Review of Night Moves (1975) by Oliver E — 03 Nov 2012

Night Moves is the best film I have ever seen. It is classic neo-noir storytelling right from the get-go, with uncanny performances and with a completely gut wrenching ending. Harry Moseby(Gene Hackman) is on to find a missing girl which then takes him on a trip to the Florida Keys where he starts to find out that there is more secrets at hand with the people he is associating around with. Plus to make matters worst his wife Ellen(Susan Clark) is cheating on him. One of Arthur Penn's best films and definetly my fav of all time.

Another review by an imdb user who goes by the name of Keith. Best review imo.

****.

Nick (Kenneth Mars) is a collector of pre-Columbian artifacts, illegal to obtain. He buys these items from stunt director Joey Ziegler (Edward Binns) who has a neat operation going on using stuntmen to get them from Yucatan. Marv Ellman (Anthony Costello) flies them into the US and drops them off in Florida to be picked up by Tom Iverson and Paula.

All is fine until Tom's stepdaughter Dilly (Melanie Griffith) leaves her mother, Arleen (Janet Ward), to go live with him. This upsets Nick as a horny teenager might ruin the deal they have going on. Therefore, he makes Arleen hire Harry Moseby to fetch her back. Arleen needs to have Dilly back to get her monthly alimony.

Harry finds Dilly in Florida in no time. Things go wrong when Marv has an accident and dies while transporting an artifact. During a dive, Dilly finds the plane and recognizes Marv. Tom (John Crawford) and Paula (Jennifer Warren) tell Harry they'll call the coast guard, but don't for obvious reasons. Harry takes Dilly back to LA.

Dilly tells her friends Quentin (James Woods) and Joey that the corpse she saw during the dive was Marv's. She's a dangerous witness to Joey, who gets her killed during a stunt.

Quentin smells something fishy and goes to Florida to investigate. Tom kills him.

Harry goes to Florida to investigate too, beats Tom senseless and discovers half this plot from Paula. He makes Paula take him out on a boat ride to the submerged plane. While Paula is diving to retrieve the artifact, Joey shows up flying a plane and kills Paula, then tries to kill the boat owner, Tom. It got too dangerous for Joey - he wants to get rid of all his team. He doesn't know it's Harry on the boat instead of Tom. As his plane is sinking he kind of apologizes to Harry. Then again, since Joey killed Dilly, I don't think he'd have any problems offing Harry too.

Harry is left alone, on a boat that's going round in circles and is angry with himself for not seeing this plot sooner. As Harry had said about that chess player, "He didn't see it. He played something else and he lost. He must have regretted it every day of his life. I know I would have." If he is rescued, he'll regret this case for the rest of his life...