Night Moves (1975)

Night Moves is a 1975 private eye thriller. Whether it qualifies as a neo-noir remains to be seen but that label has been affixed to it at times.

Harry Moseby (Gene Hackman) is a down-at-heel private eye. He’s not at the bottom of his profession but he’s a long way from the top. He gets by. He has a cute wife. He’s not what you would call a loser.

Or maybe it would be truer to say that he’s not a loser yet, but the potential is there.

He’s been hired by a faded middle-aged former starlet to find her missing teenaged daughter Delly (Melanie Griffith). Arlene Iverson (Janet Ward) was never more than a minor starlet. It’s clear that she was one of those Hollywood actresses who gave her best performances on the casting couch. She married a producer. More husbands followed.

Harry has troubles of his own. One of the disadvantages of being a private eye is that you notice things that you’d be better off not noticing and and you make connections you’d be better off not making. For example if your wife is having an affair you’re going to know about it. And Harry’s wife is definitely having an affair.

Harry is not at all happy about this. Harry is a guy who seems a bit on edge at the best of times. A bit inclined to fly off the handle.

Harry thinks he has a lead on the missing girl. She might be with her stepfather Tom Iverson (John Crawford) in Florida. He flies down to Florida. Tom has left the rat race. He does some charter boat and charter plane stuff. He’s really a glorified beach bum. He lives with his ex-hooker girlfriend Paula.

Delly is indeed there. She does not want to return to her mother whom she hates.

Delly looks like Miss Junior Femme Fatale 1975. She’s a nice girl but she’s wild and she’s far from innocent.

Then comes a plot twist right out of left field. Delly is doing some skin diving and finds a wrecked plane. With a body in it. Of course that has nothing to do with the case. It was obviously an accidental plane crash and there are plenty of light plane crashes.

The case is now solved. Harry can return to California. Maybe he can patch up his marriage. Perhaps he should give up the private eye business. He’s 40 and maybe his life needs to change direction. He needs to think. Then he receives a cryptic communication from Delly. And a piece of information about her. And yet another piece of information that suggests some interesting connections. Harry may be thinking of giving the game away but he still thinks like a private eye. Give him a puzzle and he’ll try to solve it. Especially if it involves someone of whom he is fond. Not a lover, just someone for whom he developed an odd affection. This case is not over after all.

I don’t think this is a neo-noir at all. It has some dark moments but a neo-noir requires more than that. It requires specific ingredients. Those ingredients are lacking here. Harry does not fit the mould of a noir protagonist.

There are four women all of whom could be dangerous but not one of them is a classic femme fatale. The first is disqualified because she’s so obvious that even the dumbest schmuck could see through her. The second is just selfish and shallow. The third has some femme fatale tendencies but Harry does not get seriously involved with her which disqualifies her as a femme fatale. The fourth has very definite femme fatale potential but Harry doesn’t get involved with her in any way, either emotionally or sexually. This movie is not structured like a neo-noir. It does not have a plot driven by lust. In fact the plot isn’t driven by anything in particular. There’s no obsessiveness. It’s just a PI who gets stubborn when faced by a puzzling case. The kind of plot you’d expect in a very average crime thriller.

It also lacks a neo-noir feel. The feel is more like a two-part episode of one of the popular TV PI series of the day such as Mannix or Harry O. Night Moves has no particular visual style. I don’t even see it as an homage to the great PI movies of the 40s. Night Moves is very very 70s, but not in a really interesting way.

All of the female characters are underwritten and Harry’s relationships with them are entirely undeveloped.

I have to be honest and state that I’ve seen three Arthur Penn movies and I’ve disliked all of them. I’m also not the biggest Gene Hackman fan. He’s appropriately cast here and he’s competent but no more. The best performance here comes from Melanie Griffith in her film debut. It’s a tricky role. She has to make Delly bratty, but not too bratty. She does a fine job. She actually understands subtlety.

