Critic’s Appreciation: Gene Hackman, a Tough Guy With Infinite Nuance and Boundless Range
There’s an indelible scene in Francis Ford Coppola’s 1974 masterwork, The Conversation, in which Gene Hackman’s reclusive surveillance expert, Harry Caul, visits his mistress Amy, played with aching vulnerability by Teri Garr. It’s the night of his birthday, and he arrives so late she’s almost given up on him.
She asks how old he is and then proceeds in a teasing, half-jokey way to pepper him with questions — where he lives, if he lives alone, what he does — that reveal how little she knows of this man she clearly loves and has been seeing for an unspecified length of time.
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We feel Amy’s hunger to know him, just as we feel Harry’s wincing discomfort and paranoia as she gently pries information from him. “I don’t feel like answering any more questions,” he mutters, moving toward the apartment door and opening his wallet to count out the cash for her rent. Hackman is in semi-darkness, silhouetted against the hallway light, when Amy says, “Harry, I was so happy when you came over tonight. When I heard you open up the door my toes were dancing under the covers. But I don’t think I’m gonna wait for you anymore.”
For the briefest moment Harry half-closes the door, as if to reconsider his exit. But instead of returning to Amy in bed, he reopens it and steps decisively out into the hall, closing the door behind him and severing their relationship. One of the things that makes the quiet heartbreak of that scene cut so deeply is Hackman’s body language. Though Harry says nothing as he takes his leave, the actor’s slightly bowed head and the burden of sadness knotted in his shoulders make clear that he loves Amy, but can’t afford to let anyone get too close.
Hackman, who was found dead Wednesday at 95 in his New Mexico home, was a magnificent actor of infinite range, too often considered reductively as a tough guy with brains. He will be most widely remembered for roles like the violent, unapologetically racist New York narcotics detective in the porkpie hat, Popeye Doyle, in William Friedkin’s visceral drug-bust thriller, The French Connection. Or the sadistic travesty of a lawman, Sheriff “Little Bill” Daggett, in Clint Eastwood’s revisionist Western, Unforgiven. Both films deservedly won Hackman Academy Awards.
But despite his gruff demeanor and the coiled power in his rangy 6’2″ physique, Hackman was always much more than the thinking person’s Charles Bronson or the rougher-around-the-edges Steve McQueen. Pretty much from the start, as Hackman was establishing a screen presence of steely authority and irreverent humor, he also began subverting that persona with unexpected choices.
No film was more instrumental in putting him on the map than Arthur Penn’s game-changing outlaw thriller Bonnie and Clyde, in which he played gang leader Clyde Barrow’s older brother Buck, an easygoing ex-con who consistently breaks tension within the group with his dopey jokes. Buck is such a jovial presence that when he’s killed, it’s a sobering signal of time running out for the title characters as they lurch toward their blood-spattered demise.
Hackman starred as another ex-con, this one with a much shorter fuse, opposite Al Pacino, as drifters on the road from California with a half-baked plan to open a car wash in Pittsburgh in Jerry Schatzberg’s Scarecrow. And in Arthur Penn’s twisty neo-noir Night Moves, Hackman portrayed a former pro footballer turned Los Angeles private investigator, pulled into a family drama that becomes progressively more sordid and sinister.
Those genre-bending movies, along with The French Connection and The Conversation, were very much products of the dark first half of the 1970s, a time of mounting institutional distrust and political cynicism that climaxed with the Watergate scandal. They defined Hackman as a screen actor of unquestionable gravitas, but even while he was forging the mold of a new kind of Hollywood antihero, Hackman refused to be confined by any one character type.
It seems significant that in between Friedkin’s landmark cop thriller and its sequel, Hackman made a hilarious single-scene appearance in Mel Brooks’ horror spoof Young Frankenstein, as a lonely blind hermit who welcomes the escaped monster into his humble home for a bowl of soup and some companionship. “Wait! Where are you going?” he calls after the creature, whom he has scalded with boiling-hot soup and burnt with a candle meant to light his cigar. “I was going to make espresso.”
Hackman was no doubt deadly serious about his craft, but he also refused to take himself too seriously. Witness his shady B-movie director with a gambling habit, Harry Zimm, in Barry Sonnenfeld’s Get Shorty; his gleefully sinister (and unsurpassed) take on archvillain Lex Luthor in the Christopher Reeve Superman movies; or his self-righteous family values-championing politician, Senator Keeley, in The Birdcage.
