Alligators in New York City sewers: pre-Gawker hype cache, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles-spurred paranoia, or just a further widening of the gap between unwashed enviros and the a-Pollock-for-every-mood types? However you cut it, proportionally little attention seems to be paid to the problem of bodies congesting Florida’s waterways – meaning, when your pet fish starts coughing up bits of ependyma, it probably isn’t gonna be a job for PETA. Night Moves closets a nautical skeleton, and you just know director Penn’s been dining on cine-euro’s marked remnants, ‘cos it only ventures to make its debut more than halfway through this stonewashed noir. Smiling and demure, the atrophied star intercedes the sight of a nymphal, barely-legal Melanie Griffith out skinny-dipping one night (incidentally, now also an atrophied star); but, more than charging her sexual current with an adverse voltage, it registers as a total, haunting aburdism, one that insidiously flips the hourglass on detective Harry Moseby’s (Gene Hackman) ‘case closed’.

Like a handlebar-mustachioed Antonioni, Penn seems uncommonly poised to the changes that can damage a person’s hold on their environment. When Moseby first ventures out to Florida – partly to avoid having to deal with his wife’s infidelity, partly to track down missing daughter-of-Hollywood Delly Grastner (Melanie Griffith) –, he finds an idyll wound in place like a coiled spring. Returning home with the girl seems to only u-haul the tension, dumping her in the middle of a barely suppressed hysteria that catalyses her death. Awash in the faint trauma of a headache, Moseby then has to pick at the clots of half-surfaced motives, fingering his way through a case where human detail outweighs the burn for causality, and our snarling fetishisation of sex, death and youth only triangulate into tragedy.

Up until she appears on-screen, Delly’s ranked as a nothing more than a pair of legs in whirlwind heat, providing a sterling contrast with her end-manifestation as a sickly sweet kid. But as tempting as it is to pin her death down to the craving’s of a wolfish upper-set, she also embodies a vintage excess that proves untenable in (the then) contemporary America. Harry may not be as enjoyable a candidate, but his weary Sam Spade bit is a symptom of the same degenerative condition. With his marriage rusting at the hinges, he consults the rule book in tracking down and mildly accosting his wife’s new beau; when asked why he didn’t go to her first, he claims it’s because he wanted “the truth,” but there’s the sense that he equally just wanted the opportunity to play at rogue. For Harry, the role of detective is ensconced in a mythical virility, grasped once before in his life as golden quarterback (which is why hypocrisy proves so liberating, when he falls into the arms of Delly’s step-father’s girlfriend). It also fronts the promise of unprecedented control, given its traditional narrative centricity. But what he finds is only repeated moments of reel life squaring off with real life, until they eventually threaten to cancel one another out; as he’s left drifting out to sea – helming a case that he didn’t solve, but rather that “fell in on top of [him]” – it’s his very necessity that’s called into question.—David Levinson

» Arthur Penn | USA | 1975