Because it’s summer and summer isn’t always happy days, beach frolics and picnics in the park. It's also, often, claustrophobic sunlight and heat, free time to overthink your life (or no free time to think at all), annoying, chipper people playing volleyball or worse, frisbee and my favorite, existential meltdown. But before you think I'm getting way too dramatic here, trust that summer can roll along like (and metaphorically speaking) one of my favorite movies, Arthur Penn’s "Night Moves."

Though most '70s film fans regard this picture as a classic of the era, it’s a movie that oddly, took far too long for rediscovery (and a DVD release—finally two years ago, but I’m still keeping my worn VHS copy, for sentimental reasons). But this is a bit curious. The picture was directed by Arthur Penn, the auteur behind a movie that arguably kick-started the changing face of cinema -- "Bonnie and Clyde." It features both a teenage Melanie Griffith (in all her wild child glory) and a very young James Woods. And it stars my beloved Gene Hackman in one of his greatest, most poignant and naturally moody performances. It's also a brilliant movie, a complex, thoughtful and powerfully melancholic neo-noir.

Like Bill L. Norton's masterful "Cisco Pike," Jerry Schatzberg's moving "Scarecrow" and Michael Ritchie's great, tough "Prime Cut" (the latter two also featuring Hackman) "Night Moves" (1975) is a distinctly 70s picture, a movie that showcases exactly why so many consider that era a golden period of filmmaking. Hackman plays Harry Moseby, a private detective and former pro football player whose glory days are behind him (one of the picture's most touching moments is simply catching Harry beam while walking into a football stadium). His marriage isn't working out, his wife (Susan Clark) is having an affair (she also likes going to Eric Rohmer films, something Harry famously says is like “watching paint dry.”), and he seems somewhat lost. Hackman plays this melancholia with subtlety and intelligence and his existential dread hangs over the picture with an almost bittersweet pessimism.

Hired by a washed up Hollywood glamour-puss (Janet Ward) to find her teenage daughter (the nubile Griffith), Moseby takes the job and tracks down the girl who is crashing with her stepfather (John Crawford) in the Florida Keys. The unusual relationship sees the rebellious daughter in an extremely permissive and disturbingly close situation with her father whose mistress (Jennifer Warren) seems to coolly take it in some kind of stride. Harry falls for the woman, who's unusual herself, with an intelligence and seen-it-all veneer and, yet, interestingly sunny good looks that catches the viewer somewhat off guard. She’s a blonde healthy woman who looks like she smokes about two packs a day—she's got angst, but keeps it in cynical check. In short, she's a mysterious female character one rarely experiences in movies. She's truly interesting and off.

But as the plot thickens (and boy does it thicken) we realize just how interesting and off everyone and everything is, how very real to life they are. And with this, everyone and everything is not surprisingly, frustratingly impossible to crack. A revelation does not necessarily lead to closure because a revelation isn't always what it seems in the first place. And then there's Moseby's own mysteries which are really, a lot more interesting and complex. This doggedness of not tying up its mysteries in one tidy bow makes Penn's "Night Moves" all the more meaningful, its pessimism (and amidst all the oppressive sunlight) all the more complicated. Cruising in this beautiful "paradise" Hackman's boat doesn't crash, it goes round and round (if you’ve seen the movie, you know exactly what I’m talking about), literally making the picture's moral ambiguities open ended and curiously, painfully elegant.

And again, that boat. In any kind of existential crisis, I often think of Gene Hackman and that damn boat. I don't know if it helps me, but it's nice to relate to, even if that boat only exists in one's mind.