The latter’s uproarious drag act finale pulled off the jaw-dropping feat of putting Hackman in a wig like a giant meringue, industrial-strength makeup and a sparkly mother-of-the-bride gown to make an incognito exit from a Miami gay bar swarmed by press. While reluctantly getting into the spirit by singing along to “We Are Family,” the conservative senator grumbles to his daughter: “No one will dance with me. I think it’s this dress. I told him white would make me look fat.”
Perhaps no director but Mike Nichols and no writer but Elaine May could have coaxed Hackman into doing a scene so blissfully at odds with his prevalent screen image. Nichols earlier had tapped Hackman to play the avuncular film director who reads the riot act to Meryl Streep’s drug-addicted actress Suzanne Vale in Postcards From the Edge, when she’s messing up his shoot. But later he shows nurturing warmth and support at a moment when Suzanne needs it most.
Roles like those were uncharacteristic for Hackman, but they were also evidence of the superlative actor’s refusal to be pigeonholed. Sure, most film lovers are more likely to think of Hackman in darker roles — the FBI agent going after murderous Klansmen in Mississippi Burning; the political journalist in Roger Spottiswoode’s crackling thriller Under Fire; the crooked Old West mayor in Sam Raimi’s irresistibly bonkers The Quick and the Dead; or the U.S. Navy submarine commander in Tony Scott’s Crimson Tide.
Those parts and countless others are canonical Hackman. But if I were planning a double feature to watch tonight in memory of one of the all-time greats, I’d go with less obvious choices — one a gloriously cheesy foray into all-star Hollywood blockbuster territory, the other a delightfully eccentric late-career revelation, made just three years before Hackman stepped away from the cameras for good.
Exposure at a young age to craptastic movies can burnish our memories of them. Film buffs who were children of the ’90s often wax nostalgic about Hocus Pocus, just as ’80s kids have a bizarre affection for John Huston’s Annie.
My childhood fixation, a guilty pleasure that has endured to the point where I still can’t pass it by on a streaming menu, is The Poseidon Adventure. Sure, it’s a big, bloated action spectacular, a disaster movie not so much crafted as packaged. But to a Catholic schoolkid accustomed to seeing priests as untouchable vessels of piety — so na?ve, right? — there was something thrillingly illicit about the sexual chemistry between Hackman’s minister, Reverend Frank Scott, and Stella Stevens’ fabulously gutter-mouthed former sex worker, Linda Rogo.
This was a man of God who was first and foremost a robustly masculine man, a natural leader of the group of stereotypically drawn survivalists who cared deeply about each and every one of them, every loss eating away at his faith. The Poseidon Adventure was also the first time my Australian parents had allowed me to see a release “Rated M for Mature Audiences,” so I look back on it as a formative moment in my moviegoing life, with Hackman as the de facto captain of that upside-down ship.
The other film is Wes Anderson’s funny and deeply affecting group portrait of a dysfunctional family of geniuses, The Royal Tenenbaums. At a 10th anniversary screening at the 2011 New York Film Festival, Anderson and ensemble members Anjelica Huston, Bill Murray and Gwyneth Paltrow indulged in some good-natured ribbing of Hackman’s irascibility on the shoot.
Huston described being terrified when shooting their first scene together, which required her to slap him. “I saw the imprint of my hand on his cheek and I thought, he’s going to kill me.” Murray added: “I’d hear these stories like ‘Gene tried to kill me today.’ And I’d say, ‘Kill you? You’re in the union. He can’t.’”
But whatever his mood during the shoot, Hackman’s performance is one of his best — brilliant, befuddled and full of love for his family, even if he has struggled over the years to be a dependable presence in their lives. The actor seamlessly taps into Anderson’s peculiar sensibility, a comic register somewhere between J.D. Salinger and a New Yorker cartoon.
There’s a moment of heroic redemption near the end where Royal saves his grandsons from a car crash when their errant neighbor (Owen Wilson) is at the wheel high on mescaline. The image that follows, of this wildly imperfect pater familias hanging off the side of a garbage truck with his son (Ben Stiller) and grandsons, all shouting with joy, is one that will stay in my head when I think of Hackman.
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