Seldom revisited but never forgotten, Night Moves has enjoyed a slow appreciation of its critical market share over the course of forty years. Penn made one more feature - the similarly maligned revisionist western The Missouri Breaks (1976) - before retreating for a time to theatre. Nine days after Night Moves opened across the nation, Steven Spielberg's Jaws (1975) premiered at the head of a $2 million publicity blitz. Audiences and the majority of the major critics were apathetic to the plight of a private investigator who is unable to solve his big case because he is handicapped by his inability to see his own life with honesty. The filmmaker infused elements of his own life into the Night Moves script and his feelings of failure within the Hollywood community. Lost in the shuffle of Byzantine plot mechanics, sundry deceptions, twists, and double crosses was Penn's ruminations on identity and the guttering of American self-respect. until 1975, Night Moves had the misfortune to follow Roman Polanski's Chinatown (1973), Robert Altman's The Long Goodbye (1973), and Francis Ford Coppola's The Conversation (1974) into cinemas it emerged during a glut of so-called "neo-noirs" (among these, Dick Richards' Farewell, My Lovely, Stuart Rosenberg's The Drowning Pool, Robert Benton's The Late Show, Michael Winner's The Big Sleep, and Walter Hill's The Driver) films that recalled the postwar noir thrillers but with a contemporary edge. Shot in 1973 on the tail of a writer's strike and unreleased by Warner Bros.
#Night moves film professional
(In the interim, he helmed a segment of the 1973 Olympics documentary, Visions of Eight, filmed in the aftermath of the massacre of Israeli athletes by Arab terrorists during the 1972 summer games in Munich.) Night Moves represented a departure from his earlier focus on lawbreakers - the folk heroes of the Left-Handed Gun (1958) and Bonnie & Clyde, the convict-on-the-run in The Chase (1966), the Turkey Day litterer of Alice's Restaurant (1969) - and focused instead on a tired Los Angeles PI (Gene Hackman) juggling professional and personal mysteries. Penn had absented himself from narrative filmmaking (in truth, from creative endeavors of any stripe) for several years, hot off the success of Bonnie & Clyde (1967) and Little Big Man (1970). Sharp's script had been named as a coy reference to the Universal Pictures executive building, known in the industry as The Black Tower in reworking Sharp's original scenario, a mystery set between the strangely complementary milieux of movie-making and artifact smuggling, was to emphasize a telling bit of business in the script about chess playing and the inability (or disability) of its detective hero in seeing the move he should have made. One of the first things that Arthur Penn did when he inherited the Alan Sharp script The Dark Tower from the director-producer team of Sydney Pollack and Mark Rydell was to change the title to Night Moves (1975).
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