That 70s Movie Podcast
A look back at the films that defined cinema's greatest era - the 1970s!
That 70s Movie Podcast
Night Moves
Use Left/Right to seek, Home/End to jump to start or end. Hold shift to jump forward or backward.
This week on "That '70s Movie Podcast," Jonathan and Michael dive into the water for the 1975 neo-noir thriller, "Night Moves."
This is one of Jonathan's favorite movies, and it shows! He talked with great passion about the enigma of Harry Moseby (played by Gene Hackman), his complicated relationship with Ellen, and Harry's consistent ability to connect the dots but miss the bigger picture. Michael enjoyed the movie as well, and while he particularly loved Alan Sharp's dialogue, he was a bit more critical of the film's plot holes, occasional contrivances, and somewhat bizarre ending (which we tried to unpack).
But this was nothing if not a spirited conversation about a movie that contains multitudes!
So pack up your chessboard, fix your engine, and join us for the latest episode of "That '70s Movie Podcast."
Please take a moment to leave a review, become a subscriber, or buy us a cup of coffee!
Where were you when Kennedy got shot?
SPEAKER_00I was uh on the way to San Diego. Bobby got shot, I was sitting in the car. Waiting for a guy to come out of a house with his girlfriend. Working on a divorce case. One of those times I wish I was in another business.
SPEAKER_01Welcome everybody to the latest episode of That 70s movie podcast. I'm your host, Michael A. Cohen, joined by my co-host, Jonathan Kirschner. Jonathan, how are you doing today?
SPEAKER_02Perennially hanging in there.
SPEAKER_01Hanging in there. Good to hear. I mean, I am as well. Let me ask you a question. Have you seen anything good recently?
SPEAKER_02Not especially. I saw a couple of movies perhaps worth mentioning. I checked out The Beguiled, the Clint Eastwood Don Siegel collaboration that I had never actually seen before, but it was meant to. And I thought maybe one day we might talk about it. And I thought it was interesting, but it didn't grab me in a passionate way. And another movie I was really curious about, uh, a Simeneon adaptation called Strangers in the House. And I was very interested in this because it was made in France under occupation by the Nazi film company Continental Films, and it was directed by Henry DeCoyne and written by Henry Georges Clousot, both of the major figures in the history of French cinema. And I was very excited about it, and I thought it was okay.
SPEAKER_01Okay, well, I'm sorry to hear that. Just gets an okay. It's never good when it gets an okay from Jonathan. You don't want that. But I'm glad I saw it. Okay, well, that's good. I mean, at least you can you can you can chalk it off the list. Exactly. I saw a bunch of movies this week, which we can briefly get into. Um first, because you brought it up a couple episodes ago, I watched Body Heat. Uh, and I, you know, it's funny, you said that the beginning of the movie was too slow for you, and the end was when things picked up. I thought the opposite was kind of true, actually. I liked the slow kind of build-up, like the the whole relationship between uh Kathleen Turner and William Heard, how she sort of ropes him in to the uh to this plan. I mean, maybe I saw it before if I knew it was gonna happen. I could kind of like it was sort of fun to watch the machinations. But I um I don't know, I thought it was I thought it was great. I really enjoyed it.
SPEAKER_02No, you're misremembering what I said though. It wasn't the slowness and the fastness of the pace. It was that for the first at least third of the movie, I found myself kind of irritated. It kind of seemed almost paint by numbers to me, like, yeah, she's doing this. Yeah, isn't he an idiot? And doesn't he know he's in a film noir movie? Why is he acting this way? And then I thought the the it picked up and became more interesting, and the twists I thought became more engaging, and the performances really came to life for me. And I was really surprised. Usually once I don't like a movie for uh more than a half an hour, it's hard for it to come back. But I it just went from strength to strengths for me, and at the very end, I decided I really liked it.
SPEAKER_01Okay, fair enough. Uh, one thing I'll say in the movie that kind of surprised me. It's directed by Lawrence Kasden, who uh also directed The Big Chill and Grand Canyon, a bunch of other movies that I'm not really a big fan of. But I thought it was directed really well. I thought he did a great job with this film. He made some really interesting choices, a lot of, as you would, as you like, night night uh filming. It was uh that's a terrific, terrific. Now, I wasn't really about this. It's not a revisionist noir. It's basically like an updated version of double indemnity. It's basically double indemnity with nudity. Uh and I I think, and you know, which is fine, it's this kind of copying noir movies from the 40s and 50s as opposed to reinvent the genre.
SPEAKER_02Yes, it's an homage, and as many critics noted at the time, oh, and in 1981 or 1982, the characters can actually have sex.
SPEAKER_01Exactly. Exactly. So we get to see William Heard and Kathleen Turner in in Flagrente, which, you know, I I'm not complaining. Uh I watched the 1974 movie Uh The Gambler starring James Kahn. Have you have you seen this movie, I assume?
SPEAKER_02Yes, but a very long time ago, and it's directed by, I think, Carol Wright.
SPEAKER_01Carol Reitz, that's right. James Kahn, early 70s. You know, he gets a thumbs up from me. I'll I'll I'll I'll always see a movie with him in it. But honestly, if I had to watch a movie about degenerate gamblers, I'd probably prefer California Split. Thought that was a little bit uh more effective.
SPEAKER_02Aaron Powell I mean, it's a very beautifully shot film as well, and it's a lot of good performances in it. But I sometimes get frustrated with self-destructive characters if I have trouble kind of grasping onto the extent to which they become so incredibly self-destructive. You know, it's like, you know, dude, maybe not make that choice.
SPEAKER_01Aaron Powell It's like, and you know as soon as something good happens to him that he's gonna make a bad decision. It's it it felt a little bit paint by numbers at some point. So I I I liked it. I didn't love it.
SPEAKER_02Yeah, I I think a solid brick in the wall of, you know, the new Hollywood.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, I think that's right. I think that's right. So since we discussed uh last week uh Carl Franklin's movie One False Move, I decided to watch the follow-up movie he did called uh Devil in a Blue Dress, starring um Denzel Washington and um Jennifer Beals and uh a wonderful performance by Don Cheadle. Uh this is a great movie. Really great movie, just a lot of fun. I mean, this is not like, you know, cinema, as you would say, but like hugely entertaining film.
SPEAKER_02Uh Denzel is really good, and Cheel uh steals every scene he's in.
SPEAKER_01He's hilarious. I I'm a big fan of him in general. I just think he's a really fun actor. Loved him, for example, in Out of Sight. He's just really good in everything he does. And I just, um this is just it's a great movie. It's a really fun movie.
SPEAKER_02Um, yeah, that's my my favorite line of that movie is Denzel rushes off to do something and leaves somebody with Cheadle. Cheadle kills the guy. Denzel comes back and he's devastated by this. And Cheadle says, Well, why'd you leave me with him for?
SPEAKER_01You know, what'd you leave me with him for? He's like, he's I said I said to him, he's like, I didn't shoot him. I strangled him. Uh I choked him to death. I'm like, oh, okay. Uh okay, so I went to go see this movie in the theaters now called The Invite, directed by Olivia Wilde. Now, I gotta say, Olivia Wilde, I don't think I know anything about her, although she did direct a movie a couple years ago called Book Smart. Did you see that movie, Jonathan?
SPEAKER_02Possibly. If I did, I didn't like it, but I don't want to speak out of turn because I may be misremembering it with some other movie.
SPEAKER_01It actually is like a sort of a coming-of-age movie about these two kids in high school uh and as they like approaching graduation. Actually, it's a really it's a good movie. I liked it, I liked it actually. So I, you know, and I and I'd read really good things about this film. I gotta say, I hated it. I mean, I didn't just look at it, I hated it. And what I hated about oh, it's it's like it starts Olivia Wilde, whose performance is exceptionally in one note. Uh Seth Rogan, who, you know, he's a comedic actor, he's fine, but he's not a dramatic actor and tries to play one of this movie. Edward Norton and Penelope Cruz were usually quite good. But this was just, I don't know, it wasn't that interesting. And the ending was if you had seen this movie, Jonathan, you would have had an existential crisis. It was such an unearned ending to a movie. It was, it was just appalling. Um you've scared me off it. I'm not going near it. Oh, I wouldn't go anywhere near it. But what got me, and the reason I went to see it, is that it got like a, you know, it got really good reviews. And so somebody who I follow on Instagram who does movie reviews, who I kind of think is, you know, he usually has pretty good taste. It's like, oh, this is the best movie of the year so far. What the hell are you talking about? I got like an 82 or a Metacritic. I don't get it. Like you talked about at one point how movie reviewers basically just over-exaggerate or inflate how good movies are. This is a good example of it. I couldn't believe some of the reviews of this movie, actually.
SPEAKER_02Well, I just want to say I meant I meant that in a kinder way, that critics are often overwhelmed by the avalanche of direct they have to sit through. And when they finally get something that's pretty good or pretty ambitious or admirable in some way, there's a tendency to overpraise. Aaron Powell Well, I but I think you also suggest sometimes they want the attention that comes from from doing a good review. Aaron Powell Yes, but that's the second, that's the second tier, right? There's a million, you know, you watch TV commercials and you say, you know, the greatest movie since Citizen Kane, Phil Shibano's Screen Week, you know, that kind of thing. But I don't think I don't think serious critics are are shopping for pull quotes in that same way.
