What The Hell America!

The late, great Gene Hackman was a working-class guy from Danville, Illinois, the son of a waitress and a pressman for a local newspaper who deserted the family when young Hackman was just thirteen. An avid moviegoer from childhood and a big fan of the ultimate urban working-class tough, James Cagney, whom he considered “the consummate actor,” Hackman wanted to act from an early age. But he spent many years, after a post-WWII stint in the Marines, moving furniture and driving trucks and selling shoes for a living while he studied acting and got his training on the New York stage.

The furthest thing from a camera-ready glamour boy, Hackman described himself as looking like “your everyday mine worker.” When trying to break into film and television work during an interlude at the Pasadena Playhouse, he and his friend — roommate and fellow outsider Dustin Hoffman — were voted “least likely to succeed.”

But looks aren’t everything, and Hackman got lucky in finally hitting his stride in the 1960s and ’70s, when character actors with rough-hewn, lived-in faces were able to move into starring roles based on talent, charisma, and the same outsider energy that had shunted them into supporting roles before. Hoffman and Lee Marvin and Walter Matthau were Hackman’s peers among unhandsome leading men in the films of that era.

A major actor for almost fifty years, Hackman was found dead this week at age ninety-five, in “suspicious circumstances” that also claimed the lives of his wife Betsy Arakawa, aged sixty-four, and one of their three German Shepherds. Police are investigating the cause of their deaths.

Hackman starred in so many movies, it’s hard to pick out only a few to celebrate. He acknowledged that for decades, “the poor boy in me” made it hard for him to turn down high-paying film roles, and he tended to work to the point of burnout on projects ranging from landmark to lousy. He also found it hard to manage wealth and fame and his own ambition: “I was very determined to be successful. I had a number of houses and cars and airplanes. It was like the empty barrel that doesn’t have a bottom to it.”

Though generally an amiable loner, Hackman was famously fractious on many films, battling with directors and irritated by any less-dedicated costars. He groused during the filming of The Package (1989), “I know I’m a pain. . . . Get me out of this business. I’m just praying for the day when someone says: ‘You’re finished in this town.’”

But he was never finished until he said he was finished in 2004, after a doctor’s exam showed him his heart was in no condition to endure the stresses of the filmmaking process. Before that, he was permanently on call as the tremendous actor who could ace “everyman roles.” He seemed able to play any variation — urban cop, small-town sheriff, convict, steelworker, army sergeant, government official, basketball coach — but he was equally memorable in more extreme roles. For example, watch Hackman as the blind hermit in Mel Brooks’s riotous comedy Young Frankenstein (1974), so overly eager in offering hospitality, he breaks the wine mug of the suffering Creature (Peter Boyle) during the toast, spills hot soup in his lap, and lights his thumb on fire instead of the cigar.  Then as the Creature flees this scene of torture, busting through the closed door to escape, the hermit calls out plaintively, “Wait, wait, where are you going? I was going to make espresso!”

This famous one-scene role is so perfectly done, it’s a matter of considerable grief to me that Hackman didn’t focus much on comedy during his long career.  The few times he returned to comedic roles, he was inspired. His turn as Royal Tenenbaum, the eccentric, frequently callous, and mostly neglectful patriarch of an affluent family of geniuses in Wes Anderson’s The Royal Tenenbaums (2001) is brilliant in the way Hackman invests the selfish trickster character with a vein of tenderness as he uses his own hedonistic tendencies to enliven his depressed children in a late-life attempt to make amends.

As so often with Hackman performances, he crystallized characteristics in beautifully realized poses and gestures. I can still picture him exemplifying the younger Royal’s shambling version of high style — rumpled double-breasted suit with ascot, too-long 1970s hair, square-cut glasses — exhaling the smoke from a cigarette and offering severe criticisms of his very young “adopted daughter Margo” and her play, all on her birthday. Using his considerable physical bulk for comic effect — Hackman was a blocky six foot two — he’s sitting hunched over a children-sized table with Margo’s small brothers, who are trying to defend her work. As Margo stalks off glowering, he says in the-voice-of-reason tones, “Sweetie, don’t be mad at me. That’s just one man’s opinion!”

