Roger Ebert Was Blown Away by the Ending of a ’70s Gene Hackman Crime Thriller

Film noir tends to be dark since the birth of the genre in the 1940s, but it was utterly devastated during the disillusionment of the 1970s. The Camelot arrogance of the United States is long gone. There had been a wave of political assassinations, the meat grinder of the Vietnam War was devouring young men at an alarming rate, and the increasingly paranoid President of the United States had committed a crime that would force him to resign from office.

Justice, kindness, and hope were in short supply for most of the decade, providing fertile ground for the cynical noir genre. Films like “Charley Varrick,” “Across 110th Street” and “The Friends of Eddie Coyle” were nasty and very violent; they threw spectators into the company of thieves and killers, men completely devoid of a moral code. The endings were often brutal, nothing more than the hellish finale of “Chinatown”, where we watch in horror as John Huston’s Noah Cross takes his daughter Katherine away from the freshly shot Eveyln (Faye Dunaway), who is also Evelyn’s daughter.

You never get rid of these films. They burrow into your soul and stay there forever. A film that has had a dark resonance throughout my life is “The Nocturnal Movements” by Arthur Penn a dark Los Angeles-Florida hybrid that comes to its shocking terminus off the Keys. It’s powered by a phenomenal performance from Gene Hackman and stars 17-year-old Melanie Griffith in her first credited role. It’s a smart, twisty, and ultimately haunting film, and no one was a bigger fan of it than Roger Ebert.

Roger Ebert gave “Night Moves” four stars when it was released theatrically in 1975, and opened his rave review comparing it quite favorably to Stuart Rosenberg’s noir “The Drowning Pool”. This film starred Paul Newman as Lew Harper, a Los Angeles private investigator created by crime fiction legend Ross Macdonald. Like Hackman’s Harry Moseby in “Night Moves,” Harper finds himself embroiled in a sordid Southern intrigue involving, in Ebert’s words, a “lost little girl” plot. There’s a lot going on in “The Drowning Pool,” but it ends up being a rare Newman throwaway. No one’s heart seems to be in this cold story around the heart.

That’s not the case with “Night Moves,” which benefits enormously from a wonderfully twisty original screenplay by Alan Sharp. Hackman’s IP is shaggy in every way. His wife is having an affair with a milquetoast from Malibu and the job offered to her doesn’t suit her temperament. When he is approached by a faded Hollywood actress (Janet Ward) to reunite with her 16-year-old daughter Delly (Griffith), whose wife is raiding the trust fund, he senses an easy payday. It turns out it’s quite the opposite.

Harry finds Delly in the Florida Keys, where she lives with her stepfather Tom (John Crawford) and his girlfriend Paula (Jennifer Warren). When he returns Delly to her mother near the middle of the film, you know that the worst is yet to come and that the crashed and submerged plane that Delly and Paula discovered during a pool getaway is fraught with dark secrets. I don’t want to spoil a brilliant film, but it should come as no surprise that Harry finds himself drawn to the Keys. And that’s where it all goes wrong.

Ebert was particularly stunned by the unpredictable and unhurried plot of “Night Moves”. He loved the scene where Harry visits his wife and her lover. This doesn’t really advance the plot, but it’s a key to understanding Harry outside of his professional life. “[Harry’s] the confrontation with the man,” Ebert wrote, “like so many scenes in the film, is done with dialogue so direct in its truthfulness that the characters truly escape their gender.”

He also praised Warren, a haunting and moving artist who deserved much better from Hollywood, for his praise. Ebert wrote that Warren “has the cool gaze, competent demeanor and tawny hair of that girl in the Winston commercials who smokes for fun and creates waves of desire in men from coast to coast. Miss Warren creates a character so refreshingly eccentric, so sexy in such an unusual way, that it’s all the film can do to pass her by without stopping to admire her.”

Ebert compares Hackman’s Harry Moseby to Harry Caul from “The Conversation” but they are very different men. Caul is a bookish audiophile who doesn’t much like physical altercations; Moseby is a former football player who can get into a fight when asked – and, of course, he finds himself in a tough situation at the end of the film.

Ebert ends his review thus: “There is an ending that not only is a complete surprise – which would be easy enough – but also brings everything together in a new way, one that we hadn’t thought of before, one that is almost unbearably poignant.” Amen. This is a masterfully crafted ’70s film noir that delivers a trio of cracking punches in its final minutes. The final shot is chilling. “Night Moves” leaves a mark.