Night Moves is nothing special, just a reasonably entertaining very straightforward PI thriller. A harmless time-killer. Worth a look but I wouldn’t make a huge effort to seek it out.

Camille (1936)

The 1936 Camille was the second Hollywood adaptation of the 1848 novel The Lady of the Camellias (La Dame aux Camélias) by Alexandre Dumas fils.

The movie is set in Paris in the 1840s. It is of course the story of a love affair between celebrated Parisian courtesan Marguerite Gautier and a young man, Armand Duval (Robert Taylor), whose problem is that he is not rich enough to afford her and not rich enough to defy his family by marrying her. He would like to marry her because he fears that her wild lifestyle is having a disastrous effect on her very precarious health.

There is going to be trouble with Armand’s family. His father (played by Lionel Barrymore) doesn’t mind if Armand wants to consort with courtesans but he wants him to be discreet and he certainly isn’t going to agree to a marriage. Had Armand belonged to an aristocratic family there would have been no problem. The aristocracy could treat conventional morality with contempt. But Armand’s bourgeois father is obsessed with respectability and dreads scandal.

A lot of the great actresses of the pre-code era had their careers blighted by the introduction of the Production Code in 1934. They just couldn’t flourish in the new squeaky-clean Code era. Jean Harlow being an obvious example. This was the case to some extent with Greta Garbo. She had some major hits after 1934 but some of the magic was gone.

Camille presented a challenge for MGM in 1936. The Dumas novel was based on the real-life story of one of the most famous prostitutes of the 19th century, Marie Duplessis. The heroine of the novel, like Marie Duplessis, is a courtesan but no matter how expensive she might be a courtesan is after all a prostitute. And if it’s not made clear that the heroine is a prostitute the story makes no sense at all.

The problem was that the Production Code had outlawed bad girls. Even if they suffered horrific punishment at the end it was incredibly difficult to make a movie about a bad girl.

That started to change in the early 40s as the Production Code was (in practice if not in theory) loosened a little, which made film noir possible. But in 1936 movies had to tread very very carefully indeed. And this is not just the story of a prostitute - it’s a very sympathetic story of a prostitute.

This movie solves the problem quite skilfully. It makes it very obvious that the heroine, Marguerite Gautier (Garbo), is a courtesan without ever coming right out and saying it. It relies on hints and on little exchanges that might be interpreted in an innocent way but are in fact clear indications of the way in which she makes her living. She is obviously being kept by the rich Baron de Varville (Henry Daniell). We even see an exchange of money. At one point the Baron gives her a very large sum of money, to spend on whatever takes her fancy. It is impossible to imagine a respectable woman accepting such a large cash gift. The only plausible explanation is that he is paying her for her services.

Marguerite exists in the demi-monde, the half-world of very expensive whores. She mixes with very rich men of the highest social class but her friends are clearly not the least bit respectable.

Armand is not a child. He is not at all concerned about Marguerite’s profession. All he knows is that he loves her.

Garbo is in fine form as a woman constantly veering between exaggerated gaiety and despair, between sincerity and frivolity, a woman who is reluctant to admit that she has fallen in love. Perhaps she is attracted by the prospect of emotional security but she is equally attracted by the frenetic pursuit of pleasure. Pleasure allows her to stop worrying about her health. Perhaps she would like to be respectable, but she doesn’t have a great deal of fondness for respectable people. It’s a complex role which Garbo carries off with ease.

Robert Taylor in the 1930s was generally dismissed as a mere pretty boy. As his matinee idol looks became more weather-beaten in the late 1940s his acting ability really began to blossom. He’s quite solid in Camille but he’s obviously still a bit tentative.

I have never liked Lionel Barrymore as an actor and I’m afraid I don’t like him here. Of course the character he’s playing is a loathsome self-righteous prig and that was something that Barrymore could do.

