Night Moves (4K UHD Review)
- Review Date: Mar 24, 2025
- Format: 4K Ultra HD
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Director
Arthur PennRelease Date(s)
1975 (March 25, 2025)Studio(s)
Warner Bros. (The Criterion Collection – Spine #1255)- Film/Program Grade: A-
- Video Grade: B+
- Audio Grade: B+
- Extras Grade: B
Review
Gene Hackman starred in two thrillers back-to-back between 1974 and 1975, The Conversation and Night Moves, for two directors who couldn’t possibly have been more different from each other: Francis Ford Coppola and Arthur Penn. While the narratives and themes of the two films are dissimilar, they do share one important quality in common: they’re both actually character studies of their respective protagonists, Harry Caul and Harry Moseby, with the thriller elements serving as a vehicle by which to examine the interior lives of these individuals. Neither one of them was particularly successful at the box office, but both have become cult classics over the years since then, with The Conversation in particular being widely feted as a landmark paranoia thriller of the Seventies. Night Moves, on the other hand, is still something of a sleeper that doesn’t quite get as much attention as it deserves. Yet in its own way, it’s every bit as much of a landmark as Coppola’s better-remembered thriller, albeit for completely different reasons: if The Conversation helped redefine paranoia thrillers, Night Moves redefined neo-noir.
While the Watergate break-in and its ensuing coverup ended up shaping the entire thriller genre during the latter half of the Seventies, Alan Sharp’s incisive screenplay for Night Moves actually dated back to the previous decade, and he had already rewritten it several times before Penn finally started filming it in 1973. Sharp and Penn didn’t necessarily see eye-to-eye on the project, and Penn ended up reshaping the final film during the editorial process just as much as Sharp had already reshaped the script before it even got to that point. Yet the broad strokes of the narrative remained the same. Harry Moseby (Hackman) is a former professional football player who has let himself become trapped in a dead-end career as a small-time private investigator. His wife Ellen (Susan Clark) wants him to break out of his inertia by signing up with a major firm, but he struggles to find the necessary motivation in order to make any serious changes in his life. Yet when he takes a case from aging actress Arlene Iverson (Janet Ward) to track down her wayward daughter Delly (Melanie Griffith), it ends up changing his life in ways that he couldn’t possibly have anticipated.
Like Harry Caul, Moseby’s fatal flaw is that while he may understand his own inherent weaknesses, he still can’t see how others are able to manipulate him by using those weaknesses against him. Both characters fail to plan enough moves ahead, a fact that’s made explicit in Night Moves by having Moseby replay a chess match from 1922 where Bruno Moritz failed to see that he could have checkmated Kurt Emmrich in four moves, so he ended up losing the game instead. In Moseby’s instance, he fails to see how the stasis in his personal life has driven his wife into the arms of another man (Harris Yulin). The fact that he misses all the signs of her affair until he clumsily stumbles upon it foreshadows the way that he won’t be able to put all of the pieces together with the case that he’s investigating. As a result, he ends up becoming an easy pawn in the hands of others—and with tragic consequences, too. Moseby wants to take life one day at a time, but he lives in a world in which failing to look ahead can get you checkmated.
As is typical for an Arthur Penn film, the supporting cast surrounding Hackman is superb, including the likes of Clark, Yulin, Jennifer Warren, Kenneth Mars, a young James Woods, and a very young Griffith. (Interestingly, Yulin would play another nemesis of a different sort for Hackman fifteen years later in Peter Hyams’ undervalued remake of The Narrow Margin.) Regardless of the intricacies of the plot machinations swirling around Hackman, it’s Clark, Warren, and Griffith who really own the film as three very different women who are all equally beyond Moseby’s limited comprehension. While it’s fair to consider Night Moves as being a neo-noir film, these three women are anything but femme fatales (and that even includes the otherwise hypersexualized Delly). Ellen, Paula, and Delly all have interior lives of their own, lives that Moseby could never understand well enough to outmaneuver any of them. It’s not just his failure to see enough moves ahead, but also his inability to understand women that nearly destroys both his personal and his professional lives. Considered from that angle, Night Moves ends up redefining neo-noir by returning the genre full circle to classic noir. It’s a superb portrait of a man who loses everything because he ultimately checkmates himself.
Cinematographer Bruce Surtees shot Night Moves on 35mm film using Panavision cameras with spherical lenses, framed at 1.85:1 for its theatrical release. This version is based on a 4K scan of the original camera negative, cleaned up and graded for High Dynamic Range in both Dolby Vision and HDR10. It’s not clear if this is the same scan that was performed by Warner Bros. Motion Picture Imaging for the 2017 Warner Archive Blu-ray, but the HDR grade is all-new, and that fact is going to lead to some inevitable consternation. This grade is quite different than the one on that Blu-ray, and yes, there’s a bit more of a green/teal push here in comparison. Where things really get interesting is that this grade is actually much closer to Warner’s 2005 DVD version. Criterion supposedly used a 35mm dye-transfer Technicolor print as a reference, while the Warner Archive Blu-ray never specified a reference. So which one is more correct? In lieu of having my own IB Tech print for comparison purposes, I’m going to have to trust Criterion on this one, especially since the DVD had a similar (though not quite identical) look. I’m fine with it, though your own mileage may vary, but don’t listen to anyone who makes definitive declarations one way or the other without any hard evidence to back it up.
