TT 335: NIGHT MOVES and THE LAST RUN

Guest post by Ray Banks: "Dead Men Walking: The Noirs of Alan Sharp"

EI: Ray Banks is a wonderful crime writer and engaging critic. After I sent him my piece on 70’s car movies, Ray returned the serve with some insider info on Alan Sharp, the writer of The Last Run. Until Ray pointed it out, I didn’t realize that Sharp also wrote Night Moves. Most 70’s crime film buffs cite Night Moves with regularity but the more obscure The Last Run is also a fabulous watch.

I commissioned the following piece specifically for Transitional Technology. Ray Banks and Alan Sharp are both Scottish, so that’s one natural affinity; more generally I just want to read as much Ray Banks as possible.

For my New Years’ Resolution I vow to pay more attention to screenwriters. Sure, I've seen some movies. Sure, I have opinions. But I still tend to cite directors and actors more quickly than screenwriters.

These two classic films are stamped with the voice of Alan Sharp. Sharp uses the blunt tool of a crime story to dig deep.

Dead Men Walking: The Noirs of Alan Sharp

by Ray Banks

By the end of the sixties, Alan Sharp was done with the life of a novelist and had gravitated to screen work, honing his screenwriting skills with a number of television plays before making the big leap to Hollywood. Of the five spec scripts that would make his name in the United States, three were westerns and two were crime thrillers. These two genres represented the core American experience and, for Sharp, “the two most interesting film forms,” taking place before and after the “Fall” of modernity. They were the yin and yang of drama: the western story put primitive man in conflict with a hostile environment; the crime thriller featured modern man in direct struggle with himself. And Sharp’s timing was perfect. Old Hollywood was about to become New Hollywood: established stars were willing to take a chance on riskier material to stay relevant, while the new breed was searching for off-beat personal stories that would resonate with a wider audience. For both parties, the genre movie became the go-to form of expression, and Sharp was ready for them.

Sharp tended to describe his screenplays of this period as pastiche, but this apparent self-deprecation belied his obvious love for Hollywood. This was, after all, the adopted child who was so enraptured by the movies that he chose “Humphrey Bogart as my father and Katharine Hepburn as my mother.” It’s entirely possible that Sharp used the word “pastiche” in its technical definition – this was a man who could drop the word “threnody” into a sentence without blinking – but while many European writers could only explore American genres in theoretical terms, Sharp was a fan. He had not come to bury genre film, but to praise it.

The Last Run was Sharp’s first foray into American crime and it ostensibly follows the usual timeworn beats of classic noir: retired getaway driver Harry Garmes is pulled into one more job after nine years of self-imposed exile, chauffeuring escaped convict Rickard and his girlfriend Claudie from Spain to France. There are naturally double-crosses, shootouts, car chases, and an ending that promises a close-call escape to a better life but delivers instead bullet-riddled corpses and blood on the sand. It is a movie that could have been made during the noir heyday, which is one of the reasons why it almost died in production.

The first director to be attached to The Last Run was John Boorman, who had just come off the critically appreciated but commercially disappointing Leo the Last and was undoubtedly feeling obliged to return, at least in part, to the genre that had originally made him bankable. But while Boorman had the iconoclastic Alexander Jacobs to help with Point Blank, Boorman and his co-writer William Stair would struggle to rewrite Sharp’s script to Boorman’s satisfaction, and both men would leave the production shortly afterwards.

Meanwhile, the original script had fallen into the hands of George C. Scott, who jumped at the chance to make the kind of classic gangster picture he’d loved as a boy: “I was brought up on movies – they kept me off the streets and out of the pool room. I found myself walking down the street like Cagney and doing his famous spring-heeled glide; or even adopting the explosive technique of [Edward G.] Robinson.” Furthermore, he had a replacement director in mind, one he’d worked with before on The List of Adrian Messenger and The Bible: In the Beginning: John Huston. Who better to direct a classic gangster picture than the man behind Key Largo and The Asphalt Jungle?

Huston was in need of a commercial hit after the triple failure of Sinful Davey, A Walk with Love and Death and The Kremlin Letter. When producer Carter DeHaven brought the script to London, Huston declared, “It’s a natural. I don’t want to change a word, I love it,” before following up with an ominous “there may be a couple of areas we should discuss when we get into it.” And Huston wouldn’t “get into it” until the night before principal shooting was due to start.