SPEAKER_01Aaron Powell Well, one would hope not. But I'll just say for the record, uh I I was surprised at how good reviews this movie got. But then again, you know, different strokes, different folks that people like certain things that people like you and I don't care for as much. Um now before we get into the movie today, we have a few comments um from listeners. First of all, Spencer Steele, who's a consistent commenter, who said, after watching the Jaws episode, please review more films on which the two of you disagree. Jonathan displayed a brilliant sense of humor he hasn't previously shown. And you two played off each other like Martin and Lewis. That seems unfair to Jonathan. I mean, I love Spencer. He's great, but like Jonathan's a funny guy, but he was particularly funny. Yeah, the Jaws episode. Let's go. We'll go with that. We also got two other uh comments. Uh Paul Cunningham, our old friend from uh from Ireland, said only one question arise from that episode. He's referring to the Jaws episode. Why would anyone, and I mean anyone, need to be convinced to talk about night moves? And I told Fall, maybe the best comment we've ever received on and of anything. Uh and finally, uh Mel Weinstein, uh along similar lines, sent us a voicemail. He said, I've written reviews of your program before. I love it, I love the podcast, I love the movies and the analysis you guys are doing of the movies of the 70s. 70s are my favorite. One movie that I know Jonathan wrote about in his book that I watched again last night for probably the sixth time, and I still don't understand it, is Night Moves with Gene Hackman. A great movie with a twist at the end, uh, I don't understand what happened. And I'd love to hear you guys debate it on a podcast. Well, Mel, today is your lucky day, because you know what we're doing today? We're doing night moves. All right, let's celebrate. Okay, here we go. What's it about? Uh well, before I get into that, it is directed by Arthur Penn. It's written by Alan Sharp, cinematography by Bruce Certez, edited by Dee Dee Allen and Stephen Rodder. I believe this is the second or third D.D. Allen movie that we've done. Is that right? Yeah. Yeah. She's incredible. She's great. It stars Gene Hackman, Susan Clark, Jennifer Warren, Edward Binns, Harris Eulin, a favorite of Jonathan's, Kenneth Mars, Janet Ward, Melanie Griffith, and James Wood. The last two, I believe, was their their first performances, or first major motion picture performance. Screen Depuis. Screen debuts, thank you. This is a movie that received no Oscar nominations. Uh, it is not on the IndieWire list of the greatest uh movies of the 1970s. It's also not on the AFI or BFI list. By the way, Johnson, I was looking at the BFI list uh earlier today. How the hell did Gene Dielman get number one on that list? That's just insane. We're never doing John Dielman, right? We're not doing that movie. And uh I can't sit through it again.
SPEAKER_02So let me put it to you this way. And that's not just the BFI, that's the sight and sound poll every decade. Right, right, right. Jean Dielman is not one of my five favorite Chantel Ackerman movies. I don't think I've seen anything else by Chantal Ackerman, but I maybe I don't know. I'm a tremendous advocate of her news from home, which for me is such a special movie. It's an acquired taste movie, but she's done a lot of interesting films, uh, and and I'm I'm a big fan of many of them.
SPEAKER_01Well, just for the record, we're not doing that one. Uh okay, so uh Night Moves, what is it about? It stars Gene Hackman as a private investigator who uncovers a series of sinister events while searching for the missing teenage daughter of a former film actress and chaos ensues. I saw that from Wikipedia. Just want to be clear on that point. So now we get to the point in the podcast when I mean everybody just waits with baited breath for this to happen. I'm sorry it's taken so long to get into this, but Jonathan, night moves. Is this a good movie? Is this a bad movie? Or is this a great movie?
SPEAKER_02Well, I have a lot to answer here. First of all, let's get the nonsense out of the way first. This is a great movie. Okay. But much more important than that, this is a movie I love. This is a movie I have a very close personal relationship with that transcends where it falls on the greatness scale. Although, of course, I go to Bat for its greatness, I think it's a great movie. But more to me, it is such a movie that I love and have a close personal relationship with. And as you know, that's one of my most important metrics. And it was also probably additionally important for me because when I was starting to sniff around movies in a serious way and started to evolve toward an understanding of the new Hollywood, this was one of the small handful of movies I watched with some innocence of what I was seeing, in which I realized, wow, this is what New Hollywood filmmaking was really about. I would put King of Market Gardens in that category too. Movies I saw, and these are movies I saw on TVs, on VHS tape when I was starting to explore, you know, the 70s film of the New Hollywood, and to be just to have that revelation of saying, oh yeah, right, this is what these people are doing, and it's different than it's special. So for me, this movie takes place at three levels. I think it's a great movie. It's a movie that's special to me, but it also is a movie that influenced the way I came to understood the new Hollywood. And before we go on, I also want to kind of preemptively apologize to some of our listeners. I have such enthusiasm for this movie. I I said this to Michael in prior correspondence, that listening to me talk about it might be like trying to drink from a fire hose. And so hopefully we can kind of contain what I have to say so that it comes out in reasonably short paragraphs and fairly complete sentences, because I I can I'm like a you know a doll that would pull the string and the words would just come flowing out as I would talk about this movie.
SPEAKER_01That is a great, wow, great description right there. You really set us up nicely. I mean, I feel like this is kind of maybe the reverse of, no, not the reverse of the Jaws Conversation episode, which I love that movie so much. I mean, I, and you're of course skeptical. I'm not skeptical of this movie. I don't have the same reverence for this movie that you do, and it's weird. I I feel like should. I said something a couple several years ago. I liked it, you know, I found some of it confusing, but I liked it. I watched it again a bunch of times over the past week or two. And uh I there were so many things in this movie that I liked. I made a running list of all the uh great lines in this movie. There's so many. Yeah. This is one of the best uh scripts for dialogue of any movie watched so far. I mean, we've done, I think this is our 40th movie, I think, or the 39th or 40th movie. And I just think the dialogue is just so whip smart and so great. However, I don't have the love of this movie that you do. And a part of it is because I I and you're gonna get pissy when I say this, I know it. You're gonna get angry. I can see it. You can see it. I can see the steam coming out of out of Jonathan's ears. I I the this movie is not about the plot, and I completely, you know, accept your argument, plot schmott. I I buy all of that. But the the plot here is confusing, and it does, for me, slightly detract from the movie. And I also feel that there are different elements of the movie that are a bit contrived. But let's get into that. Let's get as we go along, let's get into it. And actually, I can start with something that I found a little bit contrived at the beginning of the movie. Because you suggested.
SPEAKER_02Before you do that, and I I do want to get to your first contrivance, and I do think we have to walk kind of slowly through the movie, but I do want to pause and just talk again about the writing. This movie was uh from a script by Alan Sharp, but it was rewritten extensively by Penn with Sharp and then rewritten again during the production, and the actors participated in that. And Sharp and Penn were often at loggerheads over things to do. Penn, obviously, as a director, was able to make the final decisions. But when Penn said to Sharp, write it this way, Sharp still wrote it that way. So the lines are all Sharp's, and they're brilliant lines. I mean, staggeringly brilliant lines, but often Penn steered Sharp in certain directions that Sharp necessarily did not want to go. And so that's a fascinating part of this movie is uh Sharp's novelization, I don't think is very good. A lot of people love Sharp's novelization. Uh what I find is that he what he did was he, as if in a fit of pique, restored all the changes that Penn made him do. And Penn was always right about the changes that he wanted to make. And so what's fascinating to me is how a man could write such astonishingly brilliant dialogue and then write a rather pedestrian novelization. It's always fascinating to me, but I want to acknowledge Sharp. I mean, I'm more of a Pennyan than a Sharpian, but this gives me a chance to flag Matthew Asprey Gear's book, uh, Mosby Confidential, a very nice little book about this movie. And Gear is very much a Sharpian, and I think that book reflects a more Sharpian take on the movie.
SPEAKER_01Well, it's interesting you mentioned about Alan Sharp because he is not somebody who has a really, I mean, to be very candid, incredibly impressive track record. It's something I read somewhere. It sort of made the point that he viewed himself as a working screenwriter, as opposed to like an artiste, if you will. And that these saw he saw this particular script as kind of a pastiche. Um, which is really but I I I bring this up because I think what's striking is that this is such an original and compelling script, even if it's at times a bit confusing.
SPEAKER_02Aaron Powell Well, let me let me uh go to bad for Sharp for a minute here because it's not really something I naturally do. But I think he saw himself more as a novelist than a screenwriter. And a lot of people who see themselves as novelists often feel like they're slumming them, they write screenplays. But Sharp was a Scotsman, and then he came to America, and I think he did a lot of screenplays that took a kind of hard look at America. So he wrote Peter Fonda's wonderful revisionist Western, The Hired Hand. He also wrote the Revisionist Western Uzanna's Raid with Bert Lancaster, that was very much a Vietnam War allegory. And he wrote a difficult picture called The Last Run with George C. Scott, that John Houston was originally attached to, finally directed by Richard Schleifer. So he did a series of these movies of kind of trying to dig at kind of what for him was the American enigma. And I think that that was part of the difference between his perspective on the characters and the movie and Penn's perspective on the characters in the movie, with Sharp looking at America with some disdain, whereas Penn, who was very politically active in the 60s, looked at America in the 70s with more disappointment.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, let me let me revive this in a second, maybe just to be fair to Alan Sharp, who is no longer alive, but to his family members who might be listening. I didn't mean to suggest he didn't do good screenplay writing. I meant to say really that the screenplays he wrote, uh, for the films that he did, they didn't get a great deal of tension, right? They're not they're not really considered like classics of New Hollywood cinema. He's not somebody who I think of is thought of as like sort of one of the great screenplay or great screenwriters of the 70s, New Hollywood. Trevor Burrus, Jr. And yet there are 20 brilliant lines, easily, in this movie. Aaron Powell Easily. Easily. Okay, so let's start at the beginning of this movie. It begins with Harry Mosby, play uh played by Gene Hackman. He arrives at his wife's uh art studio or art gallery where she works. He uh comes in and he has sort of this like playful moment with her, right? She's on the phone, she's saying, by the way, I'm doing notice her dialogue here. She says, It's too late, it's too late, which by the way is like a good analogy for what ends up happening with her her character and Harry in the film. Uh he like puts his hand over her eyes, he pretends to he, I guess he kind of fondles her actually. But they're married, so they're married, so it's okay, it's okay. Uh, it's not like a meet to you situation. And then, you know, there's a little bit of interesting dialogue there where, you know, he asks her for some money and she says it's fine. And then um he uh she asks if he's taking some job at this PI firm. He's a private investigator, and uh he says no. And but there doesn't seem to be a lot of rancor between them, okay?
SPEAKER_02Would you agree? It's not a lot of rancor, but I think the movie is already establishing some tension between them. She is very much a sophisticate, right? She works in an art gallery and she's going that night to a Romer film. Uh and whereas he, as an ex-football player, is kind of a regular guy type. And so even in the beginning of the film, the differences between those characters, I think, uh, comes across in that way. That's true, but it's not clear that they hate each other. That's important. That's important. This is a real marriage with between two people who cared about each other. Yes. Both of those things are happening in this scene.
