Eye of Fashion

By RICHARD SCHICKEL

NIGHT MOVES

Directed by ARTHUR PENN Screenplay by ALAN SHARP

Night Moves suffers from the fact that it obviously derives from a body of work--Ross Macdonald's--that is currently held in high critical and popular esteem. But this movie ultimately pleases, in a modest way, because it overcomes its less than original origins. In its final hour, it turns first into a genuinely interesting puzzle, then into an exciting and suspenseful action film.

Harry Moseby (Gene Hackman) is almost indistinguishable from Novelist Macdonald's Lew Archer. Both are wearily honest Los Angeles private eyes, suffering the aftereffects of maimed childhoods but determined to remain loners in a corporate society. Archer's marriage, of course, went on the rocks before we met him, but Harry's is surely heading in that direction. Harry believes his wife (Susan Clark) may be fooling around. He shadows her like a suspect, confronts her like a criminal, and they make an uneasy peace. The main case Harry takes up, however, could have come straight from Archer's files: a troubled youngster searching for parental love.

Fatal Accident. The adolescent here is a runaway heiress (Melanie Griffith, daughter of Actress Tippi Hedren) whose obviously devious mother hires the shamus to find her. The search introduces him to plenty of colorful company, notably a movie stunt man, before he finds the girl holed up with a shabby stepfather and his mistress (Jennifer Warren) on the Florida Keys, where they manage a dubious-looking sea and air charter service. A traumatizing accident--or is it murder?--shocks the girl into docility and a return home where, doing extra work in a movie, she herself suffers a fatal accident--or is it murder?

Sure it is, and back Moseby goes to Florida for a brutal confrontation with what amounts to a convention of practically every character actor he has up to now encountered in the movie, all of whom have been engaged in an elaborate plot to smuggle hot pre-Columbian art into the U.S. The kid, of course, was killed because she knew too much, and Moseby very nearly catches it when he achieves the same state of knowledgeability. His evasion of this fate, while lying wounded on the deck of a fishing boat, under attack from a maniacally persistent baddie possessed of a reckless skill for turning an airplane into a murder weapon, compares very favorably with the final moments of Jaws for sheer terror.

The film offers other pleasures as well. Hackman, the archetype of contemporary ordinariness, is as usual superb in the central role.

Perplexed, dogged, distracted from the main issues in the case by everything from the economy to the mysteries of feminine psychology, he is an enormously appealing Everyman under pressure. Jennifer Warren, playing an updated version of the old Lauren Bacall character, at once smart-mouthed and sensual, is both skillful and beautiful.

It is curious to find a director with Arthur Perm's taste for the offbeat involved in a project that is, bottom line, just another private-eye flick. But under the pressure of his talent and ambition, Night Moves becomes more entertaining and more interesting than it basically has any right to be.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so viewer discretion is required.