I was reminded of another Gene Hackman character named Harry. Harry doesn't understand, that's for sure, and the last shot in the film, taken from high above, shows him in a boat that is circling aimlessly in the Gulf Stream, a splendid metaphor for Harry's investigation. Something is always turning up to force him to revise everything he thought he knew, and then at the end of the film he has to revise everything again, and there is a shot where one of the characters, while drowning, seems to be desperately shaking his head as if to say - what? 'I didn't mean to do this'? 'I didn't know who was in the boat'? 'In the water'? 'You don't understand'? The plot can be understood, but not easily, and not on first viewing, and besides, the point is that Moseby is as lost as we are. Of course, we could fall back on the old filmcrit ploy, 'we're not supposed to understand the plot.' That worked for ' Syriana.' But in 'Night Moves,' I think it's a little trickier.

I saw it a week ago with an audience at that holy place of the cinema, George Eastman House in Rochester, N.Y., and then I was joined in a discussion with Jim Healy, the assistant curator - we talked for an hour with a room full of moviegoers and we were left with more questions than we started with. It is probably true that if you saw 'Night Moves' several times and took careful notes, you could reconstruct exactly what happens in the movie, but that might be missing the point. Now we have most of the characters on board, and I will stop describing the plot, not so much because I fear giving it away as because I fear I cannot. In Florida, Moseby finds her (played by Melanie Griffith in her movie debut) living with Tom and Tom's lover, Paula ( Jennifer Warren). His trail leads first to a movie location, where he meets a mechanic ( James Woods) who once dated Delly, and then a stunt pilot ( Anthony Costello) who took her away from the mechanic, and then a stunt pilot who says Delly is probably in Florida with her stepfather, the charter pilot Tom Iverson (John Crawford). The man is Marty Heller ( Harris Yulin), who lives out in Malibu, and later Harry confronts him, although in a curiously lukewarm way: 'How serious is it?' When his wife finds out he knows, she makes it his fault: 'Why didn't you ask me first?' He leaves town to work on the case as a sort of therapy. It was kinda like watching paint dry.' Then he stakes out the theater and sees her meeting a man Harry doesn't know. His wife, Ellen ( Susan Clark), asks if he wants to go see ' My Night at Maud's,' but he tells her, 'I saw a Rohmer film once. Harry takes the job but first does a little sleuthing on his own time. Her 16-year-old daughter, Delly, has run away from home, and she wants Harry to find her, although if Harry wants to have a drink with Arlene first, that would be nice.

Arlene Iverson ( Janet Ward) is a onetime B-movie sweater girl who married a couple of rich guys - one dead, the other ex - and must be lonely, because she greets Harry dressed as if she's hired him to look at her breasts. As the movie opens, he is summoned to the kind of client who would be completely at home in a Sam Spade or Philip Marlowe story.

Night moves arthur penn