Gene Hackman in Night Moves (1975): Winner Lose All

Unjustifiably forgotten today, Arthur Penn's 1975 Night Moves stars Gene Hackman as Harry Moseby, a former football hero who now tries to cut it as a private detective, and one obsessed with chess at that. Sporting one of the finer non-Burt Reynolds mustaches of '70s cinema, Hackman is at his everyman best, and is as good here as he is in The French Connection or The Conversation or, hell, Superman. Night Moves may not have the Polanski/Towne/Nicholson cachet of Chinatown, the street hassle energy of Mean Streets, or the comic genre revisionism of Robert Altman's The Long Goodbye, but it's still one of the great crime/neo-noir movies of the decade. It's also part of a loose group of films of the time that were redefining and deconstructing the private eye heroisms of the 1940s that movie audiences by then had grown up with.

I wish I could recall how Night Moves ended up in my Netflix queue. I'd read Robert Kolker's seminal work of film criticism, A Cinema of Loneliness, but too long before to recall its inclusion. Regardless, one Friday night it was me, a bottle of my beloved Evan Williams green label, and the DVD. On first viewing it leapt to the top of my list of favorite '70s movies, or just favorite movies. Later that night I ended up at an impromptu late-night gathering at a friend's house, still clutching my bottle but sharing it now, rhapsodizing at length about this amazing movie no one had heard of. My friends are, thankfully, a tolerant bunch.

Night Moves is well aware of its crime movie pedigree, and mines similar territory as literary forebears Ross MacDonald and John D. MacDonald, respectively, with a convoluted plotline that stretches from LA to the Florida Keys. As the guy sleeping with Harry's wife says to him, "Come on, Harry, take a swing at me, like Sam Spade would!" Could anyone imagine Bogart's woman cheating on him like Harry's wife does? No way. It's tough being a PI in the modern world, everyone knows your playbook from old movies and dime-store paperbacks. Maybe that's where you get your moves yourself, huh, Harry? There, and that chess book whose plays you can't quite master.

Screenwriter Alan Sharp filled Night Moves with the kinds of bitter, revelatory bits of dialogue that seem snappy and off-the-cuff but actually reveal all too much about a character's mindset. After finding his wife cheating on him, Harry comes home and slumps in front of a TV watching a football game. When his wife Ellen (Susan Clark) comes in not knowing that he knows, she innocently asks, "Who's winning?" "Nobody," Harry tells her, "One side's just losing slower than the other." Later when they fight, Harry angrily throws his glass into the sink, then turns on the garbage disposal which grinds up the shards, making a horrible noise. "Will you turn that off?! I can't hear myself think!" she yells. "Lucky you," Harry deadpans.

The basics: Arlene Grastner (Janet Ward) hires Harry to track down her daughter Delly (Melanie Griffith, barely of age) and bring her back home. A faded, aging, drunken former B-movie star jealous of her daughter's power over men, Arlene seems put out not so much by Harry's fee but by his rejection of her advances. After a sojourn in the film-making world with old stuntmen friends of Arlene's, looking for clues, eventually Harry heads down to the Florida Keys. Tom Iverson (John Crawford), Arlene's ex-husband and Delly's stepfather, runs a boat charter there; Harry suspects - correctly - that's where Delly is. There, he also finds Paula, Iverson's lady friend (the too-little-seen '70s actress Jennifer Warren) whose sun-worn face and ivory teeth are warm and inviting, giving Harry another reason stick around Florida. "Down here I'm considered a good-looking chick," she tells him. The family dynamics, however, are screwed up indeed.

Harry spies Paula through the porch screen as she doffs her hat and her golden hair spills out unexpectedly and they exchange a flirtatious glance. But then Iverson returns home from his boat a moment later and Delly and Iverson's playful greeting hints at an inappropriate relationship; this hint is then confirmed when Paula takes a quick gulp of whiskey. Griffith is young and nubile and believable enough to sway men twice, three times her age to her bidding ("God, there oughta be a law," Iverson says. "Actually, there is," Harry replies drily). It's all laid out; Harry's question of "Are you with Tom?" is rendered moot.

When Harry shows Paula some historic chess moves that night, we get to the heart of the movie: three moves by a black knight which put the opponent in checkmate. "It's a beauty," Paula says. Harry continues, "But he didn't see it. He played something else and he lost. I bet he regretted it for the rest of his life. I know I would have. As a matter of fact I do regret it, and I wasn't even born yet." "That's no excuse," Paula says suddenly. O pun, metaphor, and foreshadowing, how you do go on.

