a case that involves bringing back for actor Arlene Iverson’s (Janet Ward) daughter, Delly*—a Lolita-like figure who’s recently gone missing. It’s not clear that Arlene is particularly worried about her incorrigible charge as much as the fact that her divorce settlement determined that she must live with her daughter until she reaches the legal age of her trust fund; without the girl, Arlene has no income. She’d prefer, it’s apparent, to take the detective into her bath rather than send him out into the world to chase down Delly (Melanie Griffth).

     Nick, we soon after discover in an argument Harry has with his wife, Ellen (Susan Clark) has attempted to hire our detective hero for his own quite successful company. Nick is clearly proud of his success, symbolized by a display cabinet of priceless pre-Columbian sculpture, growing more and more expensive every day, he explains, since the Mexican government has begun to attempt to protect them for exportation—one of our first clues in this twisted tale that things are not what they seem.

    But Harry obviously prefers to work alone—for far less money. Harry’s wife, moreover, runs a successful antique shop with her co-worker Charles (Ben Archibek), a gay man not unlike Bronson Pinchot in Beverly Hills Cop (1984). In short, we quickly perceive something is amiss in Harry’s personal life, wherein both his best friend and his wife work in a world from which he has chosen to exclude himself. In case you haven’t guessed it, gay is still quite evil in this 1975 film.

    Yet, despite the arguments by critics such as Vincent Canby and Robert Ebert that the plot is so impenetrable the it is unnecessary to complete unravel it, I think we already seen the circular patterns that lead to a comprehension of Penn’s bleak tale.

     Arlene suggests he check out a young mechanic, Quentin (James Wood), who had hung out with Delly. The surly mechanic, who has worked as well for the film studios, has evidently taken Delly on a shoot with him to New Mexico, where he was abandoned by the young girl for a stunt pilot, Marv Ellman (Anthony Costello).

    On a film location, Harry questions Ellman, and also meets up with stunt coordinator Joey Zigler (Edward Binns) where he observes Quentin working on Marty’s stunt plane, despite their declared falling out over Delly.

     When Harry discerns that the two men have also had affairs with Delly’s mother, he suspects that Delly may be working her way through her mother’s former lovers; and, after a tip from Ellman that Arlene’s second husband, Tom Iverson (John Crawford), Delly’s stepfather, is now organizing charter flights in the Florida Keys, Harry heads out of town—but not before discovering that his own wife has been having an affair with another man, Marty Heller (Harris Yulin). 

   His voyage, accordingly, combines a journey of both his mind and heart, allowing the problem-solving part of his life to fill in for his marital problems over which he has no control.

     In the Keys he discovers Delly living along with Iverson and his girlfriend, Paula (Jennifer Warren. The clever and fast-talking Paula makes it almost immediately clear that Delly’s presence is causing serious riffs in her own sex-life with Iverson, and when Iverson finally returns from a flight, he suggests he has been having difficulty in keeping his hands off his own step-daughter. Delly, meanwhile, attempts, without success, to seduce the detective, in part to protect herself from having to return home with him.

 

     Complications dictate that Harry stay in Iverson’s shacks for another day, and he agrees to join Paula on a swimming trip with Delly that afternoon. While swimming near the boat, Delly spots the wreckage of a small plane wherein sits the decomposing body of the former stunt pilot, Ellman.

     Distraught by the event, Delly is comforted by the two, as Paula marks the spot with a buoy, which she appears to report to the Coast Guard when the return to camp. Later that night Paula joins Harry in his bed, but soon after disappears when Delly screams out for a nightmare.

     The following day, he returns Delly to the California home of her mother, observing that Quentin has already turned up at the house and that the two, mother and daughter, are already arguing.

     Yet another circle has been rounded.

    Harry finds his wife missing, and breaks into the Malibu home of Heller where he finds his wife Ellen. She joins him at their home, and together the two attempt a kind of rapprochement, interrupted by the news of Delly’s death in an on-set automobile accident.

     Apparently she has been killed in a car driven by the stunt coordinator, Joey, who shows Harry clips from the accident. In one of the clips, Harry spots Quentin working on the car just prior to the accident.

     In a visit to the supposedly grieving mother, Harry finds her sitting poolside, drunk, while revealing that she will now inherit the girl’s trust fund. Harry’s indignity for her lack of feeling leads to her demanding that he leave.

     Unable to drop the case since he now perceives that he has been used as a pawn in the affair, he returns to Florida, where finds the mechanic, Quentin, dead in Iverson’s dolphin pen. Encountering Iverson, Harry accuses him of having murdered the kid, which leads to a fight between the two older men. When Harry knocks out Iverson, Paula explains that the plane they had found had never been reported because it contained a valuable pre-Columbian statue smuggled out of Mexico, and that her sexual encounter with Harry was simply a ruse so the Iverson might check out the wreckage spot..

     With Iverson’s accomplice in hand, Harry now returns to the spot where the plan was buoyed. But as Paula dives in to retrieve it, a plane suddenly appears out of nowhere and moves toward the boat. As Paula attempts to return to the surface with the loot, the plane moving in as the pilot shoots at both Harry and Paula. She is killed and Harry, seriously hit, watches the plane crash nearby, recognizing the pilot through the cockpit window to be the stunt coordinator, Joey.

      Unable to move, Harry attempts to manipulate the boat’s throttle, but only manages to pull it half-way before he collapses, the boat beginning the slow arc of a circle, at the very moment that he surely realizes, like the chess game he plays over and again—the move of the knight to checkmate in three quick moves over and again to capture the prize. His efforts to make a sense of reality have been all for naught, having played a game that he did not even know he was playing.

     Finally, the circles come together to draw in a noose, having involved both his friend Nick who collects the pre-Columbian art and his wife Ellen who sells it. The gumshoe has no place in a world of high stakes art; as he states early on in this film, he can only watch the “paint dry,” far too slow for the dizzyingly corrupt world that circles around him and others.

 

*The filmmaker’s father’s aspirations were to film epics such as “Samson and Delilah.” Certainly his daughter, Delly, might be described as a femme fatal devoted to sheering the hair of any likely Samson.

 

Los Angeles, December 4, 2015; revised April 27, 2026

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (December 2026) and My Queer Cinema blog (April 2026).