Private detective and former football player Harry Moseby gets hired on to what seems a standard missing person case, as a former Hollywood actress whose only major roles came thanks to being married to a studio mogul wants Moseby to find and return her daughter. Harry travels to Florida to find her, but he begins to see a connection between the runaway girl, the world of Hollywood stuntmen, and a suspicious mechanic when an unsolved murder comes to light.
Gene Hackman eventually finds the Acapulco Falcon that was seemingly driving the other characters into their own forms of madness, but it does not bring any sort of catharsis to Hackman. Nor the film itself, which closes with Hackman doing literal and metaphorical donuts in the Florida Gulf. In retrospect, this self-aware (yet not self-indulgent) noir seems to perfectly capture the 'bummer' political sensibilities of the 1970s without ever being explicit about it. The kind of movie that gives weight to the received wisdom that moviegoers were crying out for the happy, superficially apolitical (and altogether sexually wholesome) escapism of Star Wars.
