![]() Shot in 1973 on the tail of a writer's strike and unreleased by Warner Bros. (In the interim, he helmed a segment of the 1973 Olympics documentary, Visions of Eight, filmed in the aftermath of the massacre of Israeli athletes by Arab terrorists during the 1972 summer games in Munich.) Night Moves represented a departure from his earlier focus on lawbreakers - the folk heroes of the Left-Handed Gun (1958) and Bonnie & Clyde, the convict-on-the-run in The Chase (1966), the Turkey Day litterer of Alice's Restaurant (1969) - and focused instead on a tired Los Angeles PI (Gene Hackman) juggling professional and personal mysteries. Penn had absented himself from narrative filmmaking (in truth, from creative endeavors of any stripe) for several years, hot off the success of Bonnie & Clyde (1967) and Little Big Man (1970). Sharp's script had been named as a coy reference to the Universal Pictures executive building, known in the industry as The Black Tower in reworking Sharp's original scenario, a mystery set between the strangely complementary milieux of movie-making and artifact smuggling, was to emphasize a telling bit of business in the script about chess playing and the inability (or disability) of its detective hero in seeing the move he should have made. In other words, he killed two people and ruined his life for nothing.One of the first things that Arthur Penn did when he inherited the Alan Sharp script The Dark Tower from the director-producer team of Sydney Pollack and Mark Rydell was to change the title to Night Moves (1975). Maybe the realization was, that he just killed two people, committed an act of terrorism, and is now a fugitive on the run for life, yet, no one paid any attention to his act of terrorism like he thought, people just went on about their daily lives, talking on their cell phones and listening to their iPods. Then, fast forward to the end, he looks up and sees two people in the mirror's reflection, one texting and the other talking on the phone. Maybe he realizes that there's no way he can fit into a society that requires your identity to be so open to the public and is so heavily dependent on technology.Įarlier in the movie, before they blew up the damn and they're sitting in that guy's trailer talking about the revolution, Joey says "this has got to make people think, right? We're killing off all of the salmon so people can listen to their iPods every second of the day". Then, as he's filling out the application, he looks into the mirror and sees two shoppers that are both using their cell phones. Prior to walking into the camping store to apply for the job, he disassembled his phone and scattered it around the parking lot. Although, I do think the director intended to leave us in the dark so that we can speculate.and it worked! haha The ending of this was really f*cking with me last night and I finally think I've come up with some conclusions. Can anyone shed a little more light on how the very ending of the film figures into the rest of the story and what it could be trying to tell us or even just what exactly happened there? Or maybe it's just the abruptness and plainness of the ending that confuses me. ![]() ![]() Did he actually see something in that mirror (did he maybe even imagine Dena)? Are we the audience supposed to see something there too?Įven after the second watch I'm still not sure what to make of the ending or if I maybe even missed something significant. I could get behind Josh's future being left deliberately vague and that might be somewhat fitting to the rest of the film's unagitated yet ominous atmosphere, but at the same time him looking into that mirror made me wonder if anything significant happened there. I don't quite know what to make of this ending. However, when he's about to fill the application form at the clerk's desk, he looks into a ceiling mirror which shows the shop area with a few customers and that's where the film ends. After killing Dena somewhat "accidentally" Josh ends up somewhere in California and casually applies for a job at an outdoor shop, apparently trying to go under the radar. The ending of Night Moves came a little abrupt to me. ![]()
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