Night Moves (1975)

          Complementing outright throwbacks such as Chinatown (1974), several ’70s thrillers updated classic film-noir style with modern characters, settings, and themes. Arthur Penn’s Night Moves is among the best of these current-day noirs, featuring a small-time detective who has seen too much misery to muster any real hope for the human species. Nonetheless, like all the best noir heroes, he strives to do something good as a way of compensating for all the bad in the world, and thus ironically dooms not only himself but also the very people he’s trying to protect. Penn, whose erratic feature career peaked with a run of counterculture-themed pictures spanning from Bonnie and Clyde(1967) to this film, was at his best orchestrating subtle interactions between complicated characters, and he does a terrific job in Night Moves of meshing bitter tonalities.

          A seething Gene Hackman stars as low-rent L.A. investigator Harry Moseby. An amiable idealist whose principles alienate him from the compromisers who surround him, Harry is married to Ellen (Susan Clark), who wants him to shutter his one-man agency and work for a big firm. Preferring to steer his own course, Harry focuses on his next case, which involves tracking down teen runaway Delly (Melanie Griffith), the daughter of a blowsy widow (Janet Ward) who, a lifetime ago, was a promiscuous Hollywood starlet. During downtime between investigative chores, Harry discovers that Ellen is cheating on him, so he’s only too happy to follow a lead on Delly’s whereabouts to Florida, a continent away from his troubled marriage. In the sweaty Florida Keys, Harry finds Delly living with her lecherous stepfather, Tom (John Crawford), and his sexy companion, Paula (Jennifer Warren). Also part of the mix is Quentin (James Woods), a squirrelly friend of Delly’s who works as a mechanic for film-industry stuntmen.

          Alan Sharp’s provocative script features murky plotting but crisp character work, so even when the story is hard to follow, moment-to-moment engagement between people is interesting. And since the film is driven by Harry’s zigzag journey from naïveté to despair and then to a misguided sort of optimism, each time he encounters some tricky new piece of information, his relationship with someone changes. Though Hackman was never one to play for cheap sympathy, it’s heartbreaking to watch Harry cast about for someone who deserves his trust, only to be disappointed again and again.

          Every performance in the movie exists in the shadow of Hackman’s great work, but all of the actors hit the right notes, with Griffith’s adolescent petulance resonating strongly. Composer Michael Small and cinematographer Bruce Surtees contribute tremendously to the film’s shadowy mood, and Penn achieves one of his finest cinematic moments with the picture’s desolate finale. Night Moves gets a bit pretentious at times, but when the movie is really flying, it becomes a potent meditation on the challenge of finding sold moral footing during a confusing period in the evolution of the American identity.

Night Moves: GROOVY

The Outlaw Josey Wales (1976)

          With the possible exception of Dirty Harry (1971), the offbeat Western The Outlaw Josey Wales is Clint Eastwood’s best movie of the ’70s, and also one of the most textured films in his long career. Blending a sensitive approach to character with Eastwood’s signature meditations on violence—a unique combination that resulted from Eastwood’s fractious collaboration with co-screenwriter Philip Kaufman—the picture delivers the intense action fans expect from Eastwood Westerns, but also so much more. Based on a novel by Forrest Carter, the picture was written by Kaufman and Sonia Chernus, with Kaufman originally slated to direct. Alas, Eastwood, who was the film’s de facto executive producer (though not credited as such), got into a disagreement with Kaufman partway through filming and fired Kaufman, stepping into the director’s chair himself.

          Eastwood had already helmed four features, so he was well on his way to developing a recognizable style—deep shadows, long takes, quick-cut bursts of bloody violence. Yet while it’s possible to watch the film and make educated guesses about which bits remain from Kaufman’s tenure behind the camera, the blending of two sensibilities goes much deeper than that, since Kaufman wrote a script he intended to direct and Eastwood followed that script. In any event, fused authorship gives The Outlaw Josey Wales more tonal variety than one finds in Eastwood’s other ’70s Westerns, especially because so much screen time is devoted to presenting idiosyncratic supporting characters.

          As for the plot, it’s fairly simple. Josey Wales (Eastwood) is a Missouri farmer whose family is slaughtered by a group of Northern bandits during the Civil War. Joining the Confederate cause to seek revenge, Wales annihilates several enemies but falls into conflict with the insidious Captain Fletcher (John Vernon). Once the war ends, Wales becomes a fugitive, with Fletcher his sworn enemy. Wales embarks on a long journey through the South, inadvertently gathering a surrogate family of frontier stragglers while preparing for his inevitable confrontation with Fletcher.

