Gene Hackman: Cinema’s Finest Purveyor of Cracked Masculinity

Gene Hackman, who has died at the age of 95, is someone that we have never stopped discussing. He earned his first screen credit in 1964 and retired quietly forty years later, but in the intervening years he has remained as beloved and as vital as ever. It did not take his death for cinephiles to recognise his greatness. Bonnie and Clyde (1967), The French Connection (1971), The Conversation (1974)—films that are over half a century old, yet we do not have to strain to recall them, and we certainly don’t struggle to place Hackman within them. He was unforgettable, whether he took the lead role or not.

He didn’t look like Warren Beatty or Faye Dunaway, but he’s the first actor I think of when I think of Bonnie and Clyde, playing Clyde’s ribald and unfiltered brother, Buck. Everyone noticed him—it was his breakout role, and it bagged him a best supporting actor nomination at the 40th Academy Awards (he lost to another actor who excelled at playing tense, sweaty men, George Kennedy, who won for playing Dragline in Cool Hand Luke).

Hackman would indeed go on to win the Oscar for ‘Best Actor’ in a lead role for The French Connection, and decades later for best supporting actor in Unforgiven (1992). Well-earned awards to be sure, but there is something incongruous about picturing this unaffected everyman at an awards show that exists almost entirely to inflate the egos of the Hollywood elite. One wonders what face he pulled at the canapés, this actor who played characters who described Eric Rohmer films as like ‘watching paint dry’, who would seem more at home in a baseball dugout than at the Governor’s Ball (perhaps serendipitously, there was no Oscars Governor’s Ball the year Hackman was nominated for Bonnie and Clyde).

Perhaps he did have an ego—who wouldn’t in his position?—but if so, he did not come across as a man who liked to wield it. He was by all accounts private, quiet, and serious-minded. A true professional who at every turn (onscreen and off) eschewed ostentation. He played men with jobs—cops, basketball coaches, submarine captains—and could be as commanding or shrinking as you like. As Harry Caul in The Conversation—my favourite Hackman film–he almost dissolves in the San Francisco fog, a man who hardly exists, while only a year on, he reprises the role of crooked cop ‘Popeye’ Doyle for The French Connection II (1975), once again commanding and repulsive.

He didn’t have the look of a typical Hollywood star: he was hardened, indelicate and not what you’d call sensual. His moustache could make him seem like a desk jockey, doomed to file reports and paperwork for the next hundred years. But like the best character actors (a career path he all but defined) he was magnetic, his quiet, brooding confidence simmering whenever he was on screen, a sex appeal that comes from some inner tension, as if he were always calculating his next move, always tormented by unseen forces.

In Cisco Pike (1972), playing crooked cop Leo Holland, the unseen force keeping him on edge is his heart. “I run. It takes the flutter away”, he explains to Karen Black’s Sue, sprinting on the spot, sweat beading his forehead. He has to move, has to run, or else he calcifies and turns into a man that is stuck, like a town statue that everyone passes and nobody looks at. And it was Hackman’s heart that led to his retirement—his never-ceasing work ethic put such a strain on his body that at the urging of his doctors, he decided to pack in screen acting and devote the remaining years of his life to writing novels, cycling, and restoring homes.

It would be hard to describe the latter as being sedate, but if these aren’t the typical activities of a pensioner, then this was not a typical pensioner. This is the man who in 1983 drove in a 24-hour endurance race in Daytona, Florida. This is the man who lied about his age so he could join the marines at 16. When Hackman was 71 years of age in 2001, he starred in no less than five theatrically released films. Yet never did the quality of his performances waver, never did it feel like he was there just to make money. Ben Stiller recalled being starstruck when encountering Hackman for the first time, telling the legend he loved his work in The Poseidon Adventure (1972). According to Stiller, Hackman’s hilariously blunt response was the phrase: “money job”.

If that was true, and it may well have been, at no point in that film—or any of his roles—does it come across that he’s dragging his feet. If he’s thinking about how he’s going to finance his next remodelling, then somehow it only adds to turmoil of his characters. Rarely if ever did his men have the privilege of taking it easy. He was an actor coming up in the 1960s and 1970s, when social attitudes were changing, and screen acting evolved into an entirely different beast. But he’s not enjoying the sexual freedom, or the drugs, or the music. He’s not Kris Kristofferson as Cisco Pike, driving around Los Angeles high as a kite like a proto-Doc Sportello (Joaquin Phoenix), the protagonist of Paul Thomas Anderson’s Inherent Vice (2014). He is instead the detective blackmailing Cisco, infuriated by (maybe jealous of) his hippie lifestyle, just like Detective ‘Bigfoot’ Bjornsen (Josh Brolin) in Inherent Vice. Hackman’s films and performances influenced a generation of filmmakers and actors, particularly the neo-noirs that were his bread and butter, but we take sadistic pleasure in the fact that Hackman’s characters never get to enjoy the freedom of the changing times—or much of anything.

He’s usually behind desks, driving cop cars, listening to wire taps, trying to see the whole picture. He was a detective in a time when nothing made sense. Take his turn as Harry Moseby in Arthur Penn’s Night Moves (1975), a film in which he’s again investigating a mystery and slowly giving himself over to the darkness, to the answerless void. He barrels out of the starting gate when he plays supporting parts, but when he was the lead, you could often feel the ache that came from carrying the burden, as if his men were about to crack up from the pressure of holding together their world, and the films themselves.

