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As the movie ends, our point of view pans slowly, relentlessly, back and forth like a security camera across the trashed apartment. It has been ripped apart floorboard by floorboard in a doomed attempt to find the bugging device spying on the guy who lives there. With every sweep, the man is seen in the corner, playing the sax. Fatalistic, but not exactly despairing; realistic but not precisely disillusioned – the craftsman who is an artist at heart, nonchalant, magnificent. Gene Hackman’s performance as surveillance expert Harry Caul in Francis Coppola’s paranoid conspiracy drama The Conversation (1974) was a jewel in his career. Caul is a pro eavesdropper who becomes obsessed with a conversation he records for a mysterious client that, to his horror, reveals a murder plot – unlocking his own private agonies of guilt and loneliness. The film turns on some variants of intonation and pitch that Harry doesn’t understand until it’s too late.
The death of Gene Hackman marks the end of one of the greatest periods of US cinema: the American new wave. Hackman was the gold standard for this era, ever since Warren Beatty gave him his big break with the role of Buck Barrow in Arthur Penn’s Bonnie and Clyde (1967). He was the character actor who was really a star; in fact the star of every scene he was in – that tough, wised-up, intelligent but unhandsome face perpetually on the verge of coolly unconcerned derision, or creased in a heartbreakingly fatherly, pained smile. He wasn’t gorgeous like Redford or dangerously sexy like Nicholson, or even puckish like Hoffman; Hackman was normal, but his normality was steroidally supercharged. His hair was of its age: frizzy, with evident male-pattern baldness. You really don’t get star haircuts like that any more.
He was unmissable as the reckless, racist cop Jimmy “Popeye” Doyle in William Friedkin’s The French Connection (1971) and its sequel; masterly as the Rev Scott in Ronald Neame’s classic disaster pic The Poseidon Adventure (1972); superb as the ex-con in Jerry Schatzberg’s Beckettian masterpiece Scarecrow (1973); and perhaps most unmissable as the weary, bewildered private eye in Penn’s Night Moves (1975). Later, he would be a wittily cast Lex Luthor in the Christopher Reeve Superman movies, and then the mysterious plutocrat and self-made billionaire Jack McCann in Nicolas Roeg’s Eureka (1983) – his performance in which surely inspired Daniel Day-Lewis in There Will Be Blood.
Hackman’s career has so much gold in it that it is almost impossible to mine, but there was also his FBI agent Anderson in Alan Parker’s Mississippi Burning (1988); his querulous movie director Lowell Kolchek in Mike Nichols’s Postcards from the Edge (1990); and the careworn sheriff Bill Daggett in Clint Eastwood’s western Unforgiven (1992); not to mention the smilingly mysterious senior lawyer opposite Tom Cruise’s moon-faced newbie in The Firm (1993).
Then there’s his late comic masterpiece – and maybe his flat-out masterpiece, full stop: Royal Tenenbaum in Wes Anderson’s The Royal Tenenbaums (2001), the disbarred and penniless attorney who fakes stomach cancer so he can move back in with his ex-wife (an equally brilliant Anjelica Huston) and their grownup children, three eccentric, damaged former child prodigies played by Ben Stiller, Gwyneth Paltrow and Luke Wilson.
What is so extraordinary about these performances is that Hackman’s age never seems to change: he always seems to be wiry, tough and somewhere in his 40s or 50s. The “Royal Tenenbaum” Hackman could easily take the role of the “Popeye Doyle” Hackman.
As the hardbitten cop in The French Connection – for which he won the best actor Oscar – Hackman has many unmissable scenes in which he does nothing but cruise vigilantly around town: the New York of the celluloid 1970s, which was sound-recorded on film so we get the distant, ambient wailing and fluttering of car horns. Hackman can do the deadpan, quotidian part of the performance as well as the action side of it: the racist barging into the black bar, the roughing up of suspects, the angry and contemptuous denunciations, and the undercurrent of sadness. This was a performance that laid down the law for all the others he subsequently gave.
He was very different as Harry Moseby in Night Moves. Moseby is a private detective, with a great 70s moustache that exaggerates the downturn of his mouth, given the time-honoured job of tracking down a runaway teenaged daughter while also spying on the wife, but who stumbles on to a complicated mess, or tangle of messes, that he can never quite work out. The film gave him one of his greatest lines. When he turns down the chance to watch Eric Rohmer’s Ma Nuit Chez Maud, he says: “I saw a Rohmer film once. It was kinda like watching paint dry.” He delivers the cinephile laugh-line with throwaway expertise.
Quite as good is his performance in Roeg’s underrated Eureka, a metaphysical murder mystery based on a true crime, which gives Hackman one of the best roles of his career: a wealthy prospector who strikes it rich and retires to the Bahamas, while fearing that his wealth is going to be taken away by his daughter (Theresa Russell) and a couple of rapacious, mobster investors from Miami (Joe Pesci and Mickey Rourke). Again, Hackman hits the key notes of amused defiance, unafraid and unconcerned about everything except the strange demons inside his own head.
In the end, I keep coming back to his performance in The Royal Tenenbaums, one that builds on his reputation for potent, unimpressed no-bullshit men but doesn’t simply satirise or send up his former career. His tatty, double-breasted chalk-stripe suit, his cigarette in the holder, his glasses, his indomitable grin, even his slightly too long hair are all absolutely perfect – as is the moment when he finally has to swallow his pride and take a job at the Lindbergh Palace hotel, and wear the cheap-looking but strangely well-tailored uniform and cap. His line readings are perfection, especially when he talks to his bewildered grandchildren about their mother, his daughter-in-law, who has died in a plane crash: “Your mother was a terribly attractive woman.”
It doesn’t make sense to call Hackman unassuming when his presence was so potent; in some ways he conveyed the strength of a retired athlete turned sportscaster, or, for that matter, the high-school basketball coach he played in Hoosiers (1986). For four decades, the performances of Gene Hackman gave form and texture to American cinema.
