When Clint Eastwood needed a performer who could persuasively go boot-toe to boot-toe with him in his brutal 1992 western “Unforgiven,” he needed an actor who was his towering equal onscreen. Eastwood needed a performer with strange charisma, one who could at once effortlessly draw the audience to his character and repulse it without skipping a beat. This actor didn’t need the audience’s love, and would never ask for it. He instead needed to go deep and dark, playing a villain of such depravity that he inspired the viewer’s own blood lust. Eastwood needed a legend who could send shivers up spines. He needed Gene Hackman.
Hackman, whose death at 95 was announced on Thursday, was one of the defining actors of New Hollywood, that roughly decadelong, feverish period of artistic ferment that began with films like “Bonnie and Clyde,” Arthur Penn’s 1967 gangster drama. The era was famously defined by directors who helped rejuvenate the industry but was also known for male stars who didn’t conform to old studio ideals. With their unfixed noses and rough edges, these were men who once would have been largely confined to character roles. The glamorous-looking Warren Beatty played the male lead in “Bonnie and Clyde,” but it was Hackman’s striking supporting turn as Clyde’s brother, Buck, that heralded something new.
Hackman holds your gaze the moment that Buck jumps out of a jalopy in “Bonnie and Clyde” into his brother’s arms; Buck is soon in Clyde’s gang, too. Buck is an outsized character, given to flailing and whooping, and Hackman delivers a suitably full-bodied, demonstrative performance that instantly gives you a sense of the character without once edging into scene stealing. His slight whine thickened with a deep-fried accent, Hackman also smiles a great deal as Buck, which humanizes the character so wholly that it lulls you into brief complacency, leaving you unprepared — almost — for the violence that rapidly engulfs him.
Hackman’s smiles were one of his signature moves, and he used them to great disarming effect, deploying them to put other characters (and you) at ease before he abruptly shifted gears. It’s one reason he was such an effective villain. (His restraint as a surveillance expert in Francis Ford Coppola’s 1974 thriller, “The Conversation,” is one reason the film is so unnerving.) Hackman used smiles to charm and seduce, but also to obfuscate. Some actors let you see the rage boiling in their characters, the throbbing veins of hate. If you made a study of Hackman’s work, you might note that when one of his characters draws you to him with an upward curve of his mouth, something bad might happen soon. You would also divine that, thanks to his superb control, you could never predict when that false front would drop.
There’s something sublimely fitting then in the fact that Hackman is dressed as Santa when he appears in his star-making role in William Friedkin’s “The French Connection,” the 1971 thriller that earned him a best actor Oscar. Hackman plays Popeye Doyle, a New York detective helping to bring down a heroin-smuggling outfit. Popeye is undercover in the opener, watching a suspect while ringing Santa’s bell and charming some kids with his patter, a smile peeping out from under his ill-fitting white beard. All of a sudden, Popeye and another cop (Roy Scheider) are chasing the suspect through the city’s derelict, litter-strewn streets. As soon as the detectives tackle the runaway in an empty lot, Popeye begins hitting the guy savagely. “I wanna bust him,” he says repeatedly, blood smeared on his Santa sleeve.
Hackman was already a name when he appeared in “The French Connection,” having earned Oscar nominations for best supporting actor in “Bonnie and Clyde” and in “I Never Sang for My Father” (1970). In an interview with him that ran in “GQ” in 2011, Hackman spoke fondly of “I Never Sang,” Gilbert Cates’s adaptation of the Broadway play. As a professor coming to terms with his dying, tyrannical father, Hackman brings persuasive emotional nuance to this otherwise dour, unconvincing film. In the interview, he described it as “a sensitive picture about family and relationships” that he thought would have made his mother proud. I would have picked “The Birdcage,” the 1996 Mike Nichols comedy in which Hackman plays a conservative politician who ends up joyously dancing in drag to “We Are Family.”
I wonder if Hackman felt burdened by his genius for villainy and moral ambiguity. I hope not because his ability to bring recognizably human characters out of the lower depths was extraordinary. That’s precisely what Eastwood tapped him to do in “Unforgiven,” in which Hackman plays Sheriff Daggett in a late-19th-century Wyoming backwater. Known as Little Bill, the sheriff writes his grim future after he incurs the wrath of a group of local prostitutes. A customer has viciously slashed one of the women, who giggled at his “teensy little pecker,” ruining her face and earning prospects. The prostitutes hire Eastwood’s character, Will Munny, a gunslinger turned pig farmer who saddles up again with his friend, Ned (Morgan Freeman), to mete out some classic, old-fashioned American vengeance.
Hackman’s character runs hot and icy cold in “Unforgiven,” his familiar smiles flickering amid the barbarism. His Little Bill is a man of vanity and unspeakable sadism who ends up beating Ned to death. Villains have a way of stealing movies, sometimes with cruel charm. Not Hackman, who plays Little Bill’s violence with a shocking directness. Hackman was often described as an Everyman, which often seemed like a polite euphemism for his looks. In repose, he looks more average than not, lumpy rather than chiseled; his is the familiar face of someone in the bathroom mirror, not up on a screen. Little Bill is tightly wound, like other Hackman’s characters, but he also seems more average than special. He was, in other words, perfect as Little Bill — a wholly unforgettable and shockingly ordinary American villain.
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