Die heiße Spur (1975)

Die heiße Spur: Directed by Arthur Penn. With Gene Hackman, Jennifer Warren, Edward Binns, Harris Yulin. Los Angeles private investigator Harry Moseby is hired by a client to find her runaway teenage daughter. Moseby tracks the daughter down, only to stumble upon something much more intriguing and sinister.

“Night Moves (1975)u003cbr/u003eu003cbr/u003eAn odd convolution of 1940s film noir and 1970s New Hollywood. The hero is a kind of watered down Bogart—not as romanticized, and with less exaggerated one-liners (which film noir lovers will miss but which those who like realism will appreciate). Gene Hackman is terrific, and he plays Harry Moseby, a down and out ex-football player with a drained candor that makes him pathetic as much as likable. He ends up mixed up in a Dashiell Hammett kind of plot, for sure, looking for the daughter of a rich woman and then getting way over his head.u003cbr/u003eu003cbr/u003eThe artifacts of New Hollywood liberation are plain to see: nudity (female only) and a kind of sexed up background even when the plot is going somewhere else. This was for the sake of an audience still astonished that the movies could do such things (they couldnu0026#39;t before 1967) and itu0026#39;s still kind of raw and edgy in a lasting way. It also feels dated, too, making you wonder if it was really so sexually liberated back then.u003cbr/u003eu003cbr/u003eThe trail for this daughter takes us to the Florida Keys and out into the ocean. There are mysterious motives everywhere, and itu0026#39;s only Moseby we trust. Completely. And we even feel him starting to get a grounding for his drifting self amidst these miscellaneous people. And we see a kind of generosity that is based on this selfish need to do something right, and all its conflicting meanings. So eventually the movie is less about who killed who for this or that reason, and more about this man and his quest for clarity.u003cbr/u003eu003cbr/u003eBut clarity has a cost, and the movie will take several surprising turns. Not all of the plot is supported very well. We are led along at times, and frankly told things that might have been better revealed through the plot. Itu0026#39;s not a perfectly nuanced drama in this way. These are nitpicks, for sure, because the larger feeling takes over and is commanding. And thatu0026#39;s the lasting reputation of the film, that it pulls off this kind of modernized noir world with originality.u003cbr/u003eu003cbr/u003eThe director is Arthur Penn, whou0026#39;s great u0026quot;Bonnie and Clydeu0026quot; kicked off the shift into New Hollywood sensibility. (Beatty is always given too much credit for that filmu0026#39;s audacity because he starred and funded it, but the film was Pennu0026#39;s at heart.) This might be called the last of Pennu0026#39;s great cycle from the period, and if not the equal to his 1967 breakthrough, it is in many ways more delicately felt and mature. And so in a way more watchable today a second or third time. Hackman is the one great actor here, however, and if thereu0026#39;s a key problem with u0026quot;Night Moves,u0026quot; itu0026#39;s that he almost but not quite supports the film alone. The three or four secondary characters are all of them thin, or contrived to be types, and so it falters.u003cbr/u003eu003cbr/u003eSee it anyway. It surprised me the way u0026quot;Point Blanku0026quot; from this era did. Excellent.”