SPEAKER_01I guess, but then we find out soon afterward that that um his wife Ellen, played by Susan Clark, is having an affair. I struggled with the relationship between Ellen and and Harry in that I didn't quite uh how do you put this, feel as though the tension between them was so great. It felt a it's a little bit contrived to me, a little tiny bit contrived.
SPEAKER_02That's my one complaint. Oh, please. People have affairs. And let me tell you what's thrilling about this affair. Let's remember that this is a neo noir, right? And it is in the Holy Trinity of Neo Noirs, longed by Chinatown, Nightmoves. And each took the approach that was very different. The approach in night moves is to take a private eye and drop him into can you know, have him in the contemporary world where everybody kind of knows what's going on. And that is in the history, you know, everyone has seen Sam Spade movies, for example. Right. Now, here we have a private eye, and this is what puts a lot of the neo, and it's the neo-noir, or really it's more of a revisionist noir than a neo-noir, is he is married. Name me one other pro movie private eye in the noir canon or the neo-noir planet, who actually had a wife. And wait, it gets worse. And then she's cheating on him. Usually the private eye is the one who's to cheat her, not the cheat E. And wait, it gets worse. He finds out about this by accident, not because he's such a savvy detective, but because he just happens to see them almost randomly.
SPEAKER_01Well, one takeaway from this film is that Harry Mosby is a terrible detective.
SPEAKER_02I think we can disagree. I think Harry is really good at connecting the dots. He's really bad at seeing the big picture. He connects dots very effectively. Like when he's going to chase down uh Melanie Griffith, he does, he's very, very effective, going from point A to point B to point C to point D. Very good at that. He never understands the big picture, which is really the whole point of the movie.
SPEAKER_01I I think you're getting a little too much credit there. I mean, it's not as look, he it's not as though uh first of all, this job gets handed to him by another PI, the PI wants to hire him. He uh goes to meet Arlene, we'll get to that scene in a second. Yes. That's that's that's um the mother of the of Delhi who who is the person he's trying to find. And then uh, you know, he he kind of he goes down to Florida because that's where he's told she might be. And guess what? She's right there and he finds her and he brings her home.
SPEAKER_02No, that's not true at all. He has he goes to New Mexico first, and he gets the clue is about the thing. He goes to Mexico first, right. And that's where he learns about the Florida connection. Trevor Burrus, Jr.
SPEAKER_01Right. But I don't know. I don't feel like that's an incredibly impressive detective work. Maybe I'm wrong. Maybe I'm being unfair. Maybe I'm being unfair. Trevor Burrus, Jr. I mean it's not like the mystery of the ages, but you know, he seems to be it's not he seems to be competent at his job.
SPEAKER_02Which is a miscase.
SPEAKER_01No, but he goes to Florida and it's like he shows up at the place where he thinks he's gonna be, and guess what? There she is. Like he doesn't have to it's not like it's a it's a it's an incredibly I mean then again, it's a misimportive thing. Maybe it's not that difficult of a of a thing to have to do in the first place. Also, why he doesn't ask Arlene about like where like is there is there a stepfather or you know it is And to talk about me and giving you information like the fire hose, you've already mentioned Nick.
SPEAKER_02They're already fighting in the art gallery scene about whether he should take the job Nick is offering him. He doesn't want that job. He wants to work as he does in essentially a one-man private eye agency and not in a large institutional successful firm that Nick is running. Again, there's there's a lot of information going on in that strange little early scene between the two of them.
SPEAKER_01It's true. I didn't feel the tension so dramatically. I mean, I was a little surprised when I found that she was cheating. But, you know, I mean you're right. It's handled in a subtle way, and I think that's a fair that's a fair point about uh I mean, there is a lot of subtlety in this movie. I'll give I'll certainly give that credit for that. By the way, I wanted to take this moment to interject a fun fact about Susan Clark, who, the actress who plays Ellen. Uh do you know what Susan Clark's, I guess, her next major acting claim to fame was?
SPEAKER_02I I do. And suddenly a light lightning is going to strike in my head because I now realize what your fun fact is. That suddenly dawns on me. This is a good fun fact.
SPEAKER_01Okay, she was the mom in Webster. Yes. The show that was in the 1980s, Emmanuel Lewis, and her husband on that show was Alex Karras, who is mentioned, I think, twice in this movie. Turns out she married Alex Karis. That was her husband. That is a fun fact.
SPEAKER_02And it's because Harry was a former all-pro football player. Right, right.
SPEAKER_01So he makes a couple of cracks about about Alex Karas, and sure enough, years later she met him and she married her. Uh surprised. Yeah, exactly. Exactly. Well, maybe the character that we don't know, actually. That's true. Because chances are she's, you know, she's single after this movie is over. Uh, although we'll get into that later. Okay, so that is the opening scene of the movie. This next scene of the movie, another great scene actually, is where Harry goes and he meets Arlene.
unknownYeah.
SPEAKER_01What is Arlene's last name, actually? I don't know. Iverson. Arlene Iverson. And Arlene Iverson is looking for her daughter, uh Delhi Grasner, who's played by Melanie Griffiths. And uh she's 16 years old, and she now, why does she want to find her? Is it because she loves Delhi and she can't just wants to have her around? No, not really. It's because there is this trust fund that uh her ex-husband basically left to Delhi, and so she needs her around so she can access this trust fund. Is that am I describing that correctly? Yes, that yeah, I yes.
SPEAKER_02I I say that's fair. I want to give a little shout-out to Janet Ward, who plays Olyman Iverson. She's a New York stage actor. I thought she was excellent in the role. And and Penn talks about how he feels that she was a complex character. And you the way you describe the character and you describe it accurately gives her a the kind of two-dimensional quality that you would often see in a film noir or a neo-noir. But I find her a little more complex than that. Like all of the characters in this movie, they come in almost as stock characters in a noir film, but they actually, from my eyes, have a little more depth to them. And much later in the movie, she really has three scenes. And her third scene, her final confrontation with Harry, um, Penn talks about how she thinks she got her side of the argument in well. And and and I agree with him.
SPEAKER_01I agree. I mean, I think the first two scene scenes of the movie, she kind of comes across as a caricature. Right. And in the third scene, you see a little bit more depth to who she is.
SPEAKER_02Let's just give a shout-out to one of my favorite lines in this movie. In the second scene, she's like in a robe or something, and she said she was, you know, just getting out of the tub or something, and maybe he'd like to take a bath. And and and Harry says, Maybe sometime later when I'm feeling especially dirty. Yes. Yes, that's a great line.
SPEAKER_01And you know, Arlene is somebody who is, I think we could say very sexual, somebody who uh uh is always trying to seduce men and feels a sense of competition actually with her own daughter. Because we find out in the next scene, which is when uh Harry goes to New Mexico, that sh that Arlene and Deli, who again is 16 years old, have been sleeping with the same person, which is this guy named Marv Elman, who is a pilot and stunt man.
SPEAKER_02Yes. And also, you know, she's given a little backstory. I mean, the reason why she's Arlene Iverson is because she was one of these young women who made their way to Hollywood and essentially tried to sleep their way to the top. And she did marry this kind of second-rate producer, and that's where all of her money comes from when they they separated and and she got this, you know, inheritance or trust fund of her deli. And and it's you know, it's it's just a little more filled in, I think, than is often the case.
SPEAKER_01Aaron Powell Yeah, no, it's true. I think you're right. She's actually really good in this role, and she sort of plays the kind of like aging Hollywood starlet role pretty pretty effectively. Aaron Powell So the next thing that I mentioned is when uh Harry goes to New Mexico. No, why can't remind me again, why does he go to Mexico? What is it why who who leads him to go down there to see uh this guy named Joey Ziegler, who's a stunt man coordinator?
SPEAKER_02I think the character played by James Woods was an affiliate of Deli, Melanie Griffin's character, and he questions him and tells her that she had a dalliance with that stunt man on location, and that's what sends him down there, but not before I think he pays someone else a visit.
SPEAKER_01He pays Quinton a visit, you mean? No. Am I forgotten? No, I think he plays uh Oh, oh, he pays uh Harris Eulin a visit. Yes. The man who's sleeping with his with his uh his Now you know what? I'm just gonna turn this over to you because you know this movie, Inside and Out. Talk about you love that scene. This is a basically a scene where he confronts Harris Eulin. By the way, interesting uh thing I I discovered, uh Harris Eulin's character, uh Marty Heller, uh has a uh a cane.
SPEAKER_03Yes.
SPEAKER_01And I I think I you know, one implication about this is that it's like it's really like sort of uh the fact that sh that his wife is sleeping with somebody who's I hate to use this word, but crippled, right? Which like it almost is like a an attack on his masculinity. My understanding is that Harris Eulin actually did have a leg injury. Yes. And it happened after he'd been brought on for the role, and uh Penn didn't want to get rid of him, so kept him on, and even though he had this, this, this, you know.
SPEAKER_02Yes. So this is thrilling. I was so excited that he walked with the cane. I thought this was all part of the revisionism that not only is Harry being cheated on, but he's being cheated on, you know, by by a man who's uh with a cane, and that is a signifier of reduced masculinity. And I had the opportunity to interview Arthur Penn, and so I said, Oh, you know, what a brilliant idea about the cane. And Penn said to me, Yeah, he he was in an accident not long before the shooting of the film, and so he was using a cane. You know, this that was totally that was one of those happy accidents, I think. And it's it's a really interesting scene. Actually, there are two scenes. You kind of skipped over one of the two scenes that this movie is about.
SPEAKER_01So I'm gonna do this very well you're you're right. I really I got ahead of it because you have the you have the the interaction with Harris Uland. Yes. Who by the way, but Ed movie does not have Kane anymore. That's just gotten better. Yeah, the interaction with Harrison. And then you have the the after that when No, no, no. Actually before that, sorry. Uh when Hackman uh the night after the movie, Ellen comes home and they have this interaction where he has one of the great, great lines of the movie when he's watching a football game, she comes upstairs and she says, Who's winning? And he says, Nobody, one side is just losing slower than the other. Right.
