In my previous post, I marked the passing of Claude Chabrol. Alas, I now have to note further sad news. Last week, on September 28, Arthur Penn died. Understandably, his obituaries all led with some variant of the phrase "best known as the director of Bonnie and Clyde." I won't repeat here the received wisdom on that 1967 film's importance as a taboo breaker and harbinger of the "New Hollywood." For a short recap along those lines, see Dave Kehr's piece in the op-ed section of this past Sunday's New York Times, which focuses on some intriguing contrasts and parallels between Penn's career and that of actor Tony Curtis, who died just a day later. If you're interested in a broader, more in-depth perspective on Bonnie and Clyde's place in film history, check out Mark Harris's excellent book Pictures at a Revolution: Five Movies and the Birth of the New Hollywood (2008).
For me, though, Penn's finest film is not Bonnie and Clyde but a moody detective picture from 1975 called Night Moves. It stars Gene Hackman as a private investigator who takes on a missing-persons case that he quickly solves—or so he thinks until the troubled teenager he was hired to find is killed amid suspicious circumstances, thus sending him, guilt ridden, back on the trail of clues he may have missed. The film is not, as the usually sensible Richard Schickel wrote at the time, "just another private eye flick." Rather, working within genre-convention boundaries while simultaneously subverting those conventions, Penn and screenwriter Alan Sharp offer a thoughtful meditation on the limits of individual perception and knowledge—a theme that foreign directors such as Kurosawa (Rashomon) and Antonioni (Blow-Up) had gnawed on in previous decades. And Penn's treatment of it, I would argue, is just as serious as those of the art-house giants. Decidedly down-beat, Night Moves didn't do especially well at the box office upon release—it was one of many films lost that summer in the churning wake of Steven Spielberg's Jaws—but I'm gratified to see that it has had some real staying power among cinephiles. For example, the current issue of the Web journal Senses of Cinema contains a very interesting article on the film that I recommend.
Penn had a rather spotty career—in late films like Target and Dead of Winter he seemed to have sacrificed his directorial personality for a paycheck—but at his best, or near-best, he was never less than intelligent and provocative.
