Giving Gene Hackman his props

 

1930-2025

I don’t do this very often. Obituaries are a form of fiction I try to avoid. If I do them at all, it’s usually after the initial burst of well intended hagiography has worn off and I feel like I have a unique perspective to offer. This time I’m going to make an exception for several reasons. The circumstances of Gene Hackman’s death are dominating the coverage, and human curiosity aside, what happened in New Mexico seems like none of our business. He was 95 years old, retired for many years, and for many movie fans under the age of 50, he may be a distant memory or a blank. That’s not right. His story shouldn’t be the death story. It should be the work story. Why I feel entitled to chime in where I wouldn’t normally. Never knew anything about his private life, which is the way it probably should be even for the biggest stars. I’m pretty sure he was a private person who wanted to be known for what of himself he had put on film. As a lifelong fan of the cinema, I’ve seen a lot of his movies and think this is a good time to send my fellow fans in search of Hackman performances that should be remembered years from now.

I’m going to show you four or five trailers, including my own favorite and my wife’s, which happen to be quite different. He had extraordinary range, which is something to appreciate in an era where all the praise seems to be lavished on one-note stars like Robert DeNiro, Tom Cruise, and Harrison Ford, or gimmick specialists like Al Pacino, Tom Hanks, and Johnny Depp. Hackman could play any role with seeming effortless naturalism.

Here we go. 

I Never Sang for My Father

It can be hard to watch. Especially for men who grew up when fathers were in the business of making their sons into men and heartily disapproved of what their efforts produced in this, that, and the other aspect of adult life. But Hackman leaves the scenery chewing to Melvyn Douglas and all of us aging sons out here can perceive what he’s feeling because he knows what we are feeling too. When you’re in the mood to think about manhood inside the constraints of family, give this classic a try.

The French Connection

Popeye Doyle. You want proof of range? This would be it. Lines that live past the recollection of where you first heard them (“Did you ever pick your toes in Poughkeepsie?”) and a character you can’t really like but who fascinates you anyway. Most people of my generation focused more on the chase scene as the star of the film, regarded by many as superior to the iconic San Francisco joyride in Bullitt. I wasn’t distracted because I preferred McQueen’s masterful driving more than the Cinema Verité slam-bang-crashing under the el in Connection, though I agree it was probably more believable and purposeful in context than the set piece of its predecessor. Lots of good reasons to see this one again in time present. Cops like Hackman’s Doyle are few and far between now.

Did someone say “bullet”? Talk about your smooth transitions… I’m dissolving to another great acrion movie that happens to contain my favorite Gene Hackman scene of all.

Bite the Bullet

A marathon horse race inspired by an actual historic event. With co-stars like James Coburn and Candace Bergen, not to mention some fine horses filmed under extremely difficult conditions. You just have to see it for yourselves. The title is a literal reference to a case of extreme toothache at the worst possible time, when the only available help was a bullet to bite. A great scene but not the best one. That’s Hackman’s character, a former Rough-Rider with Theodore Roosevelt, recounting the truth of the charge up San Juan Hill with TR leading the way as the only mounted rider and number one target of the enemy. As Hackman tells it, you can feel the dirty under your own fingernails and the heroism of the Americans on that day. The ending is not the dream victory of Hoosiers (which I know will figure in many favorite lists), but a more satisfying demonstration of the attained wisdom of a retired civilian soldier. It should leave you feeling glad to have seen it.

Maybe not so much with the next one, which is my wife’s favorite. It’s complex, nerve-wracking, and at the same time subtle in the intricate responses the Hackman character has to the situation he finds himself in, his colleagues in a world steeped in deception, and his own toxic dilemma.

The Conversation

He’s a high-tech eavesdropper, the best of the best in a small but brilliant coterie of rivals in the same trade. His reflexive reaction to challenge or confrontation is not to react at all. Impassivity is his armor. We are the ones who have to figure out what is going on inside his silence and lack of affect. We too have to figure out what is the right thing to do and even if there is a right thing to do. A quiet masterpiece,of a movie withstand remains ambiguous even after the fact of watching it. Is he a villain caught unawares by himself? Can he, could he, be forgiven if he resolves his dilemma cleverly enough?

