Alone in the Dark

I’ve been watching a lot of Gene Hackman movies over the last few weeks, for obvious reasons. I haven’t written about him here because every new piece of information about the way he and his wife died makes it very clear that the last few years of their lives was not spent happily, and thinking about it keeps bringing up the stuff Kate and I went through with her parents over the last decade.

It’s a lot, is my point, and my instinct was to retreat from the news by spinning up movies where he was hale and hearty, stomping through pictures like French Connection II and The Package and Crimson Tide and half a dozen other movies where he played complicated men with either a little too much authority or not enough of it. (Side note: I can see why people didn’t like French Connection II when it first came out, but good lord does Hackman commit to utterly refuting the idea that Popeye Doyle should be anyone’s idea of a hero. Todd Phillips should have ripped this off for his Joker sequel.)

And also, I guess I was waiting for this week so I could write about Hackman through the prism of one of his best performances, in Arthur Penn’s Night Moves. The Criterion Collection had scheduled its 4K restoration months ago, in celebration of the film’s 50^th anniversary; now, it also serves as a memorial.

The remarkable thing about Gene Hackman was, he was a consummate performer but he never seemed to do much acting. He showed up and disappeared into whatever part he was playing; Via Vision’s 2023 Film Focus set of his lesser-known ’70s work feels more and more like a gift. I think about the way Robert Duvall casually explained the key to a compelling performance in an interview years back – “you gotta be you underneath” – and I wonder if he was thinking about his old pal Gene. In picture after picture, Hackman could show up and smile the same tight smile … and it always meant something different.

Hackman smiles a lot in Night Moves, even when it’s clear he’d rather be scowling. That’s how Harry Moseby gets through the day, putting on a cheerful face and pushing slowly forward. A college football hero who works as a private investigator these days, Harry clings to his sense of integrity even as his business slides into torpor and his wife (Susan Clark) embarks on the world’s least clandestine affair. But then this girl Delly (Melanie Griffith), the teenage daughter of a faded movie star (Janet Ward), goes missing, and Harry catches the case, which leads him to the Florida Keys to check on the girl’s stepfather (John Crawford) and his girlfriend (Jennifer Warren), with whom Harry definitely vibes. Delly is there too; it’s a pretty easy job, all things considered. But then people start dying, and Harry has to know why.

The screenwriter Alan Sharp wrote Night Moves as an exercise in subverting the detective picture, and in doing so he created a perfect companion piece to Hackman’s other great detective picture, The Conversation, released a year earlier. Pull back a little further and you can make sense of the story, a paranoid nightmare that slowly extinguishes all hope to end on a note of despair. Both movies turn on the idea that the closer one gets to the truth of a thing, the harder it is to understand. And that’s why Hackman is the perfect actor for both projects: Like Francis Ford Coppola, Arthur Penn understood all he had to do was point the camera at his star and watch him think.

But even then, we get two completely different people: Where Harry Caul is skittish and introverted, avoiding people and relationships for reasons we slowly come to understand, Harry Moseby is a chatty, convivial fellow who knows everybody and can strike up a conversation with anyone; sometimes he'll even get recognized in a bar, which is its own sort of social lubricant. Hackman wasn’t often cast for his warmth, but he was certainly capable of it, and Penn gives him some lovely interludes with Clark and Warren where Harry can put his work away for a bit and enjoy himself. The mystery will still be there in the morning.

And watching that mystery slowly take shape around Harry, its various connections resolving out of the murk of a wrecked seaplane and a sketchy car mechanic (James Woods, who takes a punch real good), I found myself thinking about something Hackman’s French Connection sidekick Roy Scheider says in another big 1975 release: “It’s only an island if you’re looking at it from the water.” Perspective is everything to understanding the story Night Moves is telling, and perspective is something with which Harry Moseby has not been equipped. That’s what makes it a tragedy, like all the best detective pictures.

The murk is even more profound in Criterion’s new restoration – especially in its native 4K, which uses HDR to push up the contrast in the darker scenes and obscure certain images even more than in previous releases of the film. Warner’s initial DVD had a lot of black crush in its night scenes, which the Warner Archive Blu-ray took pains to avoid; the darkness in Criterion’s 4K restoration is much more organic, but also much deeper. Your mileage may vary, but on my projector it was almost too dark. (The stills here were captured from the companion Blu-ray so they’d be easier to see when compressed for the newsletter.)

