until 1975, Night Moves had the misfortune to follow Roman Polanski's Chinatown (1973), Robert Altman's The Long Goodbye (1973), and Francis Ford Coppola's The Conversation (1974) into cinemas it emerged during a glut of so-called "neo-noirs" (among these, Dick Richards' Farewell, My Lovely, Stuart Rosenberg's The Drowning Pool, Robert Benton's The Late Show, Michael Winner's The Big Sleep, and Walter Hill's The Driver) films that recalled the postwar noir thrillers but with a contemporary edge. Shot in 1973 on the tail of a writer's strike and unreleased by Warner Bros. (In the interim, he helmed a segment of the 1973 Olympics documentary, Visions of Eight, filmed in the aftermath of the massacre of Israeli athletes by Arab terrorists during the 1972 summer games in Munich.) Night Moves represented a departure from his earlier focus on lawbreakers - the folk heroes of the Left-Handed Gun (1958) and Bonnie & Clyde, the convict-on-the-run in The Chase (1966), the Turkey Day litterer of Alice's Restaurant (1969) - and focused instead on a tired Los Angeles PI (Gene Hackman) juggling professional and personal mysteries. Penn had absented himself from narrative filmmaking (in truth, from creative endeavors of any stripe) for several years, hot off the success of Bonnie & Clyde (1967) and Little Big Man (1970). Sharp's script had been named as a coy reference to the Universal Pictures executive building, known in the industry as The Black Tower in reworking Sharp's original scenario, a mystery set between the strangely complementary milieux of movie-making and artifact smuggling, was to emphasize a telling bit of business in the script about chess playing and the inability (or disability) of its detective hero in seeing the move he should have made. One of the first things that Arthur Penn did when he inherited the Alan Sharp script The Dark Tower from the director-producer team of Sydney Pollack and Mark Rydell was to change the title to Night Moves (1975).
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