Sharp’s initial excitement at working with the man whose African Queen had brought his fantasy parents into his world was quickly cooled as the “real sadist” Huston set about rewriting his script with the help of his longtime assistant and his son: “I’m not one of those guys who feels, ‘It’s my masterpiece, nobody must touch it’ … What gets me is when they come to me and say: ‘I don’t know quite what it is I want, but that isn’t it. Give me something else.’ And then when I give it to them, I see the director, the director’s assistant, even the director’s twenty-year-old boy play around with it until they’ve got it all screwed up – no characterisation, no motivation, no nothing – and then they come back to me again and they tell me that won’t work, we can’t use this, try giving us something else. That makes it pretty damned hard to function.”

Sharp wasn’t the only one with reservations about Huston’s tinkering. Tony Musante, who played Rickard, was astonished to learn that his character – an otherwise straightforward hoodlum – was now an epileptic and had a scene where he capes a bull at a local fiesta. This latter addition was a typical Huston hobbyhorse embellishment, much like the fox hunting scene in The List of Adrian Messenger, and Huston took great pains to demonstrate the proper form for Musante, mostly as a show of machismo. Scott was also growing annoyed with the veteran director. As per Musante: “About three or four days into shooting, George and I are sitting in the car used in the film, and he says to me, ‘Have you read the new script?’ I said yes, and he asked me, ‘Do you like it?’ I said no. He said, ‘We gotta do something about this.’”

It wasn’t just the script. Scott and Musante were working well together, but Huston had also cast Tinto Brass favourite Tina Aumont as Claudie, who was struggling to keep up. Scott complained that Aumont’s eyes were working (whatever that means), but Sharp was more candid: “She couldn’t act, it was as simple as that.” So Scott decided to take it upon himself as star to protest, which he did in his own idiosyncratic way: he got drunk and disappeared from set.

This was standard operating procedure for George C. Scott. He frequently played the drink-and-disappear card when he felt things weren’t going well – his theatre career is littered with missed performances as revenge for poor reviews or uncomfortable work environments. As he once told Rex Reed: “There were times I got frightened. Things weren’t going right so I went out and got shitfaced. That’s me. Something goes wrong, I find a bottle. I don’t like it about myself, but I’ve done it before and I’ll do it again.” Huston was not sympathetic; he saw Scott’s drinking as a moral weakness and a personal affront. He was John Huston, damn it. He’d been hired to deliver a John Huston picture and that’s exactly what he planned to do. Unfortunately for him, a John Huston picture didn’t quite boast the same prestige, nor was it a guaranteed hit in the new market of the 1970s.

After a number of delays and late-night scheming sessions between Scott and DeHaven, the decision was made: the original script would stay and Huston would be on the next flight out of Spain. Tina Aumont was also sent packing, Bonnie Bedelia demurred, and Claudie was finally recast with Trish Van Devere, a choice that would have significant personal ramifications for Scott – he was already acting alongside his third and fourth wife Colleen Dewhurst, and Scott would start an on-set relationship with Van Devere that would lead to his fifth and final marriage. But there remained the question of Huston’s replacement and the third director of The Last Run.

Richard Fleischer had neither Huston’s pedigree nor his associated baggage. He had just wrapped on the Mia Farrow thriller See No Evil in England, and agreed to work with Sharp on revising the existing script back to its original story. While Fleischer is typically referred to as a journeyman director in the most pejorative sense of the word – thanks mostly to his lumpen work on Doctor Doolittle – he was exactly what the beleaguered production needed, a softly spoken professional who believed in getting the job done on time and within budget. Once Fleischer took the reins, he managed to triple Huston’s pace and complete the shoot in eight weeks, only a month over schedule. No small feat, considering the production was interrupted yet again by the media circus that descended on the set in the wake of Scott’s refusal of the Best Actor Oscar nomination of his work in Patton.