Night Moves is, interestingly enough, more about Harry's efforts to know, to understand, to impress himself with this sleuthing skills - years earlier he had found his father who'd abandoned him as a kid; we're led to believe that's what got his career started - than it is about the intricacies of plot mechanics. "Do you ask because you wanna know, or is it just something you think a detective should do?" Paula snaps at Harry as she drives Iverson's boat out for a little night-swimming with Delly in tow. Harry isn't even sure. With his salvageable marriage crumbling around him, Harry continues to chase after clues to a case he thinks he can comprehend.

Night Moves is about perception. Harry perceives everything askance, mediated, even obscured, through screens or windows or water, and never quite grasps what is right in front of him. The only thing he does grasp at first sight, his wife's infidelity, he does little about. It's about questions, even if the asking is the most important part, not the answers. "Where were you when Kennedy was shot?" Paula asks Moseby as they parry before making love. "Which Kennedy?" is his reply. And his full answer says a lot; when JFK was shot he was still playing football but by the time RFK is dead he is a private eye uncovering people's sordid affairs. We can infer all we need on what happened in the interim. Then Harry asks her why she asked that particular question, and her motivation is perfect: "It's a question everyone knows the answer to."

There's something indefinable about Night Moves, something in Hackman's Harry that haunts, lingers, unsettles. Is it the movie's fatalistic tone? There's a sense that Harry is failing, spinning his wheels, caught between LA and the Florida Keys, between his wife, Delly, and Paula, between the macho stunt men he befriends who have things to hide, and the crippled man with whom his wife cuckolds him. Harry's playing some other move the whole time; he seems not to know when to listen. A major question of identity could have been answered when Delly, after being returned home, leaves him a message on his (ancient, enormous) answering machine, but he snaps it off when Ellen arrives at his office, looking for forgiveness. An all-important bit of information is missed by the private eye as he considers giving up the job. O irony, will you never end?

Night Moves ends terrifically, on high notes of violence, revelation, doubt, and loss. Before Paula dives to find the treasures that are the movie's MacGuffin, Harry takes her goggles, swipes them in the ocean to clear them, and hands them back to her: he has now poisoned her vision too, and she barely sees what's coming when it finally does. I can only imagine the audience's trudge back up the aisle of the theater after such an ending, as the credits roll to Michael Small's tinkly, noir-ish score. Small's scoring was integral to a handful of great '70s thriller flicks: Klute, The Parallax View, Stepford Wives, Marathon Man, The China Syndrome. Woah. That's some résumé.

Hackman with director Penn on location

So, where did Harry Moseby - or, as it says on his card, Moseby Confidential ("At least it doesn't have an eye printed on it" he tells a young James Woods) - go wrong? How did he wind up there at movie's end, blinded and bloodied by his point of view, going around in circles? Well, the way the plot works out, he's also going back to the beginning of the movie; as Ellen says when he's boarding a plane to Florida for the second time: "If you don't leave, you can't come back." I still wonder if he ever did. Perhaps he should've had that eye printed on his card after all.

Martin Scorsese's Taxi Driver (1976): I Can't Pretend and I Know I'm Alone

Some thoughtful movie fans see American personhood summed up in characters like Rocky Balboa, Atticus Finch, George Bailey, Forrest Gump, Cool Hand Luke, and even Vito Corleone or Tony Montana. But I see much of it in Travis Bickle, the wounded Vietnam vet and desperate loner of Taxi Driver (1976), slowly going psychotically mad in the (then-) ruined urban landscape of New York City. It is my contention that this film, with its noxious stew of stalker/vigilante fantasy, misguided heroism, a war-wounded mind, racism, sexism, urban decay, gun fetishism, and misplaced media attention, is the greatest American film since its release in 1976. Really. I cannot put it any other way. It's an all-too-prescient depiction of a personality disorder that would come to haunt our public life in the following decades: men broken who refuse to mend. Their name is legion and I need not mention them here. Gaze into the abyss, a man adrift and alone:

It's well-known film lore now that Paul Schrader wrote this screenplay in a matter of weeks after a bout of homelessness, drinking while walking the streets and sleeping in his car. "It leapt out of me like an animal," he would say later. His choice of a taxi cab to symbolize loneliness while in the midst of humanity was truly inspired. The primal power of the script is undeniable, even though it was restructured in the final edit.

