Word: hackmans
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Harry Moseby (Gene Hackman) is almost indistinguishable from Novelist Macdonald's Lew Archer. Both are wearily honest Los Angeles private eyes, suffering the aftereffects of maimed childhoods but determined to remain loners in a corporate society. Archer's marriage, of course, went on the rocks before we met him, but Harry's is surely heading in that direction. Harry believes his wife (Susan Clark) may be fooling around. He shadows her like a suspect, confronts her like a criminal, and they make an uneasy peace. The main case Harry takes up, however, could have come straight from...
...film offers other pleasures as well. Hackman, the archetype of contemporary ordinariness, is as usual superb in the central role...
...Gene Hackman again. He is already on view, in rather different roles, in Arthur Perm's Night Moves (see above) and John Frankenheimer's French Connection II, and it is a fair measure of the depth and variety of his talent that he has not worn out his welcome. But although Hackman is just as creditable and fresh as ever in Bite the Bullet, he is at odds with material that hardly gives him an even break...
...Night Moves, Gene Hackman is Harry Moseby, also an observer. But the theme here is no private drama or study in paranoia; Moseby's problem is knowing where he's headed. A pro-football player turned private investigator in L.A., he's a failure to his wife, who when she can't reach him cheats on him, almost in frustration. He disrespects himself for hiring himself out on divorce cases, but he can't help it--the step-by-step of the process fascinates him, as though by compartmentalizing experience and solving things he's getting at the root...
Sharp's idea of transmitting this hard-to-pin-down moral environment is to write in punchlines that don't follow: and while Hackman's Moseby is asking incessant questions in his quest his subjects usually answer in strange, unhelpful ways. Sharp has rigged it, inevitably, so the women in the story are the most mysteriously evasive--when there are three or four of these mermaids tossing their hair the technique becomes sexist and tiresome. Worse yet are the strivings for novelistic originality. "Where were you when Kennedy was shot?" asks a character out of the blue. "Why?" queries Hackman...