If the cinema of the time was defined by a sort of post-Kerouac ideal of personal and literal freedom, then Hackman was like John Updike, representing the people who stay in their towns and jobs and marriages, desperate, frustrated, running constantly, but on the same spot. He became a star in the decades after World War II, and excelled at playing army men. He often presented a militaristic air, but it felt begrudging, a leadership that was thrust upon him, a cog in the wheel of bureaucracy and process. He could play greedy and power-mad politicians, but we got the sense he was there by accident; would much rather have spent a life as a carpenter instead. But Hackman, like his characters, had the grafting dedication to see things through to the end, for better or worse. Once the wheels had begun turning he couldn’t or wouldn’t stop them.

Sure, he’s Sheriff Bill Daggett in Unforgiven, but what is he the sheriff of, exactly? The shit-hole town in the middle of the Wyoming nothingness called Big Whiskey (it’s a fictional town, actually filmed in Alberta Canada) is his domain, and he’s a cruel, iron-fisted fascist, taking his small-town frustrations out on the folks he was sworn to protect. What control he appears to have is actually slipping through his fingers, was perhaps never his at all. Miles beneath the surface of the ocean, he’s not just losing command of his submarine in Crimson Tide (1995) but facing off against a new generation of actor—younger, savvier, sexier.

He played villains, but his imposing nature didn’t come from physical stature; it came instead from his tightly wound studiousness, his manipulations and plotting, his anger and strength that you sensed he kept in reserve in case his game plan failed. But you were always happy to see him. Reading his name in the credits for a film instantly made it worth watching, and despite his tortured, violent men, he was downright loveable, too, especially when he got to chew the scenery. As Lex Luthor in Superman (1978), he’s at his hammiest yet somehow never becomes a pantomime baddie. It’s a tightrope walk of a performance, inventing the ideal of what a comic book super-villain should be like—amusing and absurd beyond his control, but serious and vicious moment to moment. And never, you get the sense, losing sleep over it. 

Then we get brilliant comedic turns from him in the likes of Young Frankenstein (1974) and The Birdcage (1996). It’s always a risk when serious actors do silly (De Niro, an actor I adore, has never been particularly good at this), but Hackman knows how to play against his own image without ever seeming desperate. To this day, Hackman in full drag, complete with candy floss wig and forced-smile at the end of The Birdcage, is one of my true favourite images of the actor. Not because it’s out of character, but because it’s the perfect encapsulation of the types he played, just with a comic inflection: men forced into humiliating corners, the ever-changing walls of the world around them closing in. Here, Hackman got to both parody and define himself.

And it was just before his retirement that younger directors began to re-appreciate Hackman’s genius, his cinematic persona, which was distinct but so malleable. It’s The Royal Tenenbaums (2001) where we see him as soft and vulnerable, despite that patented gruff/nasal brusqueness. He played Royal Tenenbaum, the selfish patriarch of a wealthy family, now regretting his life choices like Charles Foster Kane on his deathbed, which perhaps explains his scheme to fake a terminal illness, hopefully winning the affection (or at least pity) of his loved ones in the process. It isn’t just the familiarity of Hackman that makes the role so warmly emotional, so funny—it’s the way he coughs out apologies, and can’t bear to look his estranged wife in the eye after decades of staring down everyone from Clint Eastwood to Superman. “I want to thank you for raising our children, by the way”, he says as he walks alongside Anjelica Huston’s Etheline. Here he looks at her, gauges her response. It’s a transaction, an acknowledgement, I’ve offered you this, so what say you now? It’s a Hackman character opening the door a crack, letting you know that he recognises the extent of his flaws, but it’s in the service, ultimately, of his own needs and desires.

Later on, his son Chas (Ben Stiller), lets his door open a little too. “I’ve had a rough year, dad”, he confesses, voice cracking. An understatement, the kind that Royal, or Hackman, might give. “I know, son”, he responds. Here, at the tail end of his towering career, we are reminded that Hackman is not concerned with performing some self-aggrandising idea of masculinity. What we see is what has always been there—an imposing edifice of control and strength, yet the cracks are everywhere and through them seeps the terror and insecurity that drives it all; the warped belief that to be a man in the 20th- and 21st-centuries, you must somehow jettison emotion, kindness, empathy, whilst also knowing you can never fully rid yourself of it all. Hackman certainly couldn’t—despite the sort he played, he was loveable, charming, familiar, and often, you could sense his characters caring despite the fact they’d been trained not to.

Ultimately, we love to watch Hackman work. He loved to work, and he loved to play people who worked. He wasn’t insistent, he wasn’t a camera hog—he was dedicated to the process, and through it, his characters came to life. As an audio surveillance specialist in The Conversation, we find perhaps the closest analogue to Hackman. “I don’t care what they’re talking about”, Harry Caul says about a target. “All I want is a nice, fat recording”. The recording—and the film, the performance—is the thing. It isn’t his job to ask questions, or to interrogate. And ultimately it provides us with the greatest gift: like the houses Hackman built, he has done the hard work, and it’s our freedom, our privilege, to live with the work, to look inside it, to root around and find new details and new corners. Truly, it’s one of the most generous gifts a film artist has ever given audiences.

Gene Hackman may be gone, but what he built will always stand.