Gene Hackman was a beneficiary of his times. As we’re all aware, the actor, who died yesterday at age 95, had an abundance of uncanny talent. But nothing about his appearance or his demeanor said “movie star.” But nevertheless, a movie star he became during the morphing Hollywood of the late ‘60s and early ‘70s, a time which suddenly became rife with directors who wanted their movies populated by real people, not glamorous icons. Even as a younger man, Hackman had a lived-in face. And he never had anything resembling a lustrous head of hair.
In his own accounts of his early life, Hackman painted a picture of an aimless youth. He joined the Marines at age 16, lying about his age after running away from his Storm Lake, Iowa home. While later in life he spoke of wanting to act from an early age, after falling hard for the likes of Jimmy Cagney at the pictures, he apparently eventually “went to acting school because he had nothing better to do.”
That’s according to director William Friedkin, who directed Hackman in the movie that made him a star, 1971’s The French Connection. The story of a hard-bitten New York City cop who goes to unseemly and hair-raising lengths to crack an international drug case, the movie features one of the great car chases of all-time. Hackman would play the man behind the wheel, “Popeye” Doyle, based on real-life New York cop Eddie Egan. Friedkin, whose background was in documentary, insisted on realism at every turn. Among other things, that meant shooting outside during a harsh New York winter. Few films make you feel the cold like this one does, as Doyle, surveilling malefactors outside Manhattan, rubs his hands together, gets another cup of tepid coffee, sucks on a stale cigarette.
Like Peter Boyle in John G. Avildsen’s Joe, released the year before, in which Boyle played a hippie-hating and eventually murderous middle-aged working-class man, Hackman’s Popeye Doyle became something of a reactionary hero: the cop who doesn’t go by any rules but who gets the job done. This is a bit of retrospective myth making, of course. Connection ends with Doyle pursuing the suave drug kingpin Charnier (Fernando Rey), and the movie ends with the sound of a gunshot. However, a title card informs the audience that Charnier was never caught. C’est la vie!
But Popeye Doyle couldn’t have been further away from the man who embodied him. In real life, Hackman was shy, soft-spoken, and politically progressive: a Vietnam peacenik. Doyle was frantic, obnoxious, driven, perpetually angry. And Friedkin didn’t even want Hackman at first. This would be Hackman’s fifteenth film or so. He had shown substantial supporting-role chops in dramas like I Never Sang For My Father. And, of course, he’d made a big impression as Buck Barrow, the boisterous brother of Clyde Barrow, in Arthur Penn’s 1967 Bonnie and Clyde. Buck and his wife Blanche, played by Estelle Parsons, are distorted mirror images of the iconic bank robbers, their lumpen demeanors a source of both cringe-inducing comedy and pathos.
Hackman was suggested to Friedkin by super-agent Sue Mengers, and Friedkin recalls being not too impressed…but Friedkin was also capable, with his film’s small budget, of meeting Hackman’s $25,000 rate. So he took a chance.
“I don’t think I had ever been pushed as much by a director. And that was good for me,” Hackman said in a 2008 interview. Friedkin, in his autobiography The Friedkin Connection, recalls Hackman balking at the more repellent aspects of Doyle’s character. “He goes too far,” he said to Friedkin. Friedkin countered by asking what he himself would do in the situation. Their back-and-forth led to Hackman revealing his vulnerabilities to the director. Hackman recalled working as a doorman at a New York hotel and seeing his former commanding officer walk in with a beautiful woman on his arm. Rather than man the door, Hackman hid from the guy. Not missing a trick, the older Marine walked past him saying “Hackman, you were always a fuckup, and you’re still a fuckup.” Hackman’s roommates in acting school, Dustin Hoffman and Robert Duvall, got their breaks well before Hackman did. Friedkin steered Hackman to using his anger about his past and channeling it into Doyle. Eventually the actor got it. “There was a part of me who said, that’s what the guy is. You couldn’t really whitewash him.” This speaks to a fundamental tenet of Hackman’s acting, to tell the truth about his characters, the unvarnished truth.