SPEAKER_02And I think again, this gets to your argument about the marriage. This is she is reaching out to him there. She's just been with her lover, but it's he's feeling pretty bad because he's kind of finally figured out that she's having an affair. Um, but she she is trying and failing to make a connection with him. She says, you know, do you want to come downstairs and watch? Can I make you some hot chocolate? And he kind of grunts and grumbles and sends her on her way. And you get the sense that there's been a larger breakdown in their communication and that she is coding this as that because she doesn't realize that she's upset because he corrupt her in her affair.
SPEAKER_01And then again, but I don't, you know, but if you compare that with the other interaction where they seem to be in a much like better relationship, like it does, it does speak to the fact that, like, you're right. I I don't really buy her as as she doesn't despise her husband. She's she's clearly not getting enough from him, I suppose, but that is not obvious to me. It's obvious in that scene, but that's because he's he's hurt because he found out she's having an affair.
SPEAKER_02When she talks about the affair, and we'll get to that in two scenes, she talks about it in a way that still reserves a place for strong feelings for Harry. But first I want to say the interesting thing is he goes to uh Marty's apartment, to Harris Eulin's apartment, and they have this unbelievably fascinating conversation. You know, he's asking Marty about their relationship, and Marty says, Well, what did she say? And he says, I haven't asked her yet, right? And this is something that Vincent Canby made a really cute observation. The movie's called Night Moves with an N, but Canby in his review said that Mosby tends to move like a night, K-N-I-G-H-T, night moves, indirectly confronting his problems. And then, of course, in the movie, there's an essential metaphor with chess that describes essentially what happens in the movie, but on a chess game from 1922. Anyway, he has this wonderful confrontation with Marty. And let me tell you something interesting also about Marty. He has the same nested windows that Harry has. So there's an odd similarity between them, but it's also yet another theme of the movie, because what those nested windows do is give you different interpretations of reality depending on where you're standing, different points of view. And at one point, Marty even says, I think I'm beginning to get you into focus, Mosby. And so these, all these kinds of things, there's a lot of shooting through glass and perspectives and points of view that are very important. And then Marty also kind of has the confrontation with Harry, so he says, Go ahead, why don't you take a swing at me, like you're Sam Spade or something, calling attention to the ridiculousness of it all. Okay, but wait, there's more. So then Harry goes back home, and Ellen, of course, is a little shocked that he hasn't talked to her first. She asks him plainly, why didn't you come to me first? They have an argument in the kitchen, in this incredibly dark kitchen. Big props to Bruce Certes, the director of photography. There's a lot of darkness in this movie. It's really marvelous. I find this confrontation unbelievably riveting between husband and wife. And I think it's one of the- I think it's one of the two scenes that the movie is about. And I would mention that in this private eye movie, there are ten scenes that take place between the husband and the wife. And they have this tremendous conversation where she says, you know, we can't pretend this isn't about you. And he retorts beautifully. What do you mean? You know, I'm not the one who got caught fucking Marty Heller. You're the one who got caught fucking Marty Heller, which is very funny.
SPEAKER_01Wait, but he's also right, by the way. I found I found her attitude after being caught having an affair to be, I don't know, a bit, a bit hard to figure. Like she is sort of blaming him for it, even though she was the one having the affair, and she kind of puts the burden on him a little bit.
SPEAKER_02Aaron Ross Powell No, she is suggesting that while she had the affair and that's her responsibility, that the motivation for the affair was an was a lack of something that was happening in their marriage. And she wants to talk that out, and he doesn't.
SPEAKER_01Well, I, you know, but I I I didn't Okay, that's that's that's fine. I didn't I I read it more as her not really even apologizing or even take like taking full responsibility for it. My sense of that scene was that she was acknowledging the affair, but that she was sort of putting putting the burden in some measure on him. I mean, I do think he had a point when he said that to her. Yes, he does.
SPEAKER_02It's hilarious. But but it's an incredible confrontation, and she goes at it with him, you know, and they have this big fight, and they get into the whole thing about Nick's job, and Harry's, you know, she's saying the job that Nick offered you had security. Again, there's there is an economic aspect to this thing of her being a kind of upper, upper middle class type, uh, uh, and him being a kind of working class type, and that's a real difference in their relationship. And he gives a big speech about how he doesn't want Nick's fucking job, right? He he likes doing what he's doing. And then she counters, you know, talking about the ridiculousness of his job. Then they throw the glass in the sink, and you have the grind, the sink grinder, so it gets very loud, and they're yelling at each other. And then you have two beautiful, beautiful lines that are about this relationship, where she screams, you know, turn that off, I can't hear myself think. And he says to her, Do you remember what he says to her at that moment? Uh something like it must be nice or something like that. He says, Lucky, lucky you.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, lucky you, right, right.
SPEAKER_02Which is so beautiful because what he's saying there, of course, is that he can hear himself think all the time. And it's not pretty, right?
SPEAKER_01And then the other I well, but actually I I thought he was talking about the affair in that in that moment. Maybe maybe it was not universal.
SPEAKER_02Watch the way he says lucky you. It's not an accusatory line. It's the line of someone who wishes, they didn't always have to hear themselves think. Yeah. And then she then she has funny.
SPEAKER_01That's really interesting how we can both we'll see that. And I I complete I no, I absolutely saw that moment as him saying, lucky you that you don't have to sort of deal with what I've been dealing with for the past whatever it is, number of days that I realized you were having an affair. Like I that's how I read that. Like it I felt it I felt it absolutely it was accusatory.
SPEAKER_02So that's the magic of the movies at the end of this bravora scene in which she says to him, Harry, I think if you came to me first, I would have told you. And he says, and again, this is the writing here is so good. Well, I guess we'll never know now. Yeah, exactly. Exactly. And you know, film noir usually has an A story and a B story that converge. Here, the A story is the mystery, but the B story is the relationships, and the B story is actually what the movie is about, and the A story is essentially irrelevant.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, that's fair. I think that's fair. I think to your point, uh, one of maybe our divergence on the film is that you're very focused on the story about Harry Mosby and his relationship with his wife, relationship with Swim Paula. We'll get to her in a second. And I mean, to me, that is a the you know, the most compelling element of the film. But I do think that the A part, the plot, gets slightly shortchanged, not slightly, it gets very shortchanged, and it actually ends up uh to my at least for me, undermining the B plot a little bit. Because I can see a movie in which the plot doesn't make lessons, I don't care so much, but I do need to have at least some something that's logical and something that I think I that I if you're investing my energy in trying to sort of uncover this mystery, I want it to be somewhat of a um not just believable and credible and not feel contrived. And it it it doesn't f it that's how it felt to me.
SPEAKER_02To me, I can follow it. So and we'll get to that as we work through the the end of the movie. But I think for the filmmakers, it was really all about, you know, it's not about the investigation, it's about the investigator. 100%.
SPEAKER_03You know.
SPEAKER_02So that I think Penn was said to not in not in my discussions with him, but in other interviews, he said, in a traditional detective movie, there's a problem and it needs to be solved. And he said, here the problem is internal and there is no solution.
SPEAKER_01There's no solution. I mean that in that sense, this is a very uh very 70s. Yes, very new Hollywood movie. In that in that sense. I mean it reminds me a little bit of um we talked about shampoo, about sort of the conclusion to that movie as well. There is there is no sort of solution for uh for Warren Bayscape, there's no solution for for Harry Mosby.
SPEAKER_02Yeah, so but now he does have to go on the case and make his way from New Mexico to the Florida Keys. Where he's he as you say, rather rather handily tracks down Delhi and meets up with her f step her father or step no stepfather, Tom Iverson. Right. Tom Iverson and um and also his paramour and partner Jennifer Warren. Paula, who's Paula. Played by Jennifer Warren. Very, very special and important in this movie.
SPEAKER_01I personally I found the Florida scenes in the movie some of the most compelling scenes in the entire film, in large part because of Jennifer Warren, who plays Paula, you mentioned her a second ago. And uh I think she's wonderful in this movie, and I think she's sort of a very enigmatic character, to put it mildly, and a relationship between her and Harry is kind of fascinating. We also in Florida meet uh Melanie Griffith, who plays Deli Grasner. This is like we just need to just we need to briefly just uh um touch on this because when this movie was filmed, Melanie Griffith was uh I believe 16 years old, right? She was underage, and I've heard the story, although I'm not sure it's completely true, that this film was the release of it was delayed until she turned 17 or 18. Um I'm not sure how that actually makes it okay if she was actually 15 or 16 when the film was shot, but whatever, it's the 70s. I found the scenes uh there's a lot of nudity, uh not a lot, but there's like three or four scenes of nudity of Melanie Griffith. I found that uh gratuitous and probably unnecessary, particularly the scene where she is scuba diving, or not scuba diving, she's snorkeling. I didn't understand why she had to be naked in that scene. They're just I I know, look, I know it's this it's it's the 70s and like uh sleeping with underage girls was somehow not as frowned upon as it would be as it should have been or would be today, but I did feel like it was a little bit much. But that's just my perspective. I'm curious what your take on that is.
SPEAKER_02Well, I think the movie does frown upon it because it's her stepfather that's sleeping with her, leading to one of the great lines in the movie in which he says to Harry, Well, you've seen her. There ought to be a law. And Harry responds very quickly with There is.
SPEAKER_01There is, yeah. No, it's a great line, but but I but just to push back a little bit, you're right. There is, it is point out that what what is happening is wrong. It still doesn't stop Arthur Penn from from repeatedly showing her naked. And I and I know that her character is supposed to be a seductress, somebody who like gets men to sleep with them. But like I didn't I don't know that it was essential to show her naked so many times. Because there's a scene, for example, where she takes a shower and it doesn't show her naked. It hints at it. I'm not sure why there was couldn't have been more of that and and less of the you know full frontal scene of her naked underwater.
