Check, Check, Check

NIGHT MOVES ALMOST left town two days ago unnoticed. It ground through a week of general release in the suburbs, unheralded by advertising, overshadowed by Nashville and Jaws, slipping on the projector as Silent Night, Evil Night slid off, making way this week for Aloha, Bobby and Rose. Except for a last ditch run at the Charles, unmentioned in the newspapers. Arthur Penn's new movie came and went like a clerk and his briefcase on the subway.

Which is fitting, because Gene Hackman paces through this film like a rush hour shadow, mustached and anonymous, sitting in his car playing magnetic chess, inconspicuous in a plain coat and tie. Hackman works wonders with a part like this: when he isn't cast as the big blustering shove-around of Popeye Doyle or Scarecrow, or squandered in a mistake like The Poseidon Adventure, he's our best interpreter of the middle-class presence: not the hero, or the anti-hero, but the unhero, making his own blind way.

Hackman is perfect at presenting the peripheral man, an identityless form floating around on the edge of things, affecting nothing. His character is nondescript enough to make way for tragedy--elements more powerful than himself can take over without a fight because he's doomed from the start. In Coppola's The Conversation. Hackman is totally subservient to the technology of his work: the bugging devices he plays with as vicarious life turn on him. They erase his sense of self so much that he begins to convince himself that he's being bugged. Finally, he doesn't have enough perspective left to realize what's real and what isn't, and whether there's any rational reason why he'd be bugged.

In Night Moves, Gene Hackman is Harry Moseby, also an observer. But the theme here is no private drama or study in paranoia; Moseby's problem is knowing where he's headed. A pro-football player turned private investigator in L.A., he's a failure to his wife, who when she can't reach him cheats on him, almost in frustration. He disrespects himself for hiring himself out on divorce cases, but he can't help it--the step-by-step of the process fascinates him, as though by compartmentalizing experience and solving things he's getting at the root of his own life.

But like an impotent rapist, or a scholar with writer's cramp. Harry Moseby gets everything set up--then he can't make the last move. He's likeable enough; the people around him bare themselves to him (quite literally, in the imagery of the picture), but Harry Moseby always stands silently behind screened porches, seen through the pane of a glass-bottomed boat, sitting down on a turned-around chair leaning his arms on the shield of its back. When he's got everything solved, and his life awaits that final gesture of control when all the pieces come together, all he can do is flail around in circles going nowhere. When you're a detective investigating yourself, it's impossible to escape the mercenary nature of the trade, impossible to have any moral impact.

In the amorphous atmosphere of Night Moves, Moseby's inability to finish anything off makes sense. It's night that's moving--an inexplicable rumbling in the distance, and Moseby's delusion is that he's moving a knight in a chess game, check, check, check. But in fact the checkerboard is a great swarm, with no one heading anywhere. Moseby hasn't got a chance of wrestling this free-for-all into the neat conformity he likes: once his blocks are set up, the whole construct just tumbles down again on top of him.

An interesting idea for a movie, and well-cast. But in the execution the idea gets lost, and estranged from what happens on the screen. So an interpretation of the film is a faintly boring afterthought: in the theater it's clear that significant things are going on, but precisely what they are is unclear unless you force yourself to mull it over afterwards, an artificial resurrection of what you think went on.

The fault lies with either script writer Alan Sharp or director Arthur Penn--it seems hard to tell which because their contributions never mesh. The screenplay is crafted and literary, almost pretentious, and it leaves the rest of the picture scrambling below. Full of slightly pretentious lines, the script will drop an enigmatic phrase and the camera won't cover for it--the statement is deserted-with its pants down and the audience is embarassed.

Sharp's idea of transmitting this hard-to-pin-down moral environment is to write in punchlines that don't follow: and while Hackman's Moseby is asking incessant questions in his quest his subjects usually answer in strange, unhelpful ways. Sharp has rigged it, inevitably, so the women in the story are the most mysteriously evasive--when there are three or four of these mermaids tossing their hair the technique becomes sexist and tiresome. Worse yet are the strivings for novelistic originality. "Where were you when Kennedy was shot?" asks a character out of the blue. "Why?" queries Hackman. "Because it's one of those questions everyone knows the answer to." There's no real purpose to this dialogue (a tenuous connection to a murder later on is all), and it only seems to serve as a conceit: no great witticism, but maybe something no one's bothered to write down before, which seems to appeal to the writer's ego as it confuses the audience.

Although the screenplay gives the appearance of being thrown together, it's really striving for a rigidly defined meaning. When Arthur Penn's directing is as appropriately open-ended as it is, then the hinted Wisdom of the script passes by even faster. Penn has a better way of conveying the mishmash moral atmosphere of Night Moves than Sharp's riddling. The director hasn't done anything except a quick segment of the Olympics in Visions of Eight since the days of Little Big Man, Alice's Restaurant and Bonnie and Clyde, and here he's much more easy going. He shoots a misty morning in Los Angeles like it's underwater, and the footage of the Florida Keys evokes the muggy, going-nowhere feeling of that place. People swim in this movie, too slippery and illogical for Moseby's chess game. One quick scene in the gigantic tank of a pro-football game is perfect--a dark walk through the tunnel into the bleary, intoxicating stadium--the roar and immensity give Moseby's quest all the more futility.

For the same reason, Penn makes it difficult to form judgements about the people on the screen. The guilty ones are nice folks: innocent bystanders are mean and pathetic--the only morally objectionable acts are filmed impersonally, and we don't see the faces of the murderers. So Moseby's clues lead to nowhere--when the crimes aren't dramatic, his gallant vision becomes lonelier and lonelier.

Night Moves is a pretty thin action movie, and when events happen there's no lightning and thunder, no tears. The world it portrays is full of weak and ineffectual people who can't make a difference. But somewhere in the back of the mind a little man with a briefcase scurries in late and drops off a file full of sobering things.