Criterion’s special edition retains the promotional featurette, “The Day of the Director,” included with the previous Warner Archive Blu-ray, and adds two more archival interviews with Penn from a 1975 television appearance and a 1995 documentary that let the filmmaker say a lot more about the movie and his relationship with Hackman. There’s also a new commentary track from author Matthew Asprey Gear and a new audio interview with Warren.

HDR cautions aside, it’s an exemplary package. Even Greg Manchess’ cover art is perfect, putting a filter of abstraction between Hackman’s face and Harry’s emotions at a key moment in the film. We can’t fully have him. He’s gone away.

Night Moves isn’t the only 50^th anniversary being marked this week. Shout! Studios is also releasing a new 4K edition of Ken Russell’s Tommy, nearly half a century to the week since its theatrical premiere. It’s a beautiful presentation of a movie that is very much of its moment, with all the weirdness and eccentricity that “Ken Russell writes and directs a rock opera based on one of the most elaborate and ridiculous ideas Pete Townshend ever had” entails.

In retrospect, Ken Russell – whose operatic approach to cinema was well-established long before he ever deigned to film a rock-and-roll picture – might have been the only director in 1975 capable of wrestling The Who’s album onto celluloid, building elaborate set pieces for every track on the record and encouraging his cast to try to swallow them whole. You may have vague memories of Ann-Margret and the baked beans, but I’d forgotten how terrifying Tina Turner is as the Acid Queen, and how much of a showstopper “Pinball Wizard” is in the moment, with Elton John’s eyes bulging from behind his goggles.

And of course there’s Oliver Reed gurning and braying throughout, the most sinister comic relief imaginable.

Is Tommy good? I’m not sure. Structurally, it’s a mess – a garbled allegory for the way every organized religion ultimately ends up exploiting the faithful, processed through a haze of Townshend’s self-righteousness and Russell’s own agit-pop sensibilities. But it’s that very alchemy that makes the film such a remarkable object, a container capable of holding both Ann-Margret’s impassioned frenzy as Tommy’s tragic mother and Jack Nicholson talk-singing his way through “Go to the Mirror” like he’s Rex Harrison in My Fair Lady. It’s big and it’s tactile and it’s so, so much, and it’s all shot in a way that defies us to see the seams. It’s Tommy. Those who love it do so unconditionally.

Watching the movie now, it’s also remarkable to see how many other filmmakers would pull something from Russell’s gonzo accomplishment; you can sense Derek Jarman sparking to the hallucinatory intensity of the opening war scenes, and envision Terry Gilliam’s eureka moment as he stumbles into the cinema during “Eyesight to the Blind.” It may not have been ahead of its time, but it told the future just the same.

Sadly, there are no special features whatsoever on Shout’s pristine new 4K restoration, just as there were no special features on Sony’s earlier DVD and Blu-ray editions. This is a shame, because it turns out there was a special edition produced in the UK – a pretty comprehensive one, with a Ken Russell commentary and interviews with Townshend, Daltrey and Ann-Margret. (You can still find the DVDs and Blu-rays floating around over there, though they’re not cheap.)

We do get the most beautiful presentation of Tommy I’ve ever seen in or out of a movie theater, the UHD master capturing the grain and tactility of 35mm celluloid so perfectly I was surprised it didn’t have reel change markers. Obviously, that’s not what happens when you go all the way back to the negative, but an interpositive was used as a partial source, so Shout could have done it if they’d wanted to. Color fidelity and visual detail is almost perfect, right down to the color-separated shimmer of Tommy’s visions; cinematographers Dick Bush and Ronnie Taylor outdid themselves on this one, and it’s good to see their work brought fully back to life.

Shout’s discs do offer a choice of the original Quintaphonic 5.0 and matrixed 2.0 stereo soundtracks, as well as a new 5.1 remix, all mastered in DTS-HD. The 5.1 remix felt a little more modern to my ears, spreading the singers’ voices beyond the center channel and employing the subwoofer for a lot more oomph. But given that Tommy is very much a product of its time, Quintaphonic is the way to go. You’ll want to be completely receptive to this one.

Night Moves is available Tuesday from the Criterion Collection as a 4K/Blu-ray combo and a standard Blu-ray; Tommy is available now in a 4K/Blu-ray combo from Shout! Studios.

Up next: Babygirl and The Brutalist offer very different visions of men who know what they want from the world, Severin’s 4K releases of Antiviral and Delicatessen consider very different dystopias and Paramount’s complete-series set of Star Trek: Lower Decks lets us wonder what we want from Gene Roddenberry’s universe in the 21^st century. See you soon.