SPEAKER_02So for me, this kind of rolled off my back for a number of reasons. One is I can give you the underwater boat scene as being gratuitous. The others, which amount to three or four seconds, I found to be kind of glimpses. And I do think it was valuable to establish her as this young seductress. And we should also remember that this was not scandalous or unheard of in the 1970s. There were many, many films that showed late, you know, teens, uh especially topless, on screen. And so I'm I'm a little skeptical of the idea that the studio suddenly freaked out and held it back because of that, because there would have been 20 other movies that would have had to have hold held back from release were that the case. But again, what I find interesting about um Deli's character is that she's presented to us. As this, you know, little temptress, which uh Hackman's character is so noble as the movie suggests, in resisting, but also her transformation toward the end when she has that scene with the nightmare, and Hackman comes to reassure her, it's quite a beautiful scene. And there's again a series of spectacular lines in that scene, especially from Hackman to Delhi, that are are very moving and powerful. And so again, I think almost like the Arlene Iverson character, she's presented to us initially as a stock character, and then she reveals a depth that we otherwise hadn't previously seen.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, actually, I I was about to make that comment, and this is uh one of the things I love about this film. I mean, this is a minor character, Delie Grasner. And yet in that scene, you really do see the uh the uh the depth of her character because earlier she's presented, as you said, as a stock kind of seductress who is 16 years old and is boyslash man crazy and wants to sleep with lots of men, and and like her mother, seems to find power in sexual conquest.
SPEAKER_03Yes.
SPEAKER_01And yet with with Hackman, when she realizes he's not going to sleep with her, she actually sees him and and he to her as a father-daughter kind of relationship, which she clearly has not had in her life. She didn't get it from a mom. I mean, I mean a parental relationship. She didn't get it from her mom, she didn't get it from Steph or that's for sure. He was sleeping with her. And she gets it very briefly from from Harry. And it's a lovely scene. It's also one that I really respect about this film. It actually showed her character who's on screen for what, maybe 10 or 15 minutes? Yes. It gave her a well-roundedness that you don't usually get from a character like that. I think it's great, actually.
SPEAKER_02And it also has that last scene with her in Florida, has some beautiful foreshadowing when she asks him, as she's sobbing in bed, if he ever ran away from home, and he says in a very telling line, Me and my parents, we had a different arrangement. Trevor Burrus, Jr. We had different arrangement. Exactly.
SPEAKER_01If you see the movie more than once, I think is it's a profoundly moving line. Aaron Powell And doesn't she also say like that most people suck, but you're pretty good or something. Something along those lines, right? The other thing that happens in Florida is the interaction between Paula and Harry. Now, before we get to that, let's just let's just point out that one thing that happens here is that they go out into the water. And I'm not sure why did they go out again? I can't even remember. They go out at night to do some like night fishing. I don't think it was motivated. Okay. And in doing so, Adeli jumps in the water. She discovers this crash plane. Which is, by the way, a hell of a coincidence. Hell of a coincidence. Because she happens to know the pilot who we met earlier in New Mexico named Marv Elman.
SPEAKER_02Less of a coincidence, but yes.
SPEAKER_01Less of a coincidence, yes. And she freaks out. And this is a this is a crucial moment of the film. By the way, I've seen for the record, I've said this film a number of times. I think it wasn't until the second or third time that I realized that that was Marv Elman in the plane.
unknownTrevor Burrus, Jr.
SPEAKER_02And I want to concede the point. If there's one the most massive coincidence in this movie is that the boat would stop there and she would dive under it and get onto the plane. Absolutely. You could drive a truck through that coincidence.
SPEAKER_01Aaron Powell That's a a bit of what you might call a contrivance, I think. Absolutely. Absolutely. So they get back to the uh to the where they're staying. There's a really odd scene. You know, Delhi is very shook up, she's upset. You see uh um uh uh Paula supposedly calling the Coast Guard to tell them about this this crash plane, which of course she's not actually doing, but we'll find that out later. And then we see her and Tom and then they start dancing. Yes, drinking and dancing. What did you make of that scene? I found that one of the more confusing scenes in the movie. It's a very strange scene.
SPEAKER_02Um and I don't have a super confident explanation for it. I know that um Jennifer War Paula, her character is is very, very thrown by by what's happened. And I know that she and Iverson know that they have a problem on their hands because that plane is involved in some daring, you know, some some duplicitous activity that they are involved in, and so this presents a small crisis for them. But her behavior there is odd.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, I found it strange. And actually, I I jumped ahead before we even get to that. There is a moment before this scene happens where before they go on the water, where Paula and Harry are talking, and you can tell there's a spark between the two of them. There's a there's an immediate flirtation. Um and you see Harry um playing playing a chess game. Can you just sort of talk through the scene a little bit?
SPEAKER_02He shows Paula uh a moment from a famous match that is the movie, which is that Black had a mate and he didn't see it. Three little night moves, interestingly enough. And he shows them to her. And you know it's important to the movie because he shows them to her twice. Twice. And she says, Oh, that's a beauty. And Harry says, but he didn't see it. He played something else and he lost. Must have regretted it for the rest of his life. I regret it, and I wasn't even there. That's the movie.
SPEAKER_01I wasn't even born yet. And she says, Yes, that's no excuse. I found that line very cryptic. That's no excuse. What do you think she meant by that?
SPEAKER_02I didn't take that line seriously. I thought it was a throwaway line, and I was just hanging on on what we were being told here about what was going to happen in the movie.
SPEAKER_01That is really Harry's character in a nutshell. No, Harry does Harry doesn't see that his wife is cheating on him. Uh he doesn't see a lot of the outlines of who's involved with this this plot that he uncovers. He doesn't see that when uh Paula comes to him, we'll get to the scene in a second, to sleep with him, that she's really just trying to distract him because Tom has gone out to the to the to crash to figure out if he can bring up the Mexican art that's in the water. So he just misses everything. He misses a lot of stuff. But let's talk about the scene because I think this is probably I don't know, my favorite scene in the movie when Paula, she comes to him and you know, the interesting thing, by the way, do you notice this that he is looking at her through the screen? And there's a lot of s of images in this movie of Harry looking through something to see what's like he's looking, there's a scene uh in the cars and they're he she is looking through the window at him. Yes. Um the scene about in Har in Harris Ulan's apartment where you see the the mirrors. There's a lot of this kind of this idea of of Harry is is is his view is distorted. Exactly. Yes. Yeah. A lot of that.
SPEAKER_02A lot of that's the principal visual motif of the film.
SPEAKER_01Absolutely, yeah, of course. So I want to just she comes to his so she comes to him, she's standing outside looking at her through the screen, and I want to just there's a great dialogue here. I'm just gonna read it to you because it's to me it is the essential dialogue of the movie, maybe the essential dialogue of the new Hollywood. So Paula says, Where were you when Kennedy was shot? And Harry says, Which candidate? And Paula says, any candidate. And Harry says, The president got shot. I was on my way to San Diego football game. When Bobby got shot, I was sitting in a car waiting for a guy to come out of a house with his girlfriend, working on a divorce case. One of those times I wish I was in another business. Exactly. Oh I mean, I can actually say that this is a great movie from that piece of dialogue alone. It's that fucking good. Because I read it and I'm curious for your take, but my take on this was like when John Kennedy was shot, there was hope. There was, there was a goal that we were working toward. There was that we were going to a football game. We were going, you know, there was the expectation of what could happen. When Bobby was shot five years later, he's sitting in a car, he's idling, he's not moving forward, he's treading water, he's staying in place, he's working a divorce case. It's something that he hates. He wishes to do something different. It's the it's the death of hope in America in the 60s. Uh that's how I read it. And it sort of explains how we got to where we are in the early 1970s.
SPEAKER_02Yes. If there's one thing that Sharp and Penn agreed upon, it was that that was what this movie was about. Sharp's original strap screenplay was called The End of Wishing. And Penn thought this movie was about the mourners of the Kennedy generation. And Penn worked on both of those campaigns and saw in this movie him processing his own sense of grief, not necessarily about the Kennedys, but about what had happened to America. So take, I don't disagree with anything you just said, but if you just walk with me for a minute and say to yourself, what if Harry is America? Absolutely. Then you have then you have, and I love the way it's the president and Bobby, because I think that's the relationship that these people had with those two figures. A much more kind of personal one with Bobby. And he's not just a football player, he's an all-star football player. He was in all-star games. And when he and when the president was shot, he was on his way to play a football game. And and when Bobby was shot, he's just some crummy detective working in a divorce case, you know, wishing he was doing something else. That's the trajectory of America over the kind of five-year period. It's it's devastating.
SPEAKER_01100%. And I what it's funny, um the second or third time when I saw it, I I really had to stop and go back and watch it a few times because I just was kind of blown away by it. Uh, I think you said at one point there was some line that made you gasp when you saw it. I don't maybe gasp, but it had like it had like a similar effect. I'm like, wow, that's a great line. There's a lot going on in that particular piece of dialogue. Um, as I said, I think it it sums up a lot of the attitudes uh of the new Hollywood. So from that point, Paula and and Harry have sex. That is an interesting scene. I know you have some thoughts about how that is handled. So maybe you want to jump in.
SPEAKER_02So I have a lot of thoughts about that, but again, this may this may present a crisis for us. I just want to preview for you and or something. As we hit hour two of the podcast. Because there are there are two scenes we really need to do. We need to do that scene, and we need to do Harry's subsequent scene uh in the bedroom with his wife later on. And then you want to try and figure out if this plot makes any sense. So that's three big things we have to do. So one thing to know is that I interviewed Jennifer Warren as well, and she said to me that she did not go into that um into that room duplicitously. That yes, she was there to divert Harry from Iverson going out to take care of the boat stuff, but that she went in there sincerely and interestedly in her attraction to Harry. So that's sort of interesting. And then, and here's the really exciting part. That scene was much, much longer. And it involved um an elaborate love scene, and it involved something that was off-the-scale risque for even in the even in the mid-1970s. They don't show it explicitly, but Harry goes down on her and it's elaborate. And in the throes of her passion, she goes on for paragraphs about Bobby Kennedy. Why? I don't know. But that's what she does when she's extremely aroused, apparently. Anyway, that monologue is reprinted in Sharpe's novelization. It's the only part of the monster, right? It's the only part of the novelization I admire so that we can have a record of that speech. And then that was trimmed down radically. Why? Why was that trimmed down radically? I think it was because it would have shifted the balance of power too much toward Harry's relationship with Paula and away from his relationship with his wife. When I asked Warren about that, she said Arthur would never say things like that. But when I asked Penn about it, he said, I don't, you know, I don't, we put it in, we put it out. Dee Dee, D. Allen, his most important collaborator, the editor, um, could not make up her mind. That is not true. D Allen wanted the entire scene in, and she has said that in interviews. Really? Sharp wanted the scene in. Penn cut the scene and he said to her, I wanted to keep them ungrounded. It would have been too much closure to have that whole scene in there. And I personally feel that fits my balance of power theory. That the scene between them would have been so powerful and intimate that it would have thrown us toward a bonding between the two of those characters that we couldn't recover from.
