What The Hell America!

SAD NEWS BROKE EARLY THURSDAY MORNING that the Oscar-winning actor Gene Hackman had been found dead at the age of 95 with his wife, Betsy Arakawa, in their New Mexico home alongside one of their dogs. Hackman, who famously and seemingly happily retired after 2004’s Welcome to Mooseport, is, simply, one of the all-time greats, a definite contender for the Mount Rushmore of American actors alongside Brando, De Niro, Denzel, and other recognized-by-one-name luminaries.

There’s only one Hackman, and now he’s gone.

Growing up in the age of the brawny action star, as I did, Hackman’s success as one of the great stars of the 1970s always felt like a minor miracle. There was this magical period when you could just look like A Guy and be an enormous star if you possessed the right intensity or charisma. (See also: Richard Dreyfuss and Roy Scheider.)

But then, that’s the actor’s magic: capturing the attention of the camera and the viewer on the other side of the screen and transforming from Just A Guy into The Man. Hackman was, of course, a man’s man, a Marine no less, enlisting at the age of 16 and heading over to China where he served as a field radio operator before the Communist takeover in 1949. After serving he used the GI Bill to earn a degree in television production and journalism, before becoming an actor. Success was slow in coming—an examination of his IMDB page will reveal a number of one-episode runs on TV westerns and procedurals—and then he caught his break, as Buck Barrow in Bonnie and Clyde, a role that allowed him to tap into that psycho just below the surface.

But it was his turn as Jimmy “Popeye” Doyle in The French Connection that cemented Hackman’s place in the firmament of Hollywood. Popeye was either a good Bad Cop or a bad Good Cop, depending on your point of view and what you cared to emphasize. Casually racist, more than a little brutal in his treatment of subjects, yet unrelentingly dedicated to cutting off the poison flooding the streets of New York City: Popeye Doyle was the archetypal antihero. This is where Hackman transforms from A Guy to The Man; literally, given Doyle’s profession and bearing. That he’s vaguely monstrous is at least part of the charm, and Hackman’s sly smile and willingness to get uncomfortably close to the people he’s haranguing drive it all home.

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Hackman slid easily back and forth between hero and villain; his whole career was painted in shades of gray. And while Hackman could undoubtedly ham it up—he remains the definitive live-action Lex Luthor for a reason—he imbued his characters with a sly subtlety that could leave audiences unsure where to fall. That mode practically defines the roles he took on in the last decade or so of his career, starting with Unforgiven. Given that the film stars Clint Eastwood, it’s easy to forget that he, technically, is the outlaw in that picture. Hackman’s Little Bill is the face of law and order, though not justice. He’s just a semi-retired lawman trying to maintain order in a frontier town; if some whores get cut up, that’s worth a few horses to their employer, not burning down the whole town in vengeance. Again, there’s that sly, knowing smile, one he spent decades perfecting: He deploys it before defanging English Bob (Richard Harris) because he knows he has the goods and Bob, who spends Independence Day yammering about the glory of royalty, doesn’t.

The Quick and the Dead remains one of my favorite Hackman performances because his Herod (subtle, that) is like an operatic version of Little Bill: He’s the king of a shitty little border town, soaking the people who live there for all they’re worth and killing anyone who stands in his way. He’s neither law, nor order, nor justice: He’s a force of a nature. When he screams at the assembled townsfolk that “If you live to see the dawn, it’s because I allow it,” we believe him. When he smiles that sly smile at Sharon Stone’s gunslinger across the dinner table where we’ve seen her point a derringer right at his belly, we know she’s already beat, at least in that moment; her time might come later, but she’s not going to get the drop of Gene Hackman. Not here, not in this sneaky manner. Herod is the king of sneaks.

Rumor has it at this point in his career Hackman was more or less running roughshod over his directors, particularly those unaccustomed to A-Listers, like The Quick and the Dead’s Sam Raimi. In his memoir, Best Possible Place, Worst Possible Time, Barry Sonnenfeld recalls talking after the premiere of Get Shorty with Hackman, who tells him that “I could have been so much better, except the entire time I was working on this show, I DIDN’T THINK YOU HAD A FUCKING CLUE,” all caps and itals in the original, which you can pretty much hear in Hackman’s exasperated growl. It’s the sort of backhanded compliment you come to expect from an aging patriarch.

The sort of thing, in fact, that you might expect Royal Tenenbaum to say in The Royal Tenenbaums. It wasn’t quite his last movie but it was his last great movie (all apologies to Behind Enemy Lines, which I do enjoy a great deal), and Royal Tenenbaum is himself one of the great characters of the 2000s. Failed businessman, failed father, fantastic raconteur: It’s hard to imagine anyone in the role other than Gene Hackman, who brings a perfect mixture of gruff annoyance and genuine love to the movie as the father of three geniuses who made them all feel like idiots at some point in their lives.

It’s a classic Hackman role: He’s a liar and a hound but ultimately charming, a father figure of the sort they simply do not make anymore. He’s tender without being saccharine; there’s this very brief moment at the end of the movie, when Royal’s son Chas (Ben Stiller) is choking back tears after his dog his died and his kids have nearly died, and he says “I’ve had a rough year, Dad.” And Hackman echoes that choked sob with an “I know you have, Chassie,” and just kind of grabs him around the shoulder and gives him a half hug that is perfect for both the character and the actor.

A full-on embrace wouldn’t have been right; it would have been too much, too cloying, dishonest to Royal and Chas alike. That just wasn’t who Royal was. And Hackman knew that. Because he was The Man.