No such questions about the final movie on our list, clearly labeled…

Unforgiven

Alone of the movie clips shown here, this one isn’t a trailer but the climactic moment the entire film has been aiming for, where an uncharacteristically disreputable Clint Eastwood character announces his intention to murder a famous lawman played by Gene Hackman. Eastwood, who was also the director, drew praise for reinventing the western for the modern idiom, but I don’t believe that’s what he was doing.  Far from starting over in the western genre, Unforgiven is a response and therefore an homage to The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, a classic movie by John Ford (asked to name the three best American directors, Orson Welles famously replied, “John Ford, John Ford… and John Ford”). Unforgiven was hardly the first dirty, grungy western with a deeply flawed protagonist, and it’s nothing new for Eastwood to make movies that embody a different perspective than that offered by the acknowledged classics. Indeed, it’s a pattern. High Plains Drifter (High Noon), Pale Rider (Shane), and The Outlaw Josey Wales (The Searchers) are all distinct variations on the greatest westerns of their day. 

What does all this have to do with Hackman? He doesn’t have that much time onscreen, similar to the atypically minimal screen time of John Wayne in Ford’s Valance, but like Wayne, Hackman’s character is the commanding figure who outweighs Eastwood’s own presence in the movie up until the final bloody confrontation that completes the drama. That was my own objection to the movie when I first saw it; too much time wasted watching Clint prove what a bouncer he was before until simple vengeance rose up  with him and turned him into Clint Eastwood. Until Hackman showed up to create the incentive, the movie was just a bunch of waiting for something big to happen. It’s Hackman who makes that moment big. We detest him, of course, and yet he is legally and perhaps even morally in the right. Killing him is murder. Cold-blooded murder. And in wanting that murder to occur, we in the audience are being confronted ourselves. We prefer the story to any real world truth.

Just as he waited and waited to bring Clint the gunfighter onto the stage, the director has also waited to show his hand regarding how the question being asked in The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance is being reframed in Unforgiven. In Valance, the protagonist Jimmy Stewart has enjoyed a long and presumably virtuous career based on the legend that against all odds he slew the evil killer Liberty Valance (Lee Marvin) when in reality, that, um, murder was the act of John Wayne, who lies dead in a coffin throughout the screen time of the movie. The tagline of the Ford movie is “when people prefer the legend, print the legend.” In a sense this forgives the entire fabric of mythology that has been created and maintained about the Wild West. Of course we prefer the heroes the way they have been rewritten for us because the end was a good thing; law and order overcame violence and rapine and chaos to result in the prosperous and virtuous western states of the union. That’s a happy story when all is said and done.

Unforgiven overturns this perspective. The two men who matter here, like Stewart and Wayne in Valance, are essential opposites, in this case a brave but necessarily rough and tumble bringer of order vs a free spirit whose experience has made him cold-blooded and quick to use bullets instead of law to get what he wants, including what he perceives as justice.

Which should be printed here? The truth or the colorfully bloody revenge against a man who might be wearing a badge but still not be sympathetic? 

The movie’s answer seems to be more cynical than Ford’s pat nostrum. You can pretend you’re choosing between truth and legend, but its’s the people who choose, who always choose. Why it’s important that Hackman and Eastwood have, ultimately, the same specific gravity as characters. Sinners both, again like all of us, the old immovable object vs irresistible force that creates imponderable ambiguity with respect to the truth. 

Unforgiven is as much Hackman’s movie as it is Eastwood’s in performance terms. They are equally matched. Who else could have played Hackman’s role and created the complexities of a key character who seems to have been written rather simply?

Why he was a great actor. He may not seem like a legend but he will live on in the history of his profession longer than almost anyone you can name.

For now, may he rest in peace…

P.S. In the interest of full disclosure, I was not originally a fan of Unforgiven. Back in Shuteye Town 1999, I had it in the Blockbuster category of movies at Toot CD/Video. Not admiringly:

Click on the pic for other not so beloved Blockbusters