Gene Hackman: Hollywood legend’s life in 10 great movie roles
The Times’s film critic recalls an actor who showed great versatility, from his early tough guys to his later comic roles, and picks standout films from his illustrious career | TOP 10
The death of Gene Hackman means we lose the last living connection to an older era of classic Hollywood stardom and self-tortured screen machismo. Yes, Clint Eastwood is still with us, but he’s the glamorous face of Hollywood heroism, in the line of Newman, Redford, Grant and Gable. Hackman was different. He was more Bogart or Lee Marvin, a character-acting tough guy who’d served in the army and brought some vital worldly danger to the overpampered world of Tinseltown. Hackman’s directors, in later years, would frequently describe him as “scary”.
Hackman once said, when discussing another hero of his, Marlon Brando, “he is our most sensitive actor and uses more of the feminine side of himself than anyone. Yet he has tremendous masculinity.”
Hackman’s best roles must be seen through this filter. They are often “masculine” creations. And yet even when it’s not in the script, Hackman somehow makes them shifty, unsure, vulnerable (that dry chuckle works wonders). He compels not because he’s strong, but because he’s sensitive. What a body of work.
1. Bonnie and Clyde (1967)
Hackman emerged, fully formed and nearly middle-aged (he was 37), in his breakthrough role as Buck, the older, more irascible brother of the charismatic outlaw Clyde Barrow (Warren Beatty) in this crime movie classic.
Until then he had been a struggling Broadway actor and bit-part Hollywood player who was buddies with the Method maestro Dustin Hoffman but inspired by classic screen heroes such as Cagney and Bogart.
His Buck Barrow was a dangerous creature and a smiling killer who tells corny jokes about alcoholic cows and then terrifies an elderly policeman at gunpoint while barking, “Take a good look, Pop! I’m Buck Barrow!” Hackman had arrived. Buy/rent
2. The French Connection (1971)
Hackman’s toughness was there from the start. He won the best actor Oscar for the role of the swearing, perp-slapping New York cop Popeye Doyle because he seemed real.
Clint Eastwood was another famous screen cop from that year (Dirty Harry), but he was handsome, tall and broad. Hackman had male pattern baldness and a doughy, character actor’s face – he famously hated watching himself on screen, saying, “It costs me a lot emotionally”. But he had something else too. Like Bogart and Marvin, he was ex-military (he spent 4½ years in the US Marine Corps). There was an inner steel to his machismo that was compelling.
When Popeye Doyle almost singlehandedly interrogates the denizens of an entire New York dive bar, you believe him. Disney+
3. The Conversation (1974)
The greatest crime in Hackman’s career was an Oscar snub for this performance – possibly his strongest on screen. It was a counterintuitive turn at the time, even baffling. Hackman had followed Popeye Doyle with another two-fisted tough guy in Prime Cut and then an action-man preacher in The Poseidon Adventure.
The Conversation was a game-changer. He played the taciturn surveillance expert and lonely jazz aficionado Harry Caul, a role intended for Hackman’s other screen hero, Brando.
Caul is a delicate beta male, painfully vulnerable but professionally committed, and slowly psychologically imploding as his covert role in murder is revealed.
It showcased Hackman’s remarkable range and announced a versatile actor with long-term ambition. Paramount+
4. Young Frankenstein (1974)
Speaking of range, Hackman always knew that he could do comedy – he was just waiting patiently for the roles to catch up.
“My early days in Broadway were all comedies,” he told Larry King in 2004. “I never did a straight play on Broadway.” And so, typically, he almost steals this entire Mel Brooks horror spoof by playing “Harold the blind monk” in a scene that’s four minutes of exquisite slapstick, one-liners and the most impeccable comedic timing.
When Harold first encounters the Monster (Peter Boyle), he pats his torso and sighs softly, “My joy, and my prize from heaven.” And then, as Harold begins to register the creature’s immense size, he suddenly downshifts to a droll, Groucho Marx-style, “You must have been the tallest one in your class.” Genius. DVD/Blu-ray
5. Superman (1978)
“Almost anything you do is going to be OK,” Hackman said modestly of playing Lex Luthor in this benchmark comic book adaptation. “Because he’s a flamboyant character and deranged and all the things that actors love to play.”