And eventually Hackman would grow comfortable playing the authority figures he shrank from earlier in his life. Over the course of what can only be called a voluminous career, he played an army major once, a colonel twice, a captain, a brigadier general, a defense secretary, a senator and a U.S. President (that last in Absolute Power, for director Clint Eastwood). Oh, and a sheriff, let’s not forget a sheriff — the unforgettably petty Little Bill Daggett, again for and with Eastwood, in 1992’s Unforgiven. (One rather wishes Hackman and Eastwood had worked together more often, as both of those pictures are absolute bangers.)
But in the wake of becoming an unlikely icon, Hackman took a character role as a sleazy meatpacking magnate in the fabulously off-kilter thriller Prime Cut, playing opposite Lee Marvin. His next lead was in the disaster movie blockbuster The Poseidon Adventure, as a preacher who leads a quarrelsome group of overturned cruise ship survivors to safety. He didn’t conduct himself like a star writing his own ticket, but as a working actor. A constantly working actor, it seemed.
His next truly defining role came with Francis Ford Coppola’s The Conversation. Coppola cast Hackman very much against Popeye’s type; his surveillance man Harry Caul is quiet, circumspect, detail-oriented, and a devout Catholic. His team-up with Al Pacino in 1973’s Scarecrow, with the duo as a pair of modern-day hobos, is an exemplary acting duel as well as a representative piece of Dirty American Realism. The next two decades were full of rich and varied roles. For Arthur Penn he played another detective, this one a California man full of disillusionment, in the spectacularly bleak Night Moves. And only a couple of years after that, he was a goofy but nonetheless intimidating Lex Luthor in Richard Donner’s Superman. Along the way, he found time to costar in a Barbra Streisand comedy, 1981’s All Night Long. The same year, his Bonnie and Clyde colleague Warren Beatty brought him on board the epic Reds. One can become exhausted recollecting his standout roles — who can forget his comeback basketball coach in 1986’s Hoosiers? That aforementioned defense secretary role was in 1987’s No Way Out, and that character is a self-assured and secretly desperate man trying to cover up a murder. He’s a remarkably hissable villain, but he also makes the viewer understand his dilemma.
The bottom line is that he was just a compulsively watchable actor. I was culling my physical media collection recently (it’s constantly threatening to eat my apartment, much to the concern of my wife) and I had a look at 1985’s Target, Hackman’s final collaboration with Arthur Penn, in which Hackman plays the improbable father of Matt Dillon; the two are caught in a web of overseas espionage. The movie’s more than a bit of a muddle, but Hackman acts with an urgency that belies the hazy focus. Most cinephiles who’ve seen the nail-biting 1952 chase movie The Narrow Margin, directed by Richard Fleischer, would agree that it didn’t really NEED a remake. But Hackman alone justifies the 1990 version, directed by action maestro Peter Hyams and costarring a more-than-holding-her-own Anne Archer.
My personal favorites of his later films are Mike Nichols’ The Birdcage, the one in which he plays a senator, a particularly uptight one, who has to come to grips with his future in-laws, the gay couple played by Robin Williams and Nathan Lane. And of course his role as the hilariously dyspeptic Royal Tenenbaum in Wes Anderson’s The Royal Tenenbaums. Hackman hung up his acting shoes shortly thereafter, and his fans have long bemoaned the fact that it was looking as if his last movie would be the definitively uninspired comedy Welcome to Mooseport. And, as it happened, Mooseport does, in fact, stand as his last picture. But let’s get real — at the point of his retirement, he didn’t owe us anything. And it isn’t as if he spent his final years idle — with collaborator Daniel Linehan, he became a novelist, penning legal thrillers and historical adventures. I may check out one of them.
Veteran critic Glenn Kenny reviews new releases at RogerEbert.com, the New York Times, and, as befits someone of his advanced age, the AARP magazine. He blogs, very occasionally, at Some Came Running and tweets, mostly in jest, at @glenn__kenny. He is the author of the The World Is Yours: The Story of Scarface, published by Hanover Square Press, and now available for at a bookstore near you.
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