Night Moves (1975)

 ☆ ☆ ☆ ½

Night Moves (1975) – A. Penn

Gene Hackman is pretty soulful as private eye Harry Moseby who has problems of his own (his wife is cheating on him) that may cloud his judgment as he works on what should be a perfunctory missing daughter case. The daughter in question turns out to be a very young Melanie Griffith who has fled to the Florida Keys to escape her washed-up actress mother in Hollywood, as well as ex-boyfriend mechanic James Woods and recent fling stuntman Marv. She is shacked up with her stepfather (and his girlfriend Jennifer Warren). So Harry flies down there to bring her back. Initially, she doesn’t want to return but after they discover a downed plane underwater with a corpse in it, suddenly she is ready to go back. Harry isn’t quite satisfied to let the case drop at this point, but things aren’t very clear. He suspects Woods but is he missing the big picture? The title refers to a famous chess game where a grandmaster made a spectacular blunder when he could have won – this may also be Harry’s fate.  Neo-noir but loose and often seemingly directionless (probably by design) but it doesn’t rise to the level of something like The Long Goodbye (1973), which could be the difference between an Altman and a Penn, I guess.