Word: screenplay
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...Screenplay by FRANK WALDMAN and BLAKE EDWARDS
...fault lies with either script writer Alan Sharp or director Arthur Penn--it seems hard to tell which because their contributions never mesh. The screenplay is crafted and literary, almost pretentious, and it leaves the rest of the picture scrambling below. Full of slightly pretentious lines, the script will drop an enigmatic phrase and the camera won't cover for it--the statement is deserted-with its pants down and the audience is embarassed...
Although the screenplay gives the appearance of being thrown together, it's really striving for a rigidly defined meaning. When Arthur Penn's directing is as appropriately open-ended as it is, then the hinted Wisdom of the script passes by even faster. Penn has a better way of conveying the mishmash moral atmosphere of Night Moves than Sharp's riddling. The director hasn't done anything except a quick segment of the Olympics in Visions of Eight since the days of Little Big Man, Alice's Restaurant and Bonnie and Clyde, and here he's much more easy going...
While Benchley was still trying to whip his screenplay into workable form, Production Designer Joe Alves was dispatched to the East to find a location for the fictional village of Amity. The Hamptons were considered and rejected as "too opulent" before Alves, en route to Nantucket, took a ferry to Martha's Vineyard instead. The island had handsome houses and stark, scrub-pine shore vistas. It boasted a handy harbor with the sort of 180° view of the horizon, all uninterrupted, that Spielberg was looking for. Alves thought the Vineyard was perfect for Jaws. The residents, however, were...
...certitude and the hypocrisy that comes with it. Altman is fearless in his thematic ambitions for Nashville, and it is a good measure of his success that the movie is always fleet and supple, never top-heavy. The director and his talented collaborator Joan Tewkesbury (who also did the screenplay for Altman's excellent Thieves Like Us) find their major metaphor right at the heart of the country music scene and the people who create all those tunes about broken hearts and long lonesome roads. One suspects that what attracted Altman and Tewkesbury to C. & W. was both...