SPEAKER_01So I'm gonna go, I'm gonna agree with you and go a step further. Because to me, the shot that I absolutely love is you hear Delhi scream, but he runs to see her, to, to, to, to, you know, soothe her, to comfort her. And this is the the moment when we have where he acts like a father figure to her. He goes back to his room where uh Paul is gone, and he uh looks around, he looks outside and nothing is happening. He sees nothing. I loved that moment where he this is how clueless Harry is, right? He he just has this intimate moment, he has this sexual interaction with with with Jennifer Warren, and then it's it's over, and he comes back and he is as as adrift and as confused and not see the big picture as he was before.
SPEAKER_02Yes. And we're also in like minute 15 of Glorious Night for Night at that point.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, that's there's also that too. There's also that too. But I thought the I thought the whole visual of him coming back, and you know, Penn spends some time on it of Hackman trying to sort of get his bearings and failing to do so. He doesn't know where she is. And on the one hand, it's like the the the text is looking for her. The subtext is that he's just looking for some sort of you know ballast and he's not finding it, and he's and he's as adrift as he was before. So I do think that that is, you know, really kind of a wonderful moment uh in the film. But so, so that so long short of it after this happens, he ends up bringing Delhi back to LA.
SPEAKER_03Yes.
SPEAKER_01And I don't know, do you think uh the film loses a little energy, I think, at this point, because we're sort of it's it's a bit trying to figure out kind of what's gonna happen next. And, you know, he goes to see Arlene, he uses that lot, the great. Do I have this right? Is that is that the next thing? Yeah, actually, me you know way better than I do. So tell me if I'm skipping over something here.
SPEAKER_02No, I think that scene occurs earlier because the when after he returns her, it's just that unhappy scene where the the family's kind of all screaming at each other and Quentin is there. Yeah, right. Right.
SPEAKER_01They're all screaming at each other. Yeah. Uh yeah, Quentin is there. Um uh then, you know, uh he goes to see Arlene. I guess from that point on, Harry, he quits the PI business, right? He uh does what what what what Paula asked him to do. And then you have this Ellen, sorry, Ellen. And then Ellen comes to see him at his office, and they they make up right by going to bed going back to bed with each other. And I know you love the scene in the bedroom, so I'm gonna pass it off to you.
SPEAKER_02Right. So this is the second most important scene in the movie. The first one is the kitchen fight. The second one is this bedroom confrontation, I'm gonna call it. And what's fascinating about the bedroom scene um is that again, we're post-coital, so we don't we don't actually see them um have sex or anything, but they're kind of again snuggling and stuff as they go along.
SPEAKER_01Well, they're not snuggling because they're actually lying across from each other, right? She's lying at the at the top of the bed, he's lying at the bottom of the bed. And by the way, he's having fondue. Very 70s.
SPEAKER_02Yes, 70s fondue. And they're talking and he recounts the story. You don't think it's a good private eye, but he recounts the story of how he tracked down the father who abandoned him, and it's a very elaborate story. And then, you know, she had heard the story before, uh, but there's a new twist to the story, which is that originally Harry told her, and this has to do with their communication as a couple, that he met his father and they spent a week or 10 days together. Uh, in the story Harry tells now, he approached him, saw him on a bench, reading a newspaper, and then slipped quietly away. And then again, she confronts him and he says, Why haven't you told this to me before? And he puts his fists on his face, he covers his eyes, and this is all about the relationship between them and their communication. And this was, again, as you know, I only believe in seeing what you have in front of you. But I think the backstory here can be informative to tell us what was important to the filmmakers. And we know this important this scene was important to the filmmakers because they did 40 takes of this with the camera right at the bed, with both actors there, and Penn pounding his fist on the floor saying, more, more, more, and they kept shooting until Hackman said, I don't have any more. And Susan Clark, who loved working with Penn, said it was a grueling, grueling experience. And they sh and they stopped production uh for the day after that, and they drank some brandy and took the rest of the day off. But that scene obviously was important to the people who are making this movie, and it was essentially the breakthrough scene between those two characters in which they are sharing intimacies with each other that they had never shared before. And this gets back to the whole thing about what is this a marriage worth saving? And interestingly, and again, Clark and Warren agree with this. Penn thought it was, Sharp thought it wasn't. And so that's why there was this tension in several of the scenes that Penn insisted be rewritten. And so I do think the kitchen scene, bookended by the bedroom scene, if you think about this movie more about the marriage than the mystery, these become the two essential scenes in the movie. And by the way, having the director scream more and more and more for 40 takes and having both actors exhausted and dropped to the floor afterwards, that's all I'm asking for in a movie.
SPEAKER_01That's all you're asking for in a movie. You know, it's fair. That's fair. Uh I think it's the scene after this we find out that Delhi has died in a in a car crash on a movie set. Yes. Uh the character I mentioned earlier, who was in uh New Mexico, uh John Ziegler, who was played by uh Joey. Joey, Joey Ziegler, sorry. Played by uh Edward Edward Binns. Yeah. Um he uh he was driving a car, there was an action on the set, Deli was killed. Um and Harry goes to watch the the um the film from the accident. Because it's a failed stunt. He's a stunt manager. It's a failed stunt, right? It's a failed stunt, exactly. And we see certain clues that lead us to think that this maybe wasn't an accident. First of all, we see that Quentin, he is back. Harry is beginning to wonder whether he messed with the car somehow to cause the accident. By the way, do you this is actually something I'm really curious about. Do you think that Quentin did mess with the car?
SPEAKER_02This is the whole point of the movie, and that is we cannot know. It's almost like the aliens talking to Woody Allen. These are the wrong questions. I mean, what's what's thrilling about this is they have the footage of the crash, and then and then Ziegler says there's also a B-roll, a second camera shooting. Right. So we have shots of the actual accident from two different angles, and yet we don't know exactly what happened. That again is one of the many points of the movie.
SPEAKER_01Well, actually, I was gonna raise the point with Quentin is because he is killed in the movie. Yes. Uh spoiler alert, sorry. But he the question is did he mess with the car and did he mess with the plane? Yeah. Because the plane, there is there is a uh a thought that because he is working on the plane uh earlier in the film and he's angry at Marty Ellen because Marty punched him out. So does he mess with the plane to kill Marty? And I know this is not a matter of all that much.
SPEAKER_02I'm gonna go full spoil alert here, if if I may. Please go. So, yes, Harry builds the whole town hall of his case around Quinton. Quentin could have fixed the car, Quinton could have fixed the plane, Quinton, Quentin, Quinton, he's at the center of it. Then they walk into the hallway and he's sharing with Joey his theory that Quintin is the main man, and it all adds up in Harry's mind. And Joey Ziegler, in his with his broken arm and walk on crutches and everything, and he does seem sincerely sad that Delhi is dead, says, Look, Harry, I did it. And what he meant is what he says literally is, look, I was driving the car, the car crashed, it's by fault. But also, while Harry's making this little theory about Quinton being the bad guy, the actual bad guy is standing next to the middle hallway and announces, look, Harry, I did it. I mean, and and this goes way up.
SPEAKER_01This whoosh, Harry doesn't come close to getting this. It's a great point. He's I mean, he's saying I did it as if to say I drive the car. Right. But actually, he seems to be the person who set all of these events in motion. Yes, definitely. And so he's kind of if you the the that there's text and there's subtext. The text is he's saying I'm driving the car. Right. Subtext is I'm the bad guy.
SPEAKER_02Yes. And if you were a better detective, you might grasp this. He might have grasped it. In your defense. I think Harry's a good detective, but I well the small picture question.
SPEAKER_01I'm critical of Harry, but not on this point, because the fact that that that Joey is the bad guy. Yeah, which we find out at the end of the movie is so unexpected, and I still to this day do not understand how he's the bad guy. I can tell you. Uh we'll get to it. I want to hear this. We will get to it. Um so okay, so Harry confronts Quentin, he blames him for Barty's uh Ellen's death, he blames him for Delhi's death, he escapes, uh, and Harry goes to Florida. Before he goes to Florida, which we do have to get to, yes, there is a pivotal moment in the airport with his wife, Ellen.
SPEAKER_02Do you want to take over from here? Sure. But let's remind ourselves we're in a revisionist noir, and so once Delhi dies, the code of the private eye requires him to pick up the trail. It's exactly his responsibility. He must look into this. Whereas Ellen doesn't want him to. They have that confrontation with the two cars pointing in opposite directions, and then she does go to the airport with him. And again, Sharp's original scene as- Whoa, whoa, whoa, before we get to that, yes.
SPEAKER_01I just want to I want to go back. The scene with the two the cars are going different directions. Yes. Great metaphor, by the way. Yes. He says to her, I have to go. And she says, why? So you can pretend you're solving something.
SPEAKER_02Yes, exactly.
SPEAKER_01Exactly. By the way, we're talking about. But that's Penn's point. It's solving something. I know, I know, I know. Wait, hold on. I'm going to agree with you. The whole movie is basically every character suggesting that what Harry does for a living is ridiculous. And I did read some quotes somewhere where Penn said he thought private investigators were kind of stupid and it was, he thought it was a a terrible profession. Not really a fan, but that it is to your point about the revisionist noir. Like they, the entire movie, every character is just shitting all over Harry, not just him personally, but what he does for a living.
SPEAKER_02Yes, but also because he's failing to understand that what he should be doing is participating in a little deeper introspection, that right, that the mystery is internal and that the external mystery is not important. Not important to Harry or to the movie. What is it, Paula says to him later, you're asking the wrong questions? No, she says, Do you do you ask all these questions because you you want to know the answers or because you think you're supposed to, you know? It's like Right.
SPEAKER_01That's earlier. But I think later she does say to him, You're asking all the wrong questions. Well, yes, I think she does.
