MovieChat Forums > Night Moves (1975) Discussion > Why did Delly have to die?

Why did Delly have to die?

posted 10 years ago by starmarker
9 replies | jump to latest

I recently saw this movie and it seems to me that Delly only found out after returning to California that Marv was the pilot of the plane she saw while swimming in Florida. Somebody --maybe Quentin?-- told her this.
So, I'll assume that it wasn't a case of she knew too much.
Assuming she was just a pain in the neck kid to Tom Iverson (and a dangerous sexual temptation too) I don't see why she had to be killed.
What was the motivation for someone--Ziegler I assume--killing Delly?

[–] 10 years ago

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[–] 10 years ago

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[–] Tin_ear 9 years ago

That's (supposedly) the beauty of Noir movies, they're supposed to be downbeat and gritty. In the Seventies more than any other decade, happy endings, tidy endings, and moral victories were out of style. That's what movie snobs will tell you differentiates a "serious film" from a corny Hollywood movie. But that usually just means a main character dies in the end. I think it works in Chinatown but here it just seems like random carnage.

[–] scubadivergeek 8 years ago

<<I think it works in Chinatown but here it just seems like random carnage.>>

Yeah, I kinda agree. It was actually Paula's death that upset me, but then I have a thing for lady scuba divers.😀 At least they came up with a unique way of killing her (run down by a seaplane while swimming back to the boat).

[–] wrs6565 8 years ago

"I think it works in Chinatown but here it just seems like random carnage."

THIS. I saw this movie inexplicably added to Ebert's Great Movies section and had difficulty finding it and got it eventually as a birthday present figuring I'd stumbled upon another Chinatown or The Long Goodbye but both of those movies transcend being mere gritty 70s noirs while still featuring 70s style....Night Moves doesn't, it's really stuck in the 1970s and the cynicism and nihilism are nowhere near as well earned. And when Ziegler flies in on the plane trying to machine gun Hackman, the movie just starts to seem ridiculous. The whole treasure-hunt plot is poorly linked to the find-Delly plot.

It also doesn't help that I, personally, did not give a crap whether or not Hackman's character survives the movie; maybe the movie doesn't really care, either.

[–] cloudslovestarscolors 8 years ago

@wrs6565
That's your opinion though, and I don't agree with anything you said. I'm not saying you're wrong and I'm right. I found the ending unexpected and not just random carnage. I did like Moseby and was invested in his plight. I understand why you might find the Delly plot a poor link, I think it's just more complicated than that, and I don't have the answers either. The Long Goodbye and Chinatown are amazing, but so is Night Moves. I completely appreciate how viewers could miss it though. I find this film works better the more you see it.

A list of My Favourite 100 Films
http://www.imdb.com/list/ls076253329/

[–] wrs6565 8 years ago

I've gone back and watched it a few more times and I just don't think the plot is as graceful as Chinatown. (The Long Goodbye is kind of a satirical comedy, so that's not quite as good a comparison, although it is a very '70s movie too.) I just sort of cringed when the news was broke in the film when Delly died--I checked the display on my DVD and yup, there's like 30 minutes left, so now we're going to see all those people from the early part of the movie again and some plotting is going to happen. Then it turns out to be about some sunken treasure! And you just knew the ugly blonde was going to die, but I didn't figure we'd have Zielger suddenly come rushing in with a machine gun and have that goofy scene with the crashing plane. Hackman's romance with Paula was pretty trite too, like they had to have a little affair just because she's the female lead.

I know that convoluted plots and every character being mysteriously connected is a trope of the noir detective genre--see also Chandler, Hammett, etc. But I was cringing by the resolution of the treasure-hunt plot.

But, I like Empire Of The Sun better than all other Spielberg films, so the hell with me.

[–] dwarol 8 years ago

Yeah, it's like "The Big Sleep (1946)" where the plot never really holds together. All the fun is in the minute-to-minute action.

But I do disagree with you about Paula. She's obviously feeling threatened by the young and nubile Delly. Delly was destroying her relationship with Tom and she wanted her out of there. Sleeping with Harry was just a way of proving to herself that she was still attractive. You see in her reaction when after sleeping with Harry, he jumps up out of bed to take care of Delly after her nightmare. When Harry comes back, Paula is gone.

[–] HenryCW 8 years ago

It actually became clear later that Tom Iverson ordered his own mistress (Paula) to sleep with Moseby in order to distract him so that he would not notice their night operations of smuggling Mexican art. When Moseby heard Delly scream and went to attend to her and then came back, Paula was gone. Presumably, she had served her purpose and probably gone back to the smuggling.

It was true, through, that Paula resented Iverson having an incestuous relationship with his own stepdaughter.