Well, yes and no. The multiple Lex Luthors since Hackman have proved how tricky the role is to nail. Yet playing “the greatest criminal mastermind of our time”, but one “surrounded by nincompoops”, Hackman delivers a masterclass in tone and balance (only nutty when the scene demands it) that grounds the movie. Sky/Now
6. No Way Out (1987)
Hackman’s career decisions were mostly faultless. Even in his overtly “commercial” mid-1980s period, he was churning out classics.
When he dipped into the popular Vietnam War genre he produced the cult favourite Uncommon Valor. When he chose to make a sports movie it was Hoosiers, a basketball film that became one of the all-time underdog dramas. And when he made a spy flick, it was this beloved noir-style instalment with Kevin Costner. Hackman plays the oily yet charismatic secretary of defence David Brice.
Brice is so charming that he stirs the desires of the free-spirited paramour Susan Atwell (Sean Young) and his needy general counsel Scott Pritchard (Will Patton). Costner has since said that Hackman was the best actor he has worked with. MGM+/Prime Video
7. Mississippi Burning (1988)
Hackman was a Democrat who nonetheless admired Ronald Reagan (he called Reagan a “beautiful American") and once claimed to be proud of being on a secret list of Richard Nixon’s political opponents. His great shame, he claimed, was not being involved in the US civil rights movement of the 1960s and instead concentrating on his career and “doing my own selfish thing at that time”.
He partially redressed that balance with this Alan Parker crime thriller (another Eighties classic) based on real-life race murders in the Deep South. In his triumphant scene Hackman’s FBI agent Anderson listens patiently to threats and abuse from Michael Rooker’s thug Frank before grabbing him roughly by the crotch and growling, “Now you get this straight, shit-kicker - don’t you go mistaking me for some whole other body.” Prime Video
8. Unforgiven (1992)
Hackman was married twice, first in 1956 to Faye Maltese and then in 1991 to the pianist Betsy Arakawa. He had a son and two daughters from his first marriage, and those daughters, Elizabeth Jean and Leslie Anne, began to disapprove in the mid-1980s of their father’s so-called violent film choices.
So when Clint Eastwood’s ostensibly bloody western Unforgiven came calling Hackman at first refused to take the role of the brutal local sheriff, Little Bill Daggett. The film’s screenwriter, David Webb Peoples, recalled, “Gene’s daughters didn’t like all the violent movies he was doing. He was at a stage in his career where his family was more important than his work.”
Eastwood repeatedly pleaded with Hackman, who eventually capitulated, and another complex and beautifully understated villain was born. Buy/rent
9. Get Shorty (1995)
There were other violent movies after Unforgiven, including Wyatt Earp, The Quick and the Dead and Enemy of the State. But in the closing chapters of Hackman’s career it was the comedies that mattered.
He was goofy in Heartbreakers, broad and cartoonish in The Birdcage and deliciously pompous as the shambolic Hollywood producer Harry Zimm in Get Shorty.
At the time, however, Hackman had earned a reputation for being fearsome and exacting on movie sets. Get Shorty’s director, Barry Sonnenfeld, said Hackman was “scary as hell to work with – he’s very intimidating and suffers no fools”.
The irony, and the magic, is that despite this allegedly “scary” demeanour Hackman produced the sweetness and flat-out hilarity of Harry Zimm (complete with fake dentures and poloneck sweaters), whose vainglorious motto is “I produce feature motion pictures – no TV.” ITVX
10. The Royal Tenenbaums (2001)
Hackman did a handful of projects (including the dopey comedy Welcome to Mooseport) right up until his retirement in 2004, but The Royal Tenenbaums is really his swansong. And what a way to go.
He was, again, apparently fearsome on set, and frequently squared up to his director, Wes Anderson (he famously told him to pull up his trousers and “act like a man”). Yet once more he found extraordinary grace notes in the character of the ageing patriarch Royal Tenenbaum. Anderson had written the role specifically for Hackman, who took more than a year and a half to agree to it. That tension remains in the character, and in the reluctance of a 71-year-old man to see himself as others do.
In his standout scene, set to Paul Simon’s Me and Julio Down by the Schoolyard, Royal finally announces that he’s going to let loose with his grandsons. He wants to show them what drives him. Which is? “I’m talking about putting a brick through the other guy’s windshield. I’m talking about taking it out and chopping it up.”
Take a good look, he seems to be saying. I’m Royal Tenenbaum. Or is that Buck Barrow? Disney+
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