SPEAKER_02Yes.
SPEAKER_01Right. She uh your point that you're right, she does say that earlier. But that's when he asked her what she did for a living, and she has a great, great line about how I did some I did some teaching, I did some tending house, I did some stripping, I did some hooking. I mean, it's a great, it's a great line. And he says, and then he pushes her and he and he says, like, you ask questions you think you're you think you're supposed to. Right. Again, everybody is just making f fun or or diminishing what he does.
SPEAKER_02Aaron Ross Powell, but also everybody has a backstory, and Paula's has a little feminist edge to it about the opportunities available to her as a woman in that setting over the last hundred years.
SPEAKER_01Right. And again, another example, she's in the movie for a little longer than Delhi, but not for a huge part of the film. But you get uh a good sense of her character as well. I mean, I give Alan Sharp and and Penn a lot of credit because they really do flesh out these characters. Yes. Not just Harry, but like these smaller characters in the movie. But I want to go back to the airport scene because there's a great line uh that I I flagged, and I know you love this line uh where they're talking about their their relationship.
SPEAKER_02So as originally written by Sharp, and uh it was just a goodbye scene, and it suggested they were done and never gonna get back together. But again, Penn believed in the marriage, Sharp did not believe in the marriage, and he said, no, write it this way. It's all Sharp's writing. And and so it's rewritten that they're going to reconcile or or leaves open the possibility for reconciliation, where she says that line, if you don't go, you can't come back. But Harry's kind of stumbling, and he's still talking about seemingly the affair with Marty Heller, and he's saying, Listen, I understand that when we're both feeling lonely, that sometimes, you know, we reach out to other people, and and and and then she's talking and they go back and forth, and he says, essentially confessing his own affair with Jennifer Warren, he says, you know, when I say we, I didn't mean, and she says, in a beautiful, beautiful line read, I know what you didn't mean. And the first time I saw that, I literally audibly gasped out loud because I was so impressed. That is movie writing, because it's a line. I know what you didn't mean is six words. And yet it's paragraphs, it's you know, it's it's chapters. It's an incredible line. And so it also balances a bit of the scales uh between them and also again leaves open, at least for for me and Arthur Penn, the possibility that there is a marriage here that that can be salvaged, especially after the breakthrough in the bedroom scene. But instead, you know, Harry hops on the plane, goes back to Florida to quote unquote solve the mystery.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, I mean, there's lots of ways that scene could have been handled, him admitting the affair, and to have it be, you know, I know what I know what you didn't mean is just a wonderful turn of phrase, actually. Um okay, so Harry goes to Florida, he comes to the um to the um you know, where Tom Iverson and Paula live. He finds Quentin dead in the water. I assume Tom Iverson killed him. Yeah. Uh and then he pulls his gun on on Iverson and Paula.
SPEAKER_03Yeah.
SPEAKER_01And we have this ridiculous. Actually, I like this fight scene. Come on. This whole sequence is a ridiculous bloodbath. I agree. But here, let me say this. And this is a very okay, this is a re I know this is a tangential point, but I want to get I want to get it in here. I like a fight scene where they show the people who are fighting exhausted. Yes. I actually, okay, this is a there's a movie that I know you have not seen. It's called Atomic Blonde. It's with Charlie's Theron. It's set like uh Berlin, like 89 when the wall's flying down. It's not a very good movie, but there is a fight sequence in this movie that is insane. But what I love about it is at the end of the scene, the two people are so fucking exhausted, they can barely stand up. I mean, I that's that's what would happen in a real fight. I love when they do that. And what I like with the scene is that both of these guys are like flailing each other and they're so tired and they're they're barely making contact. And at the end, you know, Tom runs up to Hackman and he Hackman gets out of the way and he runs his head into a post, and we assume it it kills him. Although he wasn't dead at the moment, he was still breathing, but I don't think he had lawn to live.
SPEAKER_02He was left for dead, but in post-production, because even Penn thought too many people were being killed in this movie, they looped a line saying he's still breathing. But it's ridiculous. He's dead. James Woods is dead, dead, dead, dead, dead, dead. I'm telling you, the laugh is lovely. Everybody is dead. It's a bloodbath.
SPEAKER_01And a pointless one. A point, yeah. I I that's no. Listen, I I I like that scene only for my like you have your thing about you like violence to have consequences. Yes. I like when there's fights in movies to be like real. All those punches you're taking, it does take a toll. It does take a toll.
SPEAKER_02In 48 hours they did that.
SPEAKER_01They were both, they couldn't even lift. Yeah, that's a good one too. That's a good one also. Exactly. Um, anyway, so Paula and Terry go out into the water to where the crash was. Right. Paula makes a uh, I would argue a a in um bad decision, which is she finds Harry's gun and she just tosses it in the water. Uh-huh. Sure, but you can understand why, but yes, but yes. But a bad choice. And so the dialogue between uh uh Paula and Harry is great in this moment. And I mean, that that is where she says to him, you're asking all of the wrong questions, which is I think a great setup for what comes next. Yes. This is where the movie uh kind of lost me a little bit. I I I have some nitpicks here and there. This ending is so bizarre. Yes. I just it's bizarre. Yes. So what happens Paula um um goes scuba dives down to where this basically these guys were smuggling like Mexican Pre-Columbian art. Pre-Columbian art.
SPEAKER_02You get a little hand tip toward that at the very start of the movie in Nick's office. Yes, where he shows him one.
SPEAKER_01Yeah. And and Harry makes a reference to Alex Karas. Uh so she goes down to the wreck to pull up this what turns out to be enormous, like statue, whatever it is. Yeah, probably worth a fortune. And as she's doing this, a plane begins circling over, and we recognize it as Tom Iverson's plane, and we realize, well, Tom Iverson, he's probably dead, so what the who's the hell is flying the plane? The plane comes in, the guy flying the plane fires a machine gun. I'll get to this in a second, and Harry wounds him in the leg. Yes. And then just like a truly horrific death scene. Absolutely. With Paula. Totally gratuitous. Devastating. You know, gratuitous and like shows a lot more than I think needed to be shown to get a big thing. It's a bloodbath. It's a bloodbath.
SPEAKER_02It's a bloodbath.
SPEAKER_01Basically, Paula comes up from the ocean. She has, of course, turned in the wrong direction, which is convenient. Uh, and this this plane, which is a seaplane, lands on the water and then speeds up and basically runs her over. I don't know. Well, Harry is desperately trying to warn her and fails to do so. Fails to do so. I don't know if that's really how if you could really pull that off, but whatever. The the plane uh you know brains her, and then but then the then the bottom of the plane, the part that lands on the water, hits the statue, the plane goes off and sinks into the water. By the way, I want to say for the record, I'm actually really curious to know how the hell they pulled that off. That's a hard stunt in the pre-CGI era. Yes. What you have is the plane hit the statue, the bottom part break away from the plane, yeah, and the plane sink. I how do you think that's been something? I haven't read up on that, but that must have been a lot of work. I was really impressed with actually that that scene. That was not easy to do. And as the plane is sinking, Harry, there is a it's a glass bottom boat, looks in the in the in the boat of the boat.
SPEAKER_02Through transparencies, as always.
SPEAKER_01Yes, that's right. And who is in the plane but Joey Ziegler? Yeah. Now, here's where I'm just gonna say bastard. What? All right, let me just let me step back. I want to I want to do this for dramatic effect. What the actual fuck? Why is Joey flying the plane? And here's a better question. This guy had broke his arm. He had one of those casts where you have a bar, so your arm is extended. So his arm is extended. Yeah. He's got one hand. Yeah. Somehow he is flying a plane with one arm, but not just flying a plane, he's flying a plane while also firing a fucking machine gun with the one hand that he's able to use. How is that possible? Hard to believe. Maybe he did it with his knees, the way you can do that with a car for a few seconds. Yeah, I don't know about any of flying planes, but that seems unlikely. Uh and he's like gonna dive when he's doing it, like the plane is diving down. Utterly ridiculous. I poked a lot of holes we did in the Marathon Man episode, uh, all the plot holes. I I can't leave this one. This is absurd.
SPEAKER_02I I found the whole scene the fact the flying of the plane or the whole the idea that he's doing this.
SPEAKER_01Both. Why is he? Okay, thank you.
SPEAKER_02Can you explain to me why Joey Ziegler is doing this? Because he thinks that his entire illegal smuggling operation is going to be exposed by Harry.
SPEAKER_01So why does he kill Paula?
SPEAKER_02I don't know. Maybe he didn't intend to kill Paula. Uh, it depends on how you read the purpose of the plane there. But also Paula has kind of with Harry kind of at this point. So she may be on Team Harry more than on Team Joey. But again, I'm not it's it's the what the movie is reaching for and maybe too quickly and taking shortcuts is this ultimate nihilism. I mean, it's definitely the smuggling plot. Ziegler is definitely, you know, everybody's, you know, James Woods gets killed, you know, Iverson gets killed, killed, killed, killed, killed, killed. It's uh well, Delhi had to be. Dil Delhi had to die. But the others were, you know, un you know, they were just knocking. It drives me crazy when the movie propels forward by knocking off all the characters at the end. I don't have a lot of pictures. That's what this movie does. It kills everybody. Trevor Burrus, Jr. It's it's lame. Absolutely. But we think about that. Okay. But but the plot makes sense to me. I mean, the the- Explain the plot to me.
SPEAKER_01What the fuck happened? I wait, again, it's responsible for the smuggling operation.
SPEAKER_02Yeah, he's the chief smuggler. He's working with he's working with Iverson, and Marv Ellman is one of his crucial allies in this. They're they're in New Mexico, so they have access to Mexico, to old Mex, as they called it in Pike Aaron the Kit Billy of the Kid, pretty easily. That's where they funnel uh the pre-Columbian art from. They use Marv Elman's plane to drop it off in Florida, where it will go on its future v voyage to wherever they're going to smuggle it off to from there. So they're all they're all in on the operation. And that's why they couldn't tell the cops about Marv Elman's plane being crashed, because Marv Elman probably had on that particular plane.
SPEAKER_01Well, we know he did.
SPEAKER_02They pulled up at the end. Exactly.