Henry Daniell as the Baron de Varville is superb. He gives the characters some depth. The Baron is selfish and arrogant and cynical but is able to regard himself, and life in general, with a certain amusement. He’s a rogue but we can’t help liking him for his lack of moralism and hypocrisy.

Marguerite and Armand are fated to misunderstand each. Marguerite does tell lies. That’s part of her profession. A whore is used to telling men what they want to hear. But when Marguerite does tell the truth Armand doesn’t believe her. They don’t really understand how much they love each other, and there is always the money problem. Armand does not have enough money to flout the social conventions. It’s an insanely romantic tale. Highly recommended.

I also highly recommend the visually stunning 1921 silent version, as well as the novel.

King of the Rocket Men (1949), The Rocketer (1991)

King of the Rocket Men is a 1949 Republic serial that mixes crime and science fiction. 

There are those who consider it to be the last great Republic serial.

The hero battles a crime lord, with the aid of a rocket suit. It's a lot of fun.

My full review can be found at Cult Movie Reviews.

And for an equally enjoyable later rocket man movie, The Rocketeer (1991) is highly recommended.

Sierra (1950)

Sierra is an early (1950) Audie Murphy western. I’ve become a rather obsessive Audie Murphy fan. I’ve now seen seven of his westerns. They’re all enjoyable and a couple of them, in my opinion, rank among the very best westerns of the classic western era.

Sierra begins with a cute but headstrong girl, Riley Martin (Wanda Hendrix), causing a major headache for Ring Hassard (Audie Murphy) and his dad Jeff (Dean Jagger). They live in a shack way up in the mountains. No-one knows they’re there. That’s how they want to keep things. They have a good reason. They need to avoid the law. Years earlier Jeff Hazzard was accused of murder. He always proclaimed his innocence but he couldn’t prove it.

Now Riley Martin knows about them. She could talk. She promises she won’t. They trust her. They have to. They can’t kill her. They’re outsiders but they’re nice guys.

There’s another problem. Riley also, quite inadvertently, brought about an accident in which Jeff was so seriously injured that his life in danger. That means they’ll need to get a doctor up there. Then everyone will know that they’ve been living in the mountains and the sheriff will send a posse.

In the midst of all these dramas Ring shoots Riley. He had to. It was for her own good. She’d been bitten by a rattlesnake. You can learn fascinating things by watching movies. Apparently you can eliminate rattlesnake venom by shooting the person in the infected area. It’s something worth remembering.

Of course this attracts more attention.

Jeff and Ring have an obsession. It’s an enormous herd of wild horses. No-one believes the herd exists but they’ve seen it. They aim to round up that herd one day. Then they’ll have the money to buy the ranch they always wanted.

So Ring (with help from some other semi-outlaws) is trying to round up the mustang herd whilst keeping a step ahead of the posse. And he’s made a couple of other very dangerous enemies as well, and they’re also gunning for him. He has a lot on his plate.

Of course Riley has fallen for Ring. A girl always feel closer to a guy after he’s shot her. And he has the glamour of being a sexy outsider rebel with a sensitive side. How could she resist him? Ring thinks Riley is pretty special as well.

It’s a fairly routine but serviceable western plot and a bit on the contrived side. You can see the crucial plot twist coming up a mile away.


The biggest problem is Burl Ives. He plays Jeff Hazzard’s wise old buddy Lonesome. Lonesome is a sort of comic relief character and he’s already irritating enough and he starts to sing. And he just keeps on singing. I guess this is supposed to add a folksy warm-hearted touch but I just wanted someone to fill Lonesome full of lead.

On the plus side it’s a Universal International 1950s western in Technicolor and they always looked nice. This one has cinematography by Russell Metty so it looks very nice indeed.

And it has Audie Murphy. This was the kind of role he handled with erase - a quiet self-effacing nice guy but you can tell that underneath the mild exterior there’s real grit and a stubborn obsessiveness. Added to which Murphy had charm and charisma.