The Last Run opened in July 1971 to a box office dominated by resurgence of the mawkish moneymaker that was Love Story. Review were largely negative, citing a fuzzy plot and apparent disregard for the building blocks of a good action movie, the blame landing squarely on both Fleischer (with the caveat that he was a last-minute replacement) and Sharp. And while Fleischer’s direction is strictly shoot-the-script with occasional music, critics missed the point of the script, which was, according to Sharp, “an attempt to use the melodramatic crime chase to deal with whatever the hero’s preoccupations might be.” Judging The Last Run by action movie standards is a mistake, because the film is less a gear-crunching, tyre-smoking actioner than it is a character study of Harry Garmes. Scott thought of Garmes as a hero in the Bogart vein, “a lonely man who suddenly commits himself to an impossible undertaking and, usually, winds up face down full of bullet holes,” and this is a fine summary of the Garmes plot delivered by an actor for whom the verb was all, but it doesn’t define who Garmes is.

Sharp’s characterisaton is both simpler and more interesting: Garmes is “a man with limited comprehension of existence … He’s the first-stage prototype, I suppose – a kind of clearing of the undergrowth in terms of trying to write the romantic hero.” In short, Garmes defines himself almost entirely by action, a further distillation of the kind of characters seen in the work of Jean-Pierre Melville and Jean-Patrick Manchette. As Garmes says to Monique, the middle-aged whore who represents the closest thing to long-term romantic attachment he has in the wake of his failed marriage: “I’m driving again for me. Because I’m getting ready to die sitting down here. I’m driving again to see if my brain and my nerves are still connected.”

Driving is the only thing that appears to give Garmes satisfaction, the BMW Cabriolet his only repository for true affection. Driver and car are inexorably linked; both are older models with plenty of miles on the clock, both can perform with a little cajoling, and the BMW’s breakdowns and eventual write-off at the hands of Rickard mirror Garmes’s own physical decline at the end of the film. Even Garmes’s death is punctuated by the death of the BMW’s engine. He is more machine than man, and while this type of characterisation would be romanticised later in the work of Michael Mann and Nicolas Winding Refn, Sharp is adamant that Garmes’s lack of inner life is in fact a type of inner death. For all his hardboiled asides about his ex-wife going to Switzerland to get her breasts lifted, his family life has resulted in nothing but grief and humiliation, and his attempts to become part of the Algarve community a sham – he’s the kind of person that now “doesn’t seem to belong anywhere.” Even his erstwhile faith – “before the Fall, I had shares” – becomes a bitter joke. The film is peppered with Catholic iconography that is almost wilfully relegated to the crumbling walls of dive hotels, and when Garmes goes through the motions of confession – “It’s the only thing I know. It’s for money, but I would like to do it right. That’s all.” – that act of confession is delivered to an empty box. It would be useless to confess to an actual priest; God stopped listening to Harry Garmes a long time ago.

Such a character could make for a monotonous protagonist, but Scott is too fascinating a presence. In his 1969 book The Season: A Candid Look at Broadway, William Goldman described most male movie stars as being stars only from the neck up, with two exceptions: Burt Lancaster and George C. Scott. Both actors, he said, would like murder you if you said something wrong in an irritating enough way, but while Lancaster “would kill you with grace and speed; Scott would brute-strength you to death.” Both actors have a simmering onscreen presence, but Scott’s comes from his struggle between his fundamental hatred of his craft and his brilliance as a craftsman. Playwright Larry Gelbart described Scott as a “closet aristocrat,” a man who glared through his curtain calls, and Scott’s finest dramatic performances are those where you can see him desperately trying to smother his instinctive rage. The compelling thing about Garmes is that he has no inner anything, and yet he still attempts to mask, to play human, in what is ultimately a futile search for connection. What could have been a cipher of a character is now an empathetic, if broken, human being. While Rickard’s final statement about Garmes – “He’s been dead for years.” – is fundamentally true, there is still a brutal fatalism about Garmes’s physical death. Roger Ebert might have wanted Garmes to “have shot the girl as his last conscious act: an act of love, mercy and revenge,” but that would have been a Huston touch, an unearned hardboiled catharsis, and a basic misreading of the character. Garmes is not the archetypal cynic of American gangster movies; he is the irredeemable husk of neo-noir, and a precursor of things to come.

