But one of the most consistently fine and important scriptwriters working in America in the early to mid-seventies was Alan Sharp, and especially for three scripts: Ulzana’s Raid, The Hired Hand and Night Moves. It is evident in Jo Heims script for Breezy, Adrian Joyce’s for Five Easy Pieces, Robert Towne’s for Chinatown and The Last Detail, Joan Tewkesbury’s for Thieves Like Us and Nashville, Paul Shrader’s for Taxi Driver, Paddy Chayefsky’s for The Hospital and Network, James Toback’s For The Gambler. The list could go on but for how much longer? The seventies names could continue quite interestingly for a while…Brian De Palma, Paul Mazursky, Michael Ritchie, Elaine May, Barbara Loden, Jerry Schatzberg…Yet at the same time, this great directorial influx coincided especially with great cinematographers - Zsigmond, Kovacs, Willis, Chapman, Weller, Hall - but also less commonly acknowledged, scriptwriters who gave to the material a sensibility that we might assume is their own as we don’t always find it in the director’s work elsewhere. How easy would it be now to put together a similar one, and just how strong would that list be? Fincher, Nolan, James Gray, Wes Anderson, PT Anderson. New Hollywood was very understandably seen as a great era for auteurism in American film: Scorsese, Altman, Peckinpah, Penn, Cassavetes, Friedkin, Ashby, Coppola, Malick, Lynch…the list is long and could be much longer. We wouldn’t wish in looking at Night Moves, directed by Arthur Penn, to undermine at all Penn’s contribution, but what we do wish to do is point up the importance of Gene Hackman in the leading role, and even more especially Alan Sharp’s script. Many saw Kael’s piece as a hatchet job on Welles’s reputation, written at a time when the great American director couldn’t easily find funding and was reliant on European money to get films made at all, making The Immortal Story in 1968 and F for Fake in 1974. Sarris’s book announced that great films are made by great directors no matter the material to hand, and Kael’s claim was that a film like Citizen Kane, so categorically credited to Orson Welles’ genius, relied immensely on Hermann J. The most significant argument in the American context was between Andrew Sarris and Pauline Kael, slugging it out in articles in the early sixties (Kael did most of the slugging), and then developing their position at length later in The American Cinema, by Sarris in 1968, and Pauline Kael in The Citizen Kane Book in 1971. Our purpose isn’t to get too embroiled in these debates (nor even the auteur theory), but to suggest that the central difference between these positions will be important to us here.
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When critics and theorists debated the auteur theory it often rested on how important the director’s vision was for those who believed in auteurism and how undervalued the contribution of others had been for those who didn’t believe in it.