Wanda Hendrix makes a fairly likeable Feisty Heroine. Riley has had a fancy big city education but she was born on the frontier and was one of those girls who learned to ride before she learned to walk.

Look out for Tony Curtis in a bit part.

Sierra is nothing special but it’s enjoyable and it’s recommended. It's included in the second of Kino Lorber's Audie Murphy Blu-Ray boxed sets.

Over the course of the 1950s Audie Murphy’s westerns just got better and better and towards the close of the decade he made the excellent Hell Bent for Leather (1960) and the absolutely magnificent No Name on the Bullet (1959).

The Unfaithful (1947)

The Unfaithful is a 1947 Warner Brothers production directed by Vincent Sherman. It’s sometimes described as a film noir but it’s more of a woman’s melodrama somewhat in the mould of Leave Her To Heaven and The Letter.

While her husband is away a man who has been lying in wait forces his way into the home of Chris Hunter (Ann Sheridan). There is a struggle. The man ends up dead, stabbed to death.

We see these events in silhouette through a curtained window. We can’t be entirely sure what happened.

Given that the maid heard a woman scream a moment before the man’s demise the police see this as as a very obvious case of a killing in self-defence. This was clearly an attempted rape.

The only problem for the police is that the story that Chris tells them is not the one they expected to hear. She tells them that the man, whom she had never seen before, tried to rob her. He tried to steal her jewels. That doesn’t quite make sense to the cops. A simple burglar would not have entered a house he knew to be occupied. A stick-up man would have had a gun. This man carried no weapon of any kind. Her story just doesn’t quite hang together. If she had said that he tried to rape her it would all make perfect sense. That’s why he waited until she was home and her husband was away, and that’s why he carried no gun. They would have believed a story like that without hesitation. But she’s telling them a different story and Detective Lieutenant Reynolds isn’t entirely happy with it.

It’s not that this is a case of a movie plot being made incomprehensible by the Production Code. While the movie has to use euphemisms the cops do ask her if it was an attempted rape. So the movie’s plot is fine. We are expected to jump to the same conclusion that Lieutenant Reynolds jumps to, and like him we are supposed to be feel the beginnings of a slight suspicion about Chris’s story.

The dead man is struggling sculptor Michael Tanner.

Chris’s attorney, Larry Hannaford (Lew Ayres), is an old friend of Chris and her husband Bob (Zachary Scott). He has no suspicions because he doesn’t want to be suspicious. Until he gets a phone call and an art dealer tries to make a sale to him.

So firstly, the movie’s good points. Ann Sheridan isn’t too bad. It is, for 1947, surprisingly open about sex.

Now the movie’s problems. At 109 minutes it’s half an hour too long. The plot is largely completed by the halfway stage and is completely resolved half an hour before the end. The characters then start talking. And they talk and they talk and they talk. They talk until the viewer is ready to beg them stop. But they keep talking. They’re talking about stuff we already know.

Lew Ayres doesn’t have any dialogue. He has speeches. Lots and lots of speeches.

The last 40 minutes is like a therapy session. You know how, if you’re even been unlucky enough to go to therapy, you start looking for an escape. You wonder if they’ve forgotten to bolt the door. Maybe you could make a run for it. Or the French windows. If they’re unlocked you might be able to flee across the garden. That’s what this movie is like.

The Unfaithful was apparently a major reworking of W. Somerset Maugham’s 1927 play The Letter and the 1929 and 1940 film. Screenwriters David Goodis and James Gunn have managed to eliminate everything that made the 1940 movie so good.

The idea that this is a film noir is laughable. It has none of the noir sense of inevitable doom. It has no femme fatale. It lacks even a trace of noir visual style. It does not contain a single film noir ingredient. This is a women’s melodrama. Now I happen to like women’s melodramas, but this is a particularly turgid example of the species. And it’s so grindingly slow.

