Three great modern films noirs are newly out or about to come out on DVD. I should put that fifth word in quotation marks because I'm violating my own stricture against calling anything post-"Kiss Me Deadly" (1955) and "Touch of Evil" (1958) a film noir. Still, these postnoirs or throwback noirs have worthy pedigrees, and an aesthetic and spiritual bite of their own that commands respect.
"Point Blank" got past me in 1967; I went to it grudgingly (also, as it happened, drunk) at a second-run theater and saw only a formulaic gangster story with Lee Marvin, whose career seemed to be moving into Oscar-curse mode. I later noticed that some discerning critics in the little magazines were very excited about the picture, and eventually I booked it into the arthouse I was helping to run at the time, in order to have a proper (sober) look at it. Oh. I now reckon "Point Blank" to be the best film of a year that also included "Bonnie and Clyde," "The Graduate" and "El Dorado."
Marvin plays a crook named Walker - just Walker - who, on a heist with his wife and best friend, gets double-crossed, shot and left for dead in a cell at the disused prison on Alcatraz. He drags himself up into the light, swims toward the mainland and, after an indeterminate interval, begins to disassemble the criminal structure of which his old pal (the late John Vernon) has become a part. Five years after "Point Blank," "The Godfather" was credited with discovering a resemblance between organized crime and modern corporate business - something "Point Blank" had already noted with considerably more pungency, satiric brio and stylistic flair.
This was director John Boorman's second feature film, and (like Mike Nichols' sophomore effort that year, "The Graduate") it was strongly influenced by the breakthrough artistry of the decade's adventurous European filmmakers - in particular, Alain Resnais's exploration of time, memory and alternative realities in "Last Year at Marienbad" and "Hiroshima, Mon Amour." Some scenes or shots are clearly what-ifs rather than this-is-what-happened-next. And "next" is often in doubt. As for Walker, he may be an avenging ghost. After a signatory montage of him Walking down some endless, barren corridor, Boorman begins scene after scene with his hero simply being there where he needs to be for the next development to take place, rather than transiting any known space.
Boorman himself was a European film artist, after all, and "Point Blank" is one of those movies in which the way the American scene, the American city, American life, become sharper and more resonant for being seen anew by an alien eye. It ushered the gangster picture into the postmodern era, and into a glass-and-steel environment where life, or nonlife, now had to go on.
Asked to put together an American-cinema-in-the-'70s sidebar for the 2002 Seattle International Film Festival, I immediately thought - before "Chinatown," before "Nashville," before "Days of Heaven" - of Arthur Penn's "Night Moves." Not that "Night Moves" was better than those great movies, but no other film sums up the decade as piercingly for me, in mood, in narrative tone, in a sense of the pieces coming unstuck and reassembling themselves in a pattern no one can quite get a handle on.
I didn't get to show "Night Moves" in the festival; there was no print. The movie had dropped off the map, and out of the studio archives as well. This was shocking, but not entirely surprising. Most critics in 1975 had judged it a misfire, a notable disappointment given the august standing of its director, star Gene Hackman and that most intriguing of '70s screenwriters, Alan Sharp ("Ulzana's Raid," "The Hired Hand," "The Last Run"). I sort of agreed, yet the film stayed with me and in subsequent viewings kept building in suggestiveness and power.
The title is a pun, in several ways. "Night moves" suggests both things done under the cover of darkness and things dimly perceived. But it's also "knight moves" because the main character, a private detective named Harry Moseby, obsessively replays a classic chess match in which a master of the game had a winning move available to him, and missed it. "Knight moves" further invokes the notion of the private eye as the modern knight-errant lending his lance to bringing justice and clarity to the dark land - and yeah, the people who made this movie brought that kind of self-glossing awareness to the enterprise.
I still think Harry Moseby is Gene Hackman's finest role. Harry has a beautiful but independent wife (Susan Clark) who's cheating on him with a crippled guy who takes her to foreign movies; and he has a case, involving a no-longer-glamorous Hollywood actress' runaway daughter (Melanie Griffith), that is at once too simple and too byzantine to solve. On every front, Harry-a guy's guy who sneers at Rohmer movies ("like watching paint dry") yet is embarrassed and plagued by what can only be called his sensitivity - becomes increasingly desperate to figure out what's what.
The ambiguities at large in "Night Moves," and certain stylistic details, hark back to the unsolvable mysteries of Michelangelo Antonioni's "L'avventura" and "Blowup." Penn's film is an honorable addition to that exemplarily modern tradition. It also features strong character work by Jennifer Warren and the young James Woods, and a music score by Michael Small, who was lending his melancholy tones to Alan Pakula's greatest films around the same time. I am delighted to see "Night Moves" rising to the surface anew, thanks to DVD.
"Hustle" (also 1975) is the one movie among these three that I didn't underestimate the first time around. Robert Aldrich directed with the same fierce, sardonic attack he brought to, well, "Attack!" and "Kiss Me Deadly" 20 years earlier. The same Establishment-baiting social anger, the same bold, hard-edged moviemaking inform this look into the soul of Los Angeles by way of a murder investigation that may not, in fact, have a murder at its core.
Even as I named it among the best films of a pretty good year, "Hustle" was shrugged off by most reviewers and ignored by the public. It was, after all, a Burt Reynolds movie with a dumb-Burt-Reynolds-movie kinda title. Although Reynolds wasn't equal to the demands of his role - an LAPD detective with a classy-courtesan girlfriend (Catherine Deneuve) and a nostalgia for Bogart - he made an honorable try; and he's abetted by an excellent cast including Paul Winfield, Ben Johnson, Eileen Brennan and Ernest Borgnine. Above all, there's the late Eddie Albert as a high-powered lawyer whose lethal politesse could freeze your marrow.[[In-content Ad]]