SPEAKER_01But here's the here's my question. Why then does Joey send Harry to Florida? Why does he tell him to go there to find Delhi? Well, I don't get that. Trevor Burrus, Jr.
SPEAKER_02Because all he thinks because Harry wants to find Delhi, and all he thinks he's gonna do is find Delhi and bring her back, which he would have done. You think he's gonna say, oh no, Harry's gonna uncover my whole evil smuggling ring?
SPEAKER_01Yes. I I mean uh he was worried enough about it that he killed him at the end of the fucking movie.
SPEAKER_02At the end of the movie. But let's let me make let me let me go all Nixon for you and make one thing perfectly clear. You know, the original plot was about drugs, and and Penn said, I don't I'm not doing a drug movie. Make make up some other crime. I mean, that's that's really what this boiled down to. Make up some other crime. It has to be It has to be about Harry getting it all wrong, failing, and not understanding what happens to him until the last minute when it's impossible for him to do anything about it.
SPEAKER_01No, I get that point. I mean, I do thought I thought the scene would when it's interesting because he's looking down through the glass bottom and he sees Joey, and he's like, what the actual what is he doing here? Which by the way, I also thought it was weird. Joey is looking at him like, what are you doing here? Yeah. I I maybe unless I read that scene wrong, but it's hard to tell he's underwater. But like it almost felt like he was surprised to see Harry there. Like, I don't I I'm not quite sure why that would be, but but I get that the idea you want to get across is that Harry is missing the big picture. But the big picture, it felt tack like it felt contrived. It didn't really make sense.
SPEAKER_02Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I think it adds up. I just don't think it makes sense. Meaning I think I understand what everybody can you explain that sentence? It doesn't add up, but it makes sense. How does that work? Aaron Ross Powell Meaning I think all of the behaviors of all of the characters is coherent in that there's the smuggling ring, here are the participants in the smuggling ring, here's the behaviors that they choose to make. That happens and unfolds at the end in this way is absolutely ridiculous. Aaron Powell Yeah, okay.
SPEAKER_01And one more thing, by the way. One more thing I'll just point out. This guy's got a broken arm. Yeah. He's flying a plane. I know. He is shooting a gun while flying a plane with a broken arm. Couldn't he just wait back at the pier for them to come back, shot them, took the how is he gonna get the art out of the water, also? I mean, I'm sorry. It makes no fucking sense. Like it's just bad criminality. And I I have and I I'm I'm sorry. Like I do like this movie, but like this just was like, what is happening? That's was my response when I saw this the first time and every time since. Having said all of that, the final shot of the movie, right? Which is that Harry is trying to start the engine and he can't reach it. Yeah. He's just it's just slightly out of reach. Yes. And he realizes he's fucked up. And you have this great uh aerial shot of the boat going around in circles, a perfect metaphor for Harry's journey, if you will, not just through the movie, but in life. Great shot. But but I I'm sorry.
SPEAKER_02And I'm that's fine to our friend that's no problem.
SPEAKER_01To our friend Mel uh Mel Weinstein who left a comment, he said, you know, I don't understand what happened at the end. You and me both, Mel. I I don't it it's very confusing. And I and I get that like Ziegler is the guy running this operation, but everything about what he does here doesn't add up. Aaron Ross Powell Right. But you I think you're mixing what and why.
SPEAKER_02So I'm confident I know that's that's what I'm saying.
SPEAKER_01No, no, no, I'm not. I know what you're saying. Go ahead and say that, but but I know what you're saying.
SPEAKER_02But that is all that I know as for what is happening, I think everything's crystal clear. As to why some of those choices are made, as you have pointed out with with some vigor, that is a little less clear. With some vigor. But that but that you know but that gets us back to the main point of the movie, which is Harry gets it wrong, right? He had it in his hands, he played something else, and he lost. And when he realized what had actually happened, it was too late. And so he's there, he is going around in circles. And to close, we just have to I I this is not important to Arthur Penn, and I happen to know it's not important to you, but followers of this movie are obsessed with knowing whether Harry lives or Harry dies. Again, Penn says it doesn't matter. The only thing that matters is whether Harry comes to understand himself. Um, but it's it's incredible how advocates of this movie feel passionately about this. But I don't know.
SPEAKER_01He seems like a I think he might bleed out. Oh my God, he's dead. He's I I don't really care. I don't think it matters at all. And for the record, I assume he's dead. Uh you know, he gets shot in the leg, he has no way of getting out from where he is, he he doesn't have a gun or a flare. He's he's he's a goner.
SPEAKER_02But those of us who live with this movie just just can't bear that thought, even though by all logic, he's he it's gonna be hard for him to survive.
SPEAKER_01Yeah. The better question is does Ellen uh end up with Marty Hell? That's the better question. Oh, if only there was an epilogue that established that for him. Exactly. I was saying, I mean, but the thing is that, you know, the I just think there is a way to make this point in a less ridiculous way, right? Like I can imagine a scenario in which the boat comes back to the pier, you know, Joey is there, he shoots Paula, he shoots uh Harry, and then Harry like drives away in the boat and the boat's going in circles. You could have done it that way. I just think there's a way to do it. Like I love the vi don't be wrong, I love the visual that they captured here off the plane. But I just didn't think it was it just I thought it confused things. And it fee it feels a little bit I'm trying to think of the right word for it. Gratuitous? I don't know. It just it just I I had an issue with it. I think it's what it comes down to.
SPEAKER_02I think we're in mostly agreement here. If you take the very end of the movie, which is Harry looking through the glass and seeing Joey, and then Harry going around in circles, preserve that. Okay, I'm keeping that. And you take it and you take the 10 minutes that occurred before that, Harry arriving after talking to Ellen, arriving in Florida, finding Quentin, you know, fighting with Iverson and all of that, that 10 minutes, for me, that is easily the weakest ten minutes in the movie, and they're just hurrying, hurrying to finish up at that point. And I do think it's weak.
SPEAKER_01I agree. I think that for what it's worth, that it undermines the movie for me, obviously, more than it does for you. Right. I I I and I still really like the movie. I think it's great. I think there's a lot of good things in this movie. I just I don't know. That that when I I said to you at one point that the plot bothered me, and you're like, plot doesn't matter, and I take your point on that, but I you've got to at least throw me a bone. Throw me a bone. And I feel like this movie threw me a monkey wrench, and I and I, you know, it just it it annoyed me. But I wanted to step back and say, having said all of those things, this is a wonderful movie. This is a movie that you should watch. And by the way, this is a movie that you cannot watch once. It uh uh unfolds over multiple viewings. And I think because first of all, because the dialogue is so good, I do think you have to savor some of these moments of the dialogue. I don't know that you can do it the first time. I like every movie you should see more than once, probably. Yes. This movie you should probably see about a dozen, half dozen to a dozen times probably is would be would be best.
SPEAKER_02Yes, and and you know, as you as you know, I could have talked about this movie for another hour and 45 minutes. So As we enter as we enter uh hour four of the podcast. So I I do want to close where I began, which is a sincere apology to to both to Michael and to our listeners. When again, when I talk about this movie, I am like just a fire hydrant. The the water is just coming out in a torrent and it can barely be contained, and and it's it's that is my my weakness.
SPEAKER_01Okay, I'm gonna use this opportunity as we're finishing up to just remind people to subscribe to the podcast and also to buy a skip of coffee, because I can tell you that between now and when this episode comes out, I'm gonna spend so much time editing this podcast to get into workable shape. And uh, you know, help me out here. Come on, you know. If ever, if ever there was a time to buy a cup of coffee or subscribe, you know, this it would be it would be from this episode because this is going to be a Herculean effort on my part to get this into workable shape. Because this is a long, long conversation. The fault of which is entirely mine. I I own that. You know what? You share the responsibility. Um So, can I mention one last thing before we go really quickly? I know we talked about a lot of stuff. The scene with Arlene at the end of the movie. Oh yeah. Beautiful. This is a great scene. And she I I by the way, this is about we haven't talked about it. I haven't mentioned Arthur Pet as much. I don't know if I love the direction of this movie. This scene is shot from this like faraway vantage point where you never see a close-up of Arlene. You see her in a distance and you see it from behind Harry's like shoulders, or it's from his perspective. I just love this idea as kind of like Arlene is you see her as like a protagonist in the first two scenes she's in. You see her as somebody who has agency. And then those last scenes you see here is a pawn in this larger game.
SPEAKER_02I love that. And that shot of Hollywood, again, I think it's contextualizing her character. And the her character's life trajectory. And as I said earlier, in a normal movie, he would come and ball her out and get the better of the argument. And here they go toe to toe, and it's not obvious to me who who leaves with the upper hand. I kind of feel like she does a little bit. Exactly, but that's that's non-traditional. Nontraditional.
SPEAKER_01All right. Uh well, look, this is a great film. If you haven't seen it, you should watch it. We've, I think we could probably do more of them if we really wanted to, but I think we're gonna we're gonna just leave it there. Uh I'll just say for the record, also, we've praised Gene Hackman in the past. We loved him in the French Connection, we loved him in the conversation. He is really great in this movie. He's great in every movie I think he's ever been in. I love Gene Hackman. He's one of my favorite actors. Um, and this is a beautiful, nuanced uh performance from an actor who just I don't think ever got the appreciation he deserved as just one of the great one of the goats of American acting in the last like 50, 60 years.
SPEAKER_02And a few things illustrate his skill as the fact that this and the conversation he made back to back. And those are not what you would call similar characters. And didn't he do that?
SPEAKER_01Didn't he do French Connection right before that? No, French Connection 71. Right, right, right. That's right, that's right. Um still Hackman, he's the best. All right, guys. Well, this was fun. Uh thanks for listening. Please subscribe if you haven't already. Please leave a comment. We've gotten something like 45 uh um reviews or on I think Spotify. We'd love to hit 50, we'd love to hit 100. So if you haven't left a review, you haven't given us a like a rating, please do. And please subscribe. It helps us, it helps you because you'll know when the next episode is out. Uh buy us a cup of coffee, and uh, you know, thanks for listening. We had a great response to last week's episode for Jaws, and uh, you know, hopefully we'll have the same for this one as well. So, Jonathan, good to see you as always. Yeah. Have a great week, and uh see you guys later. Bye-bye.