Director Martin Scorsese and cinematographer Michael Chapman use an astonishing expressionistic style to bring Schrader's words alive. For all its American-ness, this is a movie filled with foreign influences: informed fans will sense a melange of Godard, Bresson, and Dreyer in its execution; those not so inclined will still see something of power and conviction, pain and obsession. Virtually every shot includes Travis Bickle (Robert DeNiro), usually alone in the frame, as everything around him contributes to his despair. He is as responsible for his condition as he is trapped by it.

Travis scribbles in his journal with a grade-school pencil (cf. Bresson's Diary of a Country Priest) but it's not only Travis's voice-over narration that clue us in; it's snatches of dialogue, of song lyrics, the inventive camerawork, and Bernard Herrmann's glorious and final jazz-horror score which reveal the man's sickest, most feverish thoughts. "I got some bad ideas in my head," he tells fellow cabbie Wizard (Peter Boyle), and Scorsese relentlessly illustrates them on-screen. I find this strange formality one of Taxi Driver's most fascinating aspects, which I'll focus on here rather than rehashing the plot or performances.

Travis's famous "morbid self-attention" does not result in a sense of self-awareness; it shows a serious lack of one. Those journal entries serve as an ironic counterpoint to his daily life alone in his filthy room (in the screenplay, when Travis leaves his place for the final time, we see it is in a condemned building). Two moments are standouts:

"Here is a man who stood up. Here is..."

"You're only... as healthy... as... you... feel."

In other instances, dialogue by other characters function as Travis's interior monologue. While the camera focuses on Travis, characters continue talking but we are not really hearing them; it's as if we're inside Travis's head, hearing his very thoughts. First is Wizard relating another of his tall tales about taxi life, two gay men in a fight in his cab; the words are painfully accurate after his date with Betsy (Cybill Shepherd) fails spectacularly:

"They start arguing, they start yelling... you bitch, you whore..."

Fellow cabbie Charlie T's innocent comment about Travis's wad of cash (and all that money never buys Travis a ticket out of this cesspool) proves an ominous warning. He also jokingly calls Travis "Killer." Soon all will be literalized:

"My man is loaded, loaded."

The seething black man screaming as he storms down the street while Travis stalks underage hooker Iris (Jodie Foster) delves further into Travis's crumbling mind in the most simplistic terms:

"When I get my hands on that bitch I'm gonna kill her..."

And of course the porn soundtrack Travis can't seem to live without, as a voracious actress expresses her admiration for a large "weapon":

"Look at the size of that... oh yeah... it looks so good..."

Even non-essential flirty banter has its place; witness Tom (Albert Brooks) and Betsy at work in Senator Palantine's headquarters. These scenes are not in Schrader's original screenplay, but they are still integral to the film. Are we to take their words at face value, or are they a horrifying prophetic foreshadowing?

"If you had these three fingers missing on this hand, and that hand missing on that hand..."

Horrifying prophetic foreshadowing.

In perhaps the film's most revealing and discomforting sequence (prior to the climax of course), director Scorsese himself, looking like an upstanding Manson, glowers maniacally in the backseat of Travis's cab. The living, breathing embodiment of the ugliest thoughts in Bickle's head, he rattles off his intent: to kill his wife--with a .44 Magnum, of course--who's sleeping with a black man. Except he relays this in some of the most repulsively sexist and racist comments that have ever been uttered in a mainstream picture. Travis says nothing, but the glare in his eyes says everything. The passenger exists both as a manifestation of Travis's darkest fears and as an element in the outside world that Travis focuses on solely.

"And I'm gonna kill her with that gun."

The previous scene showed us Travis condemning Betsy to hell for rejecting him; in the very next sequence, as Travis walks out of the Belmore Cafeteria, an all-night cabbie haunt, he stops and glares at a young black man, who glowers back. When Travis meets up with gun salesman Easy Andy, the first thing he asks is, "You got a .44 Magnum?" All the pieces are falling into place.

"Goddamn, man... Goddamn..."

Everyone focuses on the "You talkin' to me?" scene, beloved of dude-movie fans everywhere, but the really effective scenes are simply Travis alone in his room, alone with his fears, his fantasies, and his guns. Scorsese, always ready with an appropriate rock song to illustrate his characters' internal conflicts and desires, nails Travis's with Jackson Browne's "Late for the Sky." Ostensibly a plaintive, earnest tune about a broken relationship, here it becomes an elegy for a forgotten man.

"How long have I been drifting alone through the night?"