It made sense that after a hardboiled gangster flick and three westerns, Sharp would turn his eye to that other key American genre, the PI movie. And it also makes sense that Sharp would approach the genre from a different angle. According to Matthew Asprey Gear’s comprehensive monograph Moseby Confidential, the germ of what would become Night Moves was not protagonist Harry Moseby, but his femme fatale. During a late sixties road trip across America, the Sharp family encountered a woman named Paula, “a hard-nosed little woman who was very much alone and was having an affair,” who ran ocean excursions in a glass-bottomed boat in the Florida Keys. Sharp pegged the “slightly shop-soiled, self-respecting” Paula as a quintessentially American character, and initially wrote her into a Mexican-set noir adventure called Tepic in the Morning. While the screenplay attracted little interest – Sharp would eventually direct it himself as 1985’s Little Treasure – the character stuck, becoming a key part of a new screenplay, The End of Wishing.

The End of Wishing was written as an anti-thriller, one in which the framework of the detective story is jettisoned around halfway through in order to explore the limitations of heroism, perception, and truth. For Sharp, the late sixties and early seventies were an age of assassinations, Vietnam and Watergate. He saw the turbulence of the times as the growing pains of an adolescent country: “They find themselves in some metaphor for increasing self-consciousness, as the first nation who had ever watched the dailies of a war they were engaged in. They got to see their own war as they were fighting it, which is something that none of us has any perception of.” But instead of clarity, these “dailies” muddied perception even further. Television reality provided no answers; the war was a “crushed beetle”, close-up carnage without context.

Producer George Sherman saw an early draft of the script and immediately sent it to John Calley, then production chief at Warner Bros, who made Sherman an offer he couldn’t refuse: “I can get you Bogdanovich, Penn, or Kubrick. Can anybody at Fox do that?” When Penn signed on, the only person not happy with the situation was Sharp: “I didn’t think the script was remotely up to being submitted to Arthur Penn and felt uncertain about it because it hadn’t resolved itself. But they sent it off, and I went to see Arthur and was astonished, a bit surprised, that he was interested in going ahead with it.”

For Arthur Penn, the script was a dark reflection not only of the times, but also his own incipient depression. He had just finished shooting a segment of Visions of Eight, the official documentary of the 1972 Munich Olympics. It had been a tough assignment – Penn’s original subject, the boxer Bobby Lee Hunter, had failed to make it through the eliminations, so Penn had to pivot to the pole vault. And then, just as shooting wrapped, eight Palestinian terrorists stormed the Olympic Village, killed two Israeli athletes and took nine more hostage. A failed rescue attempt left all nine dead, along with one policeman and five of the terrorists. Penn saw The End of Wishing, now retitled The Dark Tower, as an opportunity to “give voice to our grief.”

Sharp’s uncertainty was tempered by Penn’s enthusiasm, but only up to a point: “Even though I’d done a few movies and worked with a few directors, I assumed that directors were auteurs and that you brought them the material and they shaped it into their vision. It didn’t occur to me in the screenwriting process that Arthur didn’t really know any more about it than I did.” Penn’s indecision would become a key point of contention between the two, especially when it leaked into the shoot.

There was little indecisiveness about casting. When it came to Harry Moseby, Gene Hackman was an obvious and plausible choice as a working-class PI and former football player. He was also a bankable star, having racked up two Best Supporting Actor Oscar nominations – for Bonnie and Clyde and I Never Sang for My Father – and a Best Actor statuette for Popeye Doyle in The French Connection. He was also one of the most prolific actors in Hollywood at the time, appearing in around three films a year in the early seventies. Sharp had originally wanted a James Garner type for the role, but Hackman quickly bowled him over: “Lines that had been written just to get you from one line to the next line came alive with him."

Paula was another matter. As Penn said, she was “a great character, a wonderful character, and she remained intact. But it was tough to cast her. Jennifer Warren was a New York actress, not greatly known. I auditioned a lot of women, and they would have one aspect but not the other. She, finally, was just perfect: smart, sexy, not self-caring. She got it.” Warren was excited to be a part of The Dark Tower: “It’s not often that you go into a shoot and within the first couple of days everybody is telling everybody how much they’re excited about the script.”