In any event, the image is clean and reasonably well resolved, without any significant signs of damage, and there doesn’t appear to be any noteworthy compression artifacts either. It’s possible that some light grain management has been applied, since the grain looks slightly smoother than what’s typical in raw negative scans, but it’s nothing that detrimentally impacts the fine detail. That said, expectations need to be tempered considering the stocks, fast lenses, and lighting that Surtees utilized; Night Moves is never going to be the sharpest and most pinpoint-detailed film in the format. The optically printed opening credits were derived from dupe elements instead, and while their inherent softness improves once the credits are over, that only goes so far. The black levels aren’t the deepest, and don’t look for too much shadow detail in them; we’re talking about Bruce Surtees here, who definitely wasn’t afraid of the dark. On the whole, this is still an improvement over the previous Blu-ray, but it’s fair to point out that it’s only an incremental one.
Audio is offered in English 1.0 mono LPCM, with optional English SDH subtitles. While the new(?) color grade may raise some eyebrows, there’s no question that the audio is an improvement over the Warner Archive Blu-ray. It may still be mono, but it’s cleaner and clearer, with more air on the top end and a little more depth to the bass. Michael Small’s score really benefits from the added clarity, with every note of the bass line in his title theme sounding clear and perfectly delineated, never muddy or tubby. Alan Sharp’s dialogue is also crystal-clear.
Criterion’s 4K Ultra HD release of Night Moves is a two-disc set that includes a Blu-ray with a 1080p copy of the film. There’s also a 12-page foldout booklet featuring an essay by Mark Harris, as well as credits and restoration notes. The following extras are included:
DISC ONE: UHD
- Audio Commentary by Matthew Asprey Gear
DISC TWO: BD
- Audio Commentary by Matthew Asprey Gear
- Arthur Penn: 1975 (HD – 19:17)
- Arthur Penn: 1995 (Upscaled SD – 5:22)
- Jennifer Warren (HD – 17:04)
- The Day of the Director (Upscaled SD – 8:33)
- Trailer (HD – 2:15)
Matthew Asprey Gear is the perfect choice for a commentary about Night Moves since he wrote the literal book on the subject: Moseby Confidential: Arthur Penn’s Night Moves and the Rise of Neo-Noir. He views Night Moves through the lens of the conflict between Arthur Penn and Alan Sharp, neither of whom were completely happy with the finished film, but Gear feels that the whole is greater than the sum of its parts. He traces the reshaping of the script and the final film, comparing them to Alan Sharp’s novelization of Night Moves, and he points out some of the editorial changes. He notes some of the coincidences and implausibilities in the story as seen in the film. He also discusses the filmographies of Penn and Sharp, and tells various other stories about the production of Night Moves. It’s a great commentary from a genuine expert on the subject.
Criterion has included two different interviews with Arthur Penn, each of them taking place twenty years apart. The first one was recorded for an episode of the television series Cinema Showcase, and it first aired back when Night Moves was originally released. Host Jim Whaley steps Penn through his career up to that point and delves into Penn’s thoughts about Night Moves. It’s definitely an artifact from a different era—it’s leisurely paced and quite thoughtful. The second interview is a brief excerpt from the 1995 television documentary Arthur Penn: A Love Affair with Film, by Lars-Olav Beier and Robert Müller (both of whom also published a 1998 book on Penn). Penn describes how Harry Moseby’s final look through the glass-bottomed boat was the moment of clarity for viewers as well, and how he worked backward from that moment in the design of the rest of the film (there’s a good reason why Jennifer Warren is frequently seen glimpsed through screens or windows).
Speaking of Warren, she appears in a new audio-only interview that was conducted via telephone. She explains the process of rehearsing and preparing for Night Moves, as well as her experiences making it. She gives full credit to Alan Sharp for having written Paula to be such a singular character, and details some of the challenges that she faced like the scuba diving scenes. Finally, The Day of the Director is a promotional film from 1975 that was shot on the set of Night Moves, showing Penn and his cast & crew at work. It includes some interesting footage of them shooting the finale, although it does cut away to avoid giving any spoilers for the film.
The only one of those extras that appeared on previous releases of Night Moves is The Day of the Director, so Criterion’s version is a definite upgrade in that regard. They’ve really stepped up their game with 4K releases lately, offering more and more upgrades of their own previous Blu-rays as well as some striking new additions to their catalogue like this one. It’s a great introduction to the world of Harry Moseby—or at least to the world of Harry Moseby as viewed through his own somewhat myopic lens. It’s also a fine tribute to the late great Gene Hackman, so the timing of this release couldn’t be better.
-Stephen Bjork
(You can follow Stephen on social media at these links: Twitter, Facebook, BlueSky, and Letterboxd).