I was settling into Gunpowder Milkshake on Netflix…”my God, this is heaven…amazing!…why doesn’t Netflix make more like this?” No, seriously, it made me sick to my stomach. So I turned it off and began to watch Arthur Penn‘s Night Moves (’75), not intending to watch it all through (it was after 11) but I watched about 45 or 50 minutes.
Night Moves runs only runs 99 minutes but always feels like two hours, and yet it’s always engrossing. As noirs go it’s colder than most. It’s a demimonde film about a community of friendly, cynical people who work in the lower end of the film industry and don’t care all that much about anything. It basically says that everyone’s guilty or corrupt or thoughtless…that everything’s rancid and foul. But Gene Hackman‘s Harry Moseby lends a certain humanity.
Anyway there’s a night scene early on in which Moseby, an ex-football player turned private investigator, happens to drive by the Magnolia Theatre (4403 W. Magnolia, Burbank…not far from Warner Bros. studio) with Eric Rohmer‘s My Night at Maud’s on the marquee. A bit earlier his wife, played by Susan George, tells Harry she’ll be catching this very Rohmer film with a gay friend and asks Harry if he’d like to join**.
So he pulls over and waits for the show to end. Never mind about what happens — I was suddenly swooning over the marquee and the quiet street and the idea of little independent movie theatres…a small single-screen theatre showing an arty French film on a weeknight in a quiet little neighorhood in the San Fernando Valley. And I was thinking “Jesus, I really wish I’d driven out there earlier this evening and caught the same 7 pm show.”
** Moseby responds with the famous line “I saw a Rohmer film once…it was kinda like watching paint dry.” This line was quoted in Rohmer’s N.Y. Times obituary.