Hackman first broke through in film in Bonnie and Clyde (1967), playing Clyde Barrow’s brother and fellow bank robber, Buck. Hackman brings a raucous, expansive physical energy and a rube’s naivete to the character, who sees no contradiction in being a newly reformed ex-con and family man, married to the prudish Blanche (Estelle Parsons), but falling easily back into Barrow Gang robberies.

Buck’s death scene is among the most harrowing put on film, because of the sudden extreme gun violence that cuts Buck down, leaving him with his head “half blowed off” but still struggling and crying out in the night. In his last words he frets to Clyde about having lost his shoes, and Hackman puts a heartbreaking, querulous note into the lines as Buck’s brain functions slip away: “I b’lieve the dog took ‘em. . . .”

Who could forget Hackman’s turn as the sadistic sheriff of a ramshackle Western town in Clint Eastwood’s best film, Unforgiven (1992)? Hackman finds a tight, menacing grin that attests to Little Bill Daggett’s lethal barbarism as an expression of scary levels of masculine insecurity, in a film that’s all about violence arising from masculine insecurity. Recall that Little Bill is obsessed with building a house but is a clownishly incompetent carpenter. In compensation, he revels in cruelties as entertainment for himself and the town, from the torture-murder of Morgan Freeman’s Ned Logan character — recall the sick, sexualized way Bill stands close behind Ned, whispering in his ear the warning of what grisly fate awaits him — to the hilarious psychological torture of gunslinger English Bob (Richard Harris), who’s proud of the glamorizing book about him called The Duke of Death. As part of the reputation-ruining humiliation Little Bill doles out, he repeatedly mispronounces the title, calling him in insistent mock-serious tones, “The Duck of Death.”

Hackman himself considered his performance as Harry Caul in Francis Coppola’s The Conversation (1974) to be among his finest. It’s a masterpiece of repressed emotion, sustained in scene after scene, until increasingly acute paranoia unravels Caul’s command of himself. A surveillance expert who thinks he overhears a murder being planned, Caul obsesses over his recording until his attempts to understand it backfire and he becomes convinced he’s become the object of someone else’s surveillance.

But long before the famous ending, when the mentally wrecked Caul sits slumped, playing a lonely saxophone, in the apartment he destroyed trying to find the bug he’s convinced must be there, Hackman had already exhausted the audience’s nerves with his character’s severely interiorized fear of the world. In the first scene, the expressionless, bespectacled, tie-wearing Caul is stopped dead in a posture of carefully controlled alarm, and then unable to rest until he finds out who invaded his apartment and left a bottle of champagne in honor of his birthday. How would anyone get into his apartment? And who would know his birthday? (The landlady, it turns out, is the culprit.)

That performance is a tremendous study of how much you can do with how little in terms of an actor’s arsenal of facial expressions, vocal inflections, postures, and gestures, while still getting across an overall effect of grim intensity.

Hackman won the Academy Award for Best Actor for his role as crude, racist, alcoholic cop Jimmy “Popeye” Doyle in William Friedkin’s The French Connection (1971) and for Best Supporting Actor in Unforgiven. He was nominated for Bonnie and Clyde, I Never Sang for My Father (1970), and Mississippi Burning (1988). He got the prizes and the accolades and the respect and the money he deserved for such consistent and unsparing excellence. And he looked as if he paid a real price for it, which isn’t something one often notes about rich, thoroughly rewarded professionals. He seemed to find it necessary, in order to maintain the quality of his work, to keep a certain emotional rawness that would’ve characterized his lean and precarious early years:

If you look at yourself as a star, you’ve already lost something in the portrayal of any human being. I need to wear that hair shirt. I need to keep myself on the edge and keep as pure as possible. You need something to bring you down to a sense of who you are and who you’re portraying. You need to remember you’re not a movie star and that you shouldn’t be too happy. You should never take anything for granted.

And indeed, Hackman always looked like a man repressing a grimace of pain or anger, or most likely both.

In interviews, he often told a haunting story from his youth, when his father left the family for good, driving by where the boy was playing in the street and waving goodbye. As Hackman told it, the gesture seemed so significant, he speculated that the seeds of his acting career may have sprung from that one moment of bleak recognition: “I sensed from that wave it was over, and I ran home to ask my mom what was the matter. That wave, it was like he was saying, ‘O.K., it’s all yours. You’re on your own, kiddo.”’

It was a fitting start for an everyman actor, and we salute his efforts to maintain emotional solidarity with all the others living on the edge.