          As in many Eastwood pictures—notably Unforgiven (1991), which can be seen as a successor to Josey Wales—this picture investigates the question of whether a man can preserve his soul after succumbing to bloodlust. Wales is a decent, hard-working man when we meet him, but tragedy turns him into a ruthless killer. Then, once he’s out on the frontier, protecting and being protected by a strange band of friends, he becomes something more than a vigilante; he’s a strange sort of gun-toting patriarch, struggling to claim high ground while mired in moral quicksand.

          Simply by dint of the nuanced script, Eastwood’s acting has a broader range of colors here than usual, and the way his performance is decorated with weird details—like spitting tobacco onto nearly every living thing that crosses his path—makes Wales as indelible an Eastwood characterization as Dirty Harry or the Man With No Name. Vernon makes a fine foil, a craven sort who’s bold when backed up by a militia but pathetic when standing alone, and reliable character actors including Matt Clark, Bill McKinney, Woodrow Parfrey, and John Quade populate the movie’s sweaty periphery. Yet it’s the members of Wales’ surrogate family who often command the most attention. Sondra Locke, appearing in the first of many films she did with Eastwood, lends fragile beauty that contrasts the ugliness of Wales’ world, while Chief Dan George is dry, funny, and wise as Lone Watie, an aging Cherokee Indian who joins Wales’ entourage.

          Holding the movie’s potentially disparate elements together is slick technical presentation, courtesy of cinematographer Bruce Surtees and composer Jerry Fielding (both frequent Eastwood collaborators) and others. From its unique spin on gunslinger mythology to its colorful use of vivid Western archetypes, The Outlaw Josey Wales feels consistently interesting, literary, and personal.

The Outlaw Josey Wales: RIGHT ON

Escape from Alcatraz (1979)

          The final collaboration between director Don Siegel and his superstar protégé, Clint Eastwood, Escape from Alcatraz is a smart thriller about exactly what the title suggests—the only known successful escape from the titular prison, a fortress-like structure built on a small island in the San Francisco Bay. For three decades, from 1933 to 1963, “The Rock” was considered one of the most secure federal prisons in the U.S., and the real-life jailbreak that inspired this movie occurred in 1962, just one year prior to the prison’s closure. (J. Campbell Bruce wrote a nonfiction book about the incident shortly afterward, and screenwriter Richard Tuggle adapted the book.) Although Eastwood and Siegel reportedly had a tense relationship on the project—it’s rumored that Eastwood directed much of the picture because his aging friend was losing his touch—the film is as smooth as anything either man made during this era.

          Siegel’s storied efficiency is visible in the minimalistic storytelling, while Eastwood’s penchant for gloomy lighting and leisurely pacing adds a meditative quality. It helps, tremendously, that the material plays to the strengths of both men. Portraying a career criminal obsessed with breaking out of an “escape-proof” prison, Eastwood seethes as only he can, forming a community of like-minded inmates while enduring the cruel machinations of a nameless warden (Patrick McGoohan). Siegel meticulously depicts every step along the would-be escapees’ dangerous path, from carving a secret tunnel to preparing for a brazen leap into the choppy waters surrounding the prison.

          Some of the story mechanics feel like standard prison-picture stuff, like the development of a sympathetic geezer (Roberts Blossom) whom we can sense from his first appearance will not breathe free air, but the use of stock characters suits the milieu. Similarly, loading the cast with generic character actors—Eastwood, McGoohan, and supporting players Danny Glover and Fred Ward notwithstanding—helps accentuate the idea of prison as an equalizing environment.

          More than anything, however, Escape from Alcatraz works as a mood piece, building ambience and tension as we, the viewers, become more and more invested in seeing the “heroes” succeed. (Regular Eastwood collaborators including composer Jerry Fielding and cinematographer Bruce Surtees contribute immeasurably to the film’s menacing quality.) Escape from Alcatraz may not be about much, beyond the usual pap about man’s inhumanity to man and the sweet nectar of freedom, but it’s an offbeat action picture in that many of the thrills stem from characters scheming in private; rather than building toward confrontations, it’s a movie about characters avoiding confrontations.

Escape from Alcatraz: GROOVY