The excitement didn’t last. The shoot, which took place in late 1973 in Los Angeles and the Florida Keys, was not a happy one. Hackman, never the easiest personality when working, was frustrated by Penn’s insistence on what he thought was unnecessary coverage and the length of the shoot – “I’ve been on location for fifteen out of the last eighteen months. The only thing that could help me now is plasma.” – while Sharp was busy dealing with a failing marriage, as well as the realisation that Penn was still searching for the story. “I got the impression that he basically acquired a lot of excellent footage and then retired to the safety of the editing room with Dede Allen and made his decisions there,” said Sharp. “I thought he would be more on the set doing it.” Warren was also disappointed in the minimal direction from the so-called actor’s director and Penn’s refusal to engage in scene work, telling her he’d only direct her if he thought she was doing it wrong. In fact, the only satisfied party on the humid set were the mosquitoes that ate cast and crew alive.

Penn remained insecure about The Dark Tower even after the first cut. He and Sherman apparently screened an early cut for Penn’s Hollywood friends and fellow filmmakers, after which the primary note was that Harry Moseby was an unsympathetic lead. Penn decided to act on it, attempting to rework the movie, now titled Night Moves, into a marketable picture with a classic detective hero front and centre. Most of the cuts were to previous embellishments around Moseby’s character that had made him more jealous and aggressive, some were to tighten the pace, and one change – the penultimate fight between Moseby and Tom leaves Tom alive – actively helps with the surprise climax, in that we expect Tom to be the one opening fire from the plane, when in fact it’s Moseby’s old pal Ziegler. The most contentious edit of all was the decision to cut down a sex scene between Moseby and Paula, in which Paula delivers a thematically important monologue. This angered Sharp: “It was the first time I had ever been creatively offended working in Hollywood … That decision to cut it offended me. I felt it was really very weak of Arthur. More to the point, it improved the film in no real way.” Sharp had already seen an early cut and voiced his concerns, mostly around pacing and coherence, but it began to feel like Penn had reverted to a wilful mishandling of the material by attempting to force it into the very genre Sharp was deconstructing.

Warner Bros were ambivalent about the film’s commercial prospects, projecting box office of around $2.5 million against a $4 million budget. Initial marketing that presented Night Moves as an action thriller didn’t help, and within a couple of weeks of release Jaws would change the marketplace for good. There was some critical acclaim, but a lot of the praise was qualified by suspicion around the execution: were the lack of suspense and muddy plot intentional? Part of this muted response stems from the changes made by Penn; his sacrifices at the altar of marketability had effectively smothered the voice of the movie. That said, the reputation of Night Moves has grown over the years, and it takes a place alongside seventies neo-noir PI movies The Long Goodbye and Chinatown, even if it is the scruffiest member of the triumvirate.

The story is initially simple enough: Harry Moseby is a former football player turned private detective, who begins the film juggling two separate cases, one professional and one personal. The professional is a wandering daughter job – has-been starlet Arlene Iverson hires Moseby to locate and return her sixteen-year-old nymphette daughter Delly (Melanie Griffith in an early role). The personal is Moseby’s own marriage: he suspects his wife Ellen of having an affair. This latter case is quickly resolved: Ellen is having an affair, but not with the man Moseby originally suspected. Instead of processing the personal, Moseby concentrates on the professional. He tracks Delly to New Mexico, where she was seen shacked up with a stuntman named Marv Ellman before she lit out to Florida to live with her seedy stepfather Tom and his girlfriend Paula. Delly refuses to return until a spot of skinny-dipping reveals the wreckage of a plane and a corpse, at which point she allows herself to be taken home. Case closed, at least until Delly dies in an on-set accident. Again, Moseby ignores his marital woes by investigating Delly’s death as murder, which leads him back to Florida, the discovery of a smuggling ring, and Moseby’s stunned realisation that he’s already made too many wrong moves to win this particular game.

