Here's a modern-day film noir in which you're never sure what's real and what isn't real. There is a possibility you may get tired of guessing and give up on this film 34ths of the way through, as I almost did but it worth finishing. It also was better the second time around The problem is just too many flashbacks. If some of those scenes were not replayed so often, or a few of the many twists eliminated, it would have been a super movie. It still was fascinating in parts. It grabs you, and you can't stop watching to see what the real story is. Along the way, is a bunch of nice colors and some nice film noir-type in the beginning and then during the ending credits.
Harry Moseby (Gene Hackman), a worn-out private detective, is hired to look for a 16-year-old girl who has run away from the luxury home of her mother, formerly a small-time actress in Los Angeles. The more the weary cynic tries to get under the surface of the seemingly simple case, the harder it is for him to find his bearings among the lies and deceptions that surround him. Eight years after the key New Hollywood film Bonnie and Clyde, Arthur Penn and Gene Hackman reunited to collaborate on what was to become one of the most undervalued films of the decade. Like Polanski in Chinatown or Altman in The Long Goodbye, in his revisionist film noir, Penn also allows the 1940s classic genre to pervade the complex reality of the 1970s. The feelings of bitterness and emptiness in the modern Chandleresque protagonist originate not only in the “public” sphere of the strange, increasingly convoluted case, but in his private life as well (boyhood trauma, a broken marriage). As Moseby remarks of a sporting event, “nobody’s winning … one side is just losing slower than the other.”