geezer cinema: night moves (arthur penn, 1975)

This is the first bonus film I have watched in "My Letterboxd Season Challenge 2024-25", a "33-week-long community challenge" where "you must watch one previously unseen film that fits the criteria of the theme for the week." This is the 10th annual challenge, and my sixth time participating (previous years can be found at "2019-20", "2020-21", "2021-22", "2022-23", and 2023-24). Bonus Week 1 is called "Roger Ebert's Great Movies Week":

The first bonus entry for this year's challenge is the very first theme from the very first Letterboxd Season Challenge! In fact Roger Ebert's Great Movies made it as a theme on the first five LSCs until previous host Benjamin Milot retired it, with one last time as a bonus theme in LSC 5. We're resurrecting the theme again for the 10th anniversary!

This bonus challenge is to watch one of Roger Ebert's Great Movies!

This may be a cheat. I think I saw this many years ago, but since I can't remember anything about it, I figure it's OK to treat it as "unseen" for the Challenge.

Roger Ebert wrote of Gene Hackman's Harry Moseby in Night Moves:

There is a profound disconnect between his investigation and what is really happening, and essentially the movie shows him acting like a private eye while the case unfolds independently in front of him.... What [Hackman] brings to “Night Moves” is crucial; he must be absolutely sure of his identity as a free-lance gumshoe, even while all of his craft is useless and all of his hunches are based on ignorance of the big picture.

The typical old-school private eye is a bit smarter than everyone else. It's the noir "hero" that gets it all wrong, which is how Night Moves is more neo-noir than private eye movie. It's a bit like Altman/Gould's The Long Goodbye, if not as good. The film takes its time getting to the core mystery ... it's almost a character study at first, and while the acting is good and the characters are interesting, I was getting a bit impatient. When the mystery plot begins to unfold, things pick up, but since Harry Moseby is always unknowingly a step behind, the forward momentum is hesitant at best. Also in the Raymond Chandler tradition, once everything is played out, it's not entirely clear who has done what to whom for what reason, if that kind of thing matters to you.

Night Moves was the first pairing of Arthur Penn and Gene Hackman since Bonnie and Clyde. Crucially, editor Dede Allen is also present, although Stephen A. Rotter is listed as co-editor. I found the film to be more interesting in the post-mortem than in the actual watching ... there are some intriguing things going on with genre here that make for good discussion, but I wanted more from the movie itself.