The thing that keeps Night Moves from greatness is the very thing that, with a little more commitment, could prove that greatness: its lack of a singular vision. It is, after all, a movie about the limits of individual perception, the discovery of those limits, and the effect on the individual in question. As Sharp put it: “There is no reality for me to tell you about. There is only a reality for you to perceive … Very much of that was a conscious part of Night Moves, but the issue of someone being removed further and further from a central role, the more and more he goes into the narrative, is intentional. Moseby’s impotence is the essence of everything.” Penn’s inability to fully commit to the theme and his retreat into comfortable generic characterisation gives Night Moves a strange, unfinished quality that, were it obviously by design, would have made the film a true postmodern classic. Instead, every compromise is palpably felt.

This isn’t to say that Night Moves is a failure. As Sharp says, Moseby’s impotence is the essence of the piece. He is the polar opposite to Garmes, a man who has arguably too much inner life to be able to see reality for what it is, and a crippling inability to take action when it is most needed. He has retreated behind a shield of masculinity, no doubt informed and developed as a part of a football team, which presents as jocular homophobia, philistinism, and a boy’s-own camaraderie with the very men he should suspect. Hackman’s signature everyman chuckle hides deep reserves of insecurity and emotional damage – he too is an adopted child, who located his birth father and was too embarrassed to approach – and while he does get the opportunity to throw down in the two-fisted private detective way, it never feels true. Moseby is playing the part of a PI, just as he’s playing the part of a confident man. Both impose a simplicity of perception on life – the PI’s job is to resolve the complex, the confident man herds life into a basic set of universal values. Night Moves goes out of its way to prick those performative gestures. The case is perverse in both its relationships and schemes, and Ellen’s affair with Marty Heller is inconceivable to Moseby: Marty is a balding, middle-aged aesthete with a limp, hardly the kind of alpha male Moseby expects to be cuckolded by.

For Sharp, maturation cannot happen without true self-understanding. For all their blustering and brawling, the men of Night Moves all end up dead and ignorant. Paula, as damaged as she is, at least has some understanding of herself. This is why her death, essentially accidental collateral damage in a fight between men, feels more suddenly tragic. As the seed from which Night Moves grew, she arguably a more important character than Moseby – while he carries the theme of impotence, Paula’s character carries the exploration of existential and personal grief. This is highlighted in her cut monologue, in which she details the emotional dissonance of her first sexual encounter against the backdrop of assassination. In fact, Penn’s edits excise most of the heart of Paula’s character, which also happens to be the heart of Sharp’s intended film, and Jennifer Warren’s compelling performance can only counter this so much.

Ultimately, Night Moves can feel as aimless as its last scene, a boat spinning in circles with a wounded man at the helm, but its philosophical intent is laudable, and one which could only have been considered during those few golden years of New Hollywood. Sharp would go on to restore material cut by Penn in his paperback original novelization of the screenplay, the frustrated novelist turned screenwriter doing a U-turn to preserve his original vision. In a cheeky form of reconciliation, Sharp sent a copy of the book to Penn with a note reading: “Do you think there’s a movie in this?”

As for Penn, his depression before Night Moves was exacerbated by it: “It’s been a year, a year and a half of immersing yourself in the misery of a film like Night Moves. I miss my family more. I really do. I feel very lonely during those films. I get so inside that I’m sure I’m a lousy father and husband at that point, because you end up touching personal, painful material.” He returned to the theatre to take on Larry Gelbart’s post-gold rush take on Ben Jonson’s Volpone, titled Sly Fox, with George C. Scott and his new wife Trish Van Devere in the cast, before briefly stumbling into the nightmare that would be Altered States.

Sharp would become a script doctor for a while, eventually leaving the United States after Reagan took the White House and his marriage fell apart. He would end up in New Zealand and continued to write for the screen, though never reaching the same level of acclaim. Of the five screenplays that launched his career, only The Hired Hand and Night Moves have any kind of lasting critical appreciation, and none were commercially successful, but all of Sharp’s original screenplays have the same intellectual rigor and love of genre that mark him as one of the foremost British screenwriters of his generation. While his bleak – and some might say quintessentially Scottish – outlook could only really have flourished during that rare period of Hollywood self-reflection and ingenuity, he largely avoided the screenwriter’s nightmare, shared by Moseby in the novelization: “He lay watching, helpless, as indeed he had been from the start moving through his life by the rules that allowed him to pretend he was in control, disguising himself from his essential plight.”