Lastly: throughout the film Scorsese intersperses dramatic overhead and high-angle shots, almost haphazardly. It's first seen in the opening when Travis is being interviewed for the cab driver job. We see it next when he futilely hits on the ticket-taker girl at the porno theater. Then, when Travis boldly confronts Betsy and asks for a date ("I see all this and it means nothing"). And lastly, ultimately, most startling of all, the long tracking shot from the ceiling in Iris's bedroom, now the scene of slaughter. These shots have predicted the film's climax and reach their apotheosis in a gory tabloid of pulp genius.

Whew. This was a tough post to write. Surely I am not the only one for whom revisiting this classic is an emotionally exhausting experience, painful but rewarding. Travis Bickle is a sort of Hamlet character, in which a myriad of interpretations of his behavior and actions seem to say much but in the end do no justice. "He seems to have wandered in from a land where it is always cold," Schrader describes him in the screenplay's opening passages, "a country where the inhabitants seldom speak." Better to watch safely, then, at a distance, comfortable in the theater or at home. But then that is something men like this would never allow us to do.

"On every street corner there's a nobody who dreams of being somebody..."

Schrader, Scorsese, & DeNiro share big laughs on location

Albert Brooks's Real Life (1979): Burning Down the House

It's satisfyingly ironic that the first reality show was broadcast on PBS, that most esteemed bastion of social conscience and good taste, in 1973. An American Family showcased the Loud family and their daily lives in a 12-hour miniseries for the delectation of a record-setting millions of viewers. Interestingly, son Lance was perhaps the first openly gay person on television. You don't hear much if anything about this groundbreaking bit of cultural flotsam any longer (although I had read about Lance Loud's association with the Warhol entourage), nor, I daresay, the 1979 directorial debut of comedian Albert Brooks, Real Life, which takes An American Family as its jumping off point. I've enjoyed Brooks's Modern Romance (1981) and especially Mother (1996), and who can forget his portrayal of Tom, the only normal person in Taxi Driver?

In Real Life, Brooks plays "himself," an egotistical, shallow (as he gleefully admits), slightly deluded Hollywood filmmaker with delusions of grandeur. He flatters the regular folks of Phoenix in a pre-credit news conference by telling them that the most dramatic, the funniest, and the most suspenseful things are occurring "in my backyard and yours." So what better idea than to make a movie of a regular family, doing regular things, following them in their daily lives for a year, which yet somehow are more amazing and exciting than the latest hit film? Real Life dryly skewers not, as one might think, the hapless family who would allow cameras into its living room and, ostensibly, its backyard, but the media hucksters who thrive on such absurdity in the name of "reality."

Which family offers themselves up for cinematic preservation? The Yeagers. The always-welcome Charles Grodin plays the veterinarian father who tries to corral his family into presenting its good side, but on the very night, his wife (Frances Lee McCain) has terrible menstrual cramps. The horror! Another funny-awkward bit is when their young teenage daughter, pretending for the cameras to be a famous movie star, innocently flirts with her father: "Kiss me as I've never been kissed before!" she swoons. Grodin is always a pleasure to watch in these moments, here he squirms and tries to laugh off her mugging.

And when he fatally botches an emergency surgery on a racehorse, on camera, Yeager begs to speak with Brooks, who narrates, "He asked to see me alone. Of course I obliged." Beat. Cut to, of course, the two sitting down in front of the camera.

Ultimately we realize that the real drama is not the Yeager family, but the manipulations of Brooks as he tries to cajole everyone around him - psychiatrists, producers, journalists, etc. - to go along with him on his attempt to present "real life." A black psychology professor Brooks hired as a consultant mocks his white liberal guilt, and quits the production staff to write a blistering account of the filming. Brooks dismisses it as a book sold to "those publishers who missed out on Watergate." It gets worse from there for everyone involved.

Checking the credits, should I have been surprised to see Harry Shearer as co-writer? No. Perhaps the best bits have to do with the Ettinauer 2-26XL, the "most versatile camera ever made," and the sight gags, with Shearer as cameraman, are priceless. Who could possibly live a real life with this following them around?

One doesn't have to be familiar with An American Family to get this movie, but the fact is Real Life exists as a comment on a very specific event. It doesn't come close, or even necessarily desire to, the blistering attack on television that is Network (1976), still probably the best go-to film when talking about the predictive abilities of the medium. This early mockumentary, seen today, plays a little too gently to be of classic status. Some of the one-liners Brooks get off are sub-Woody Allen, but his rant near the end of the film, as he struggles to salvage the ending of this work (should he end it like Star Wars? Maybe like Jaws!), is spot-on. And its glimpse into the future of television is uncanny. Anyone interested in Brooks, the evolution of mockumentaries, or a nice glimpse into middle-class '70s life, would do well to check out Real Life .