The movie industry is in mourning for actor Gene Hackman who has passed away at the age of 95. Hackman's formidable career spanned more than five decades and encompassed every conceivable genre from gritty thrillers to high-camp comedies.
Born in California in 1930, Hackman's desire to be an actor set in at a young age. After serving in the U.S. Marines, he was discharged and wound up back in California where he fell in with fellow jobbers Dustin Hoffman and Robert Duvall.
Despite enduring sneeringly low-performance scores at the Pasadena Playhouse, Hackman broke through with his role in the 1967 drama Bonnie & Clyde. His casting came about as a result of his friendship with star Warren Beatty, and Hackman's Hollywood career took off.
He won his first Oscar as Popeye Doyle in William Friedkin's seminal thriller The French Connection (1971) and demonstrated his comic chops as the megalomaniacal Lex Luthor in Superman (1978). Hackman won his second Oscar for portraying the vicious Sheriff Little Bill Daggett in Clint Eastwood's classic Western Unforgiven (1992).
Hackman's other notable roles included The Poseidon Adventure (1972), The Conversation (1974), Hoosiers (1986), Mississippi Burning (1988) and The Royal Tenenbaums (2001). The last of those was directed by Wes Anderson and despite Hackman's frosty relationship with the director, he received his final Best Actor nomination before retiring from the industry in 2004 to become a full-time author.
We're here to celebrate this illustrious career not by looking back at the famous works (many of which have been cited above), but some overlooked gems. The following films demonstrate Hackman's remarkable ability to lace his everyman persona with raw rage, earthy vitality and consummate realism.
1. Scarecrow (1973)
This is the only collaboration between acting titans Hackman and Al Pacino and is therefore in dire need of reappraisal. Hackman was post-French Connection and Pacino was post-Godfather in this affecting character study, which bears all the tough verisimilitude of the New Hollywood era. It's directed by Jerry Schatzberg who had scored a critical hit with the Pacino drama The Panic in Needle Park (1971).
Hackman plays an ex-con and Pacino a sailor on leave, both of whom travel from California to Pittsburgh to start a new life. Hackman's stories about the making of the film are legendary: he and Pacino went undercover as the film's down-and-out characters, visiting soup kitchens incognito while trying to avoid detection, a hard thing to manage when they were two of the biggest actors on the planet.
2. The French Connection II (1975)
Hackman was defined by his role as the tenacious and relentless New York cop Popeye Doyle in The French Connection (the character was based on real-life NYPD detective Eddie Egan). Such was the Oscar-winning success of William Friedkin's film (this included Best Picture) that a sequel was all but guaranteed.
Enter director John Frankenheimer who took Doyle to Marseille to track down the elusive criminal Charnier (Fernando Rey). The underrated sequel sports a typically energetic performance from Hackman, and it's a brave one too, particularly when Doyle has to undergo an especially nasty case of cold turkey.
3. Night Moves (1975)
Hackman's purple patch in the 1970s was something to behold. Before he fought Christopher Reeve's Superman, Hackman delivered one of his most oblique and chameleonic roles in this atmospheric and sweaty neo-noir thriller.
Overlooked for many years, Night Moves is now undergoing something of an appraisal with many critics citing Hackman's ability to infuse rough-hewn characters with believability. He plays a Los Angeles private investigator who gets in over his head while searching for the missing daughter of a former actress. The film was notable for reuniting Hackman with his Bonnie & Clyde filmmaker Arthur Penn.
4. Under Fire (1983)
Hackman claimed to be suffering a career drought in the early to mid 1980s but you wouldn't know it by looking at his typically sterling work. One of his best films from this period is the political thriller Under Fire, directed by Roger Spottiswoode and co-starring Nick Nolte and Joanna Cassidy.
The film is the story of journalists covering the final days of the Nicaraguan revolution in 1979. Hackman plays war correspondent Alex who wants to make the conflict his final piece before taking up a news anchor job in New York. The piece is imbued with a sense of time and place, aided immeasurably by Jerry Goldsmith's authentically atmospheric score.
5. The Quick and the Dead (1995)
Unforgiven elicited a memorable performance from Hackman even though he had to be talked into doing it. Sam Raimi's satirical The Quick and the Dead allowed Hackman to crank his Unforgiven portrayal up to 11, portraying the corrupt small-town Sheriff Herrod who clashes with Sharon Stone's mysterious Woman With No Name.
Raimi's visual style is full of knowing crash zooms and impossible angles, both deconstructing and celebrating the legacy of Sergio Leone's Spaghetti Westerns (aided by Alan Silvestri's score). Amid a strong cast that also includes Leonardo DiCaprio and Russell Crowe, Hackman is having a grand time as a diabolical madman ready to meet his maker at high noon.
6. The Birdcage (1996)
Many forget that Hackman started his career in comedy – it isn't exactly evident from films like The French Connection or Night Moves. Mike Nichols' delightful satire The Birdcage allowed Hackman to return to his roots.
It's an adaptation of the 1978 French film La Cage Aux Folles, starring Robin Williams and a scene-stealing Nathan Lane as a gay couple whose son is set to marry the daughter of an ultra-conservative senator. Said politician is played by Hackman who is clearly game for a laugh and deploys an admirable poker face while surrounded by expert comics. Plus, you get to see this Oscar-winning icon in drag come the end of the film.
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