If you’re a very very keen Ann Sheridan fan you might want to check out The Unfaithful. Otherwise it’s one to avoid.

The Warner Archive DVD looks very good.

Oddly enough in 1947 Ann Sheridan starred in another Vincent Sherman-directed women’s melodrama, Nora Prentiss, which s actually a very good movie and well worth seeing. So I suspect that most of the blame for The Unfaithful should be laid at the feet of the screenwriters.

Campbell’s Kingdom (1957)

Campbell’s Kingdom is a slightly unconventional 1957 British thriller. It was based on the 1952 Hammond Innes novel of the same name. Innes is now largely forgotten but he was one of the great thriller writers.

This is a frontier adventure tale of sorts. Bruce Campbell (Dirk Bogarde) arrives from England to take up his inheritance in the wilds of Canada. His inheritance is known as Campbell’s Kingdom. It’s a completely worthless tract of land, but Campbell doesn’t think it’s worthless. His now deceased grandfather thought there was oil there. Nobody ever believed him. His grandfather was accused of fraud and sent to prison. But Bruce Campbell believes his grandfather was right.

He has his own reasons for believing and he has his own reasons for being determined to find that oil. Those reasons do not include greed. Even if there is oil Bruce Campbell will never see any money from it.

His immediate problem is Owen Morgan (Stanley Baker). Morgan, a very shady construction contractor, has a contract to build a dam. The dam will flood Campbell’s Kingdom. After that, even if there is oil there, no-one will ever be able to be able to find it or access it.

The most recent geological survey by the seismological surveyor, Bladen (Michael Craig), confirmed what everybody knew. There is no oil. But a conversation with Bladen arouses Campbell’s suspicions. And that conversation arouses Bladen’s suspicions as well. He is an honest man. Perhaps he has been deceived in some way as well.

Test drilling would provide the answer but in a few short weeks the whole valley will be underwater. Even worse, Morgan controls all access to Campell’s kingdom. There is no way to do any test drilling. But Campbell has a plan.

And he has the man to help him carry it out. James MacDonald (James Robertson Justice) is a wildcat oil driller and he’s a man prepared to take a huge gamble.

This is a thriller with almost no violence at all. There’s crookedness and skullduggery but not violence. There is however plenty of action and excitement. And explosions! And there are two race-against-time elements. Ralph Thomas was the director. He made fine movies in lots of different genres, in fact in just about every genre you can name including some good thrillers. It’s no surprise that he is able to get plenty of thrills out of this story.

Dirk Bogarde might seem an odd casting choice but it works. This is a clash between two men representing very different types of masculinity. Stanley Baker as Morgan is aggressive, overbearing, hard-driving and overtly macho. Bruce Campbell is quiet, passive and self-effacing but he does not lack courage and under the surface is a steely determination and an iron will. This is a guy who never backs down and never gives up. Which is why the casting of Bogarde works - he is the perfect counterpoint to Baker.

Michael Craig plays Bladen as a nice guy but he’s also tougher than he looks. James Robertson Justice is of course a delight.

There is, naturally, a girl. Jean Lucas (Barbara Murray) played a part in Bruce Campbell’s past, a part of which Campbell knew nothing. For a number of reasons she knows she cannot play a part in his future. This is in spite of the fact that she fallen instantly head over heels in love with him, and he’s obviously pretty fond of her. Barbara Murray plays her as feisty and likeable.

Look at for Sid James in a small role.

Hammond Innes always made superb use of either nautical settings or settings in the frozen wastes of the North. He had a real feel for such settings, and that’s reflected in this movie. There’s some lovely location shooting, all done in Italy (with the Dolomites standing in for Canada). The special effects are extremely well done.

It’s refreshing and unusual to see a movie in which the oil men are the good guys.

Campbell’s Kingdom is unusual enough to be interesting, it looks great, it has excitement and some romance and some fine acting. Highly recommended.

The Blu-Ray from the now defunct Network is still available and it looks lovely.