Was Gene Hackman a Great American Actor — or the Greatest American Actor?
If there’s a moment that sums up the genius of Gene Hackman, it’s in Night Moves, the 1975 Arthur Penn neo-noir where he’s a washed-up football player turned detective. He’s on a case where he hunts a movie star’s runaway teenage daughter in the Florida Keys. But at one point Hackman watches a football game on TV, while his wife asks him who’s winning. “Nobody,” he says without taking his eyes off the screen. “One side is just losing slower than the other.”
A great line, so great that The Wire ripped it off verbatim for Prez. But Hackman doesn’t play it as a clever quip — it’s just the proverb of the quintessential hard-boiled all-American loser, the kind of character that Gene Hackman played more vividly than anyone. Born in 1931, he was the last great movie star who remembered the Depression, and you could see it in his eyes. He brought a quintessential American fatalism to characters from Bonnie and Clyde to The French Connection, from The Conversation to Hoosiers. He brought so much joie de vivre to each role, even when he was playing jerks.
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It’s why Gene Hackman was one of the most universally beloved of classic Hollywood movie stars, and no film was ever worse off for having Hackman in it. And that’s why the world is grieving today, after the news of his passing today at 95 — Hackman, his 64-year-old wife, pianist Betsy Arakawa, and their dog were all found dead in their Santa Fe home, from mysterious causes (although no foul play is suspected).
Hackman always had his own roguish charm, but with a slow-burning, spluttering sense of rage. He specialized in lonely men, especially the antiheroes of The Conversation and Night Moves, guys cocky enough to try outsmarting the system, bitter enough to know they’ll end up paying for everyone else’s sins. He was a master of “the mythic forms of loserdom,” as Steely Dan’s Walter Becker once put it, while discussing the song “Deacon Blues.” If they’d ever made a movie out of “Deacon Blues,” Gene Hackman would have been perfect for the role.
He even plays sax in his most powerful and haunting performance, in the 1973 Francis Ford Coppola classic The Conversation, and nobody has ever made it look more depressing to learn to work the saxophone. Hackman is a detective who specializes in audio surveillance, spying on and bugging strangers, a wiretapper capturing them in incriminating secrets, yet unable to empathize or bond with any real-life humans. He’s a lonely man who has chosen to make loneliness his life’s work. When he sits on the floor of his solitary apartment, blowing his sax, the music pouring out of him just makes him look more hauntingly forlorn.
Hackman grew up in everytowns in the American Midwest, and after four years in the Marines (he lied about his age to enlist), he hitchhiked to New York to attend the School of Radio Technique under the G.I. Bill. His drama teachers told him that with his everyman looks, he was a character actor. “The world ‘character’ denotes something less than attractive,” Hackman told Film Comment in 1988. “This was drummed into us. I accepted the limitation, of always being the third or fourth guy down, and my goals were tiny. But I still wanted to be an actor.”
His breakout role came in Bonnie and Clyde in 1967, as a member of the bank-robber gang, the big brother Buck to Warren Beatty’s Clyde. The audience knows from the get-go that the character is doomed, but Hackman’s warmth and humor is irrepressible — especially when he taunts a young Gene Wilder with a shotgun, asking, “When are you gonna marry the girl?” It earned Hackman his first Oscar nomination.
He loved to play cocky assholes, wise guys full of themselves, yet not as wise as they think they are when it comes to gaming the system. That’s why his most famous role is the bad cop Popeye Doyle in The French Connection, a decidedly unbrilliant thug with a badge — a world away from Clint Eastwood’s Dirty Harry, the ominiscient supercop with near-magic powers. (You simply can’t touch Harry with a bullet, no matter how close to him you fire.) Popeye tells himself he’s the kind of brutally efficient bastard who gets results at all costs. Except he doesn’t get the results. In the most iconic scene, he gets outfoxed on the subway by the French drug lord on a subway, playing cat-and-mouse on the platform. When the train pulls away — and his target serenely waves goodbye through the window — Popeye’s convulsive rage is a quintessential Hackman flourish. He won the Oscar for Best Actor.
That charm of his was unkillable. Hackman loved to walk right into a nothingburger of a movie and take over, a feat he pulled off countless times. One of his more mischievously juicy performances is in Extreme Measures, a godawful 1996 medical thriller starring Hugh Grant as an idealistic young doctor who discovers (much more slowly than the audience does) that Hackman is an evil madman. He’s a Dr. Frankenstein playing God with patients, killing them off for his scientific experiments. Yet Hackman realizes there’s nothing going on in the movie besides him, so he feels free to grab the wheel and drive it off the nearest cliff. In the most over-the-top scene, he grins and even twinkles as he explains his project to poor Hugh Grant, asking, “If you could cure cancer just by killing one person, wouldn’t you HAVE to do that?”
Yet his Midwestern warmth was always there. He’s brilliant in his brief scene in Young Frankenstein, uncredited, as the blind hermit who takes in Peter Boyle’s escaped monster. (As Pauline Kael wrote, “I thought there was a famous comedian hidden under the beard until I recognized his voice.”) Not only does he offer the creature a cigar, he sets his finger on fire.
Hackman was famously tough on directors. “I pity directors who work with me,” he said with a laugh in 1988. “I do try very hard to get along, however.” But that was rooted in his boyhood, with a father who abandoned the family when Hackman was 13. “Since I didn’t have a strong father,” he said, “I don’t have any authority problem and I cannot stand to have someone tell me how to modulate a scene… I can immediately see what the problem is and do something about it, as opposed to having to deal with some kind of diplomacy which I don’t think has a place in art.”
The silliest thing anyone could do with Hackman was cast him as a romantic lead, especially in a rom-com, though it was often tried, as when he canoodled with Ann-Margret for the Eighties soaper Twice in a Lifetime. He was always too knowing and seemed a little too wary for roles that required him to fall in love. Straight comedy didn’t necessarily suit him — his knack was playing the funniest character in a drama, as in his superb turn as the villain lawyer of The Firm, the only figure onscreen who realizes how silly the movie is. But he worked in all kinds of pictures, from the disaster-epic silliness of The Poseidon Adventure to the heartland basketball heart-tugger Hoosiers. He won another Oscar for his 1992 supporting role in Unforgiven, Clint Eastwood’s Western, as a sherriff who takes a hilariously sadistic pleasure in humiliating Richard Harris as an English poseur.
His last great role came in 2001, when he played the ne’er-do-well patriarch in Wes Anderson’s family portrait, The Royal Tenenbaums. As Anderson said, the role “was written for him against his wishes.” He notoriously clashed with the director on the set, to the point where Bill Murray stepped in to keep the peace — quite the achievement to be the most ornery actor in a cast that includes Murray. Tenenbaums would have been the perfect role for Hackman to retire with, but he kept working for another couple of years grinding out unmemorable Hollywood product, signing off with the cheeseball 2004 comedy Welcome to Moosepoint. Yet there’s something apropos about that, fitting his blue-collar ethic. Retiring with a masterpiece would have been too sentimental a finale for an actor as flinty as this guy. Farewell to one of the all-time greats.
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