[COLUMN] Gene Hackman Set the Standard | by Darren Mooney

Gene Hackman passed away earlier this week, one of the great institutions of Hollywood cinema.

Hackman emerged as part of the New Hollywood movement. His first major film role was playing Buck Barrow in Arthur Penn’s Bonnie and Clyde, the film generally cited as the starting point of that wave in American cinema in 1967. He was hired for and fired from Mike Nichols’ The Graduate that same year, another seminal film, in which he was originally supposed to play the father-in-law of Dustin Hoffman’s character. Hoffman was Hackman’s old roommate and just seven years younger.

Hackman had wanted to be an actor since he was a child, citing James Cagney as a major influence. However, famously, it took the actor years to break into the business. Hackman’s interviews and biographies are packed with stories of humiliations and embarrassments. He was, along with Hoffman, voted “Least Likely to Succeed” during their time at the Pasadena Playhouse. Hackman would tell stories about meeting old acquaintances while working second jobs.

This frustration would serve as a motivating factor for Hackman, who felt the need to prove himself to classmates, teachers and colleagues who believed that he was going nowhere fast. “It was like me against them,” Hackman admitted in 2004, the year that he effectively retired from acting, “and in some way, unfortunately, I still feel that way.” This is fitting. One of the commonalities between Hackman’s screen persona and that of his idol Cagney is the sense of a chip on their shoulder.

There are few pleasures in cinema quite as enjoyable as Gene Hackman shifting gears from quiet frustration to full-blown contempt. Hackman was one of cinema’s great shouters, and many of his best scenes involve Hackman’s character losing his temper, whether with friend or foe. There was, perhaps, some of Hackman in this screen persona. As recently as 2000, at the age of 71, Hackman was embroiled in a road rage incident in Los Angeles that ended with him punching the other party.

Hackman emerged as part of a wave of young and talented actors who didn’t conform to the standards of classic Hollywood beauty, performers like Al Pacino, Robert Duvall, James Caan. These were more grizzled men, people who felt more grounded and more authentic than the polished icons of earlier generations. These were actors who could be scruffy and stubbled. They all had star power and they were all handsome in their way, but it was a gritty sort of handsomeness.

It makes sense that Hackman truly established himself with the lead role as Detective Jimmy “Popeye” Doyle in William Friedkin’s The French Connection in 1971. This was the performance that won Hackman his first Oscar, and which inspired a chain of chicken restaurants. The French Connection is one of the most important films of the era, with Friedkin adopting an almost documentarian eye in filming the urban crime thriller.

The French Connection remains one of the great depictions of New York on film, because it captures the city as it really was at that moment in time. It is famously one of the first films to show the World Trade Center. Hackman fits perfectly within this framework. Popeye feels of a piece with the movie’s setting and aesthetics. The movie’s glimpse of Popeye’s apartment suggests this era of the city in microcosm: a dirty, messy sprawl that somehow attracts the most interesting visitors.

Perhaps reflecting his delayed entry into the industry and his desire to prove his critics wrong, Hackman was one of the most prolific actors of his generation. Between 1971 and 1975, he appeared in fourteen movies: Doctors' Wives, The Hunting Party, The French Connection, Cisco Pike, Prime Cut, The Poseidon Adventure, Scarecrow, The Conversation, Zandy's Bride, Young Frankenstein, Night Moves, Bite the Bullet, French Connection II and Lucky Lady.

This was in no way abnormal. Hackman would have similarly dense stretches at various points in his career. He appeared in five movies in 1988 alone: Split Decisions, Bat*21, Full Moon in Blue Water, Another Woman and Mississippi Burning. Hackman was genuinely prolific. While the films were of variable quality, Hackman was always a steady hand. He had a certain grounding quality, a way of anchoring material.

One of the more interesting contrasts between Hackman and many of other great actors of his generation was the sense that he was rarely embarrassed. Hackman was not afraid to retread old ground, whether literally or metaphorically. He returned for French Connection II, while Friedkin stayed away. He appeared in both Superman II and Superman IV: The Quest for Peace, although he made a point to side with director Richard Donner when he was fired while making Superman II.

Hackman was also never afraid to be typecast. His role in Tony Scott’s Enemy of the State is clearly riffing on his performance in The Conversation, to the point that it feels like a stealth sequel. After winning his second Oscar for Unforgiven in 1992, Hackman went all-in on the decade’s miniature western revival, starring in Geronimo: An American Legend, Wyatt Earp and The Quick and the Dead. He cornered the market on John Grisham adaptations: The Firm, The Chamber, Runaway Jury.

This may explain why Hackman never seemed to go through the same sorts of peaks and valleys that shaped the careers of so many of his contemporaries, like Al Pacino during the 1980s. While Hackman had a reputation for being ornery – director Barry Sonnenfeld described Hackman as “scary as hell to work with” while Wes Anderson described him as “one of the most challenging” actors he ever cast – but it honestly seemed like Hackman liked to work without ego.

This is evident in the way that Hackman aged into “elder statesman” roles much quicker than many of his New Hollywood contemporaries. During the 1990s, combining Hackman with a younger star – usually as a foil – was a recipe for thrills: Tom Cruise in The Firm, Denzel Washington in Crimson Tide, Hugh Grant in Extreme Measures, Chris O’Donnell in The Chamber, Will Smith in The Enemy of the State, even Owen Wilson in Behind Enemy Lines.

Hackman was never diminished by this framing of him as “the old guard”, the standard-bearer of movie-stardom. There was never a sense of an old man being put out to pasture or a veteran stopping by to bestow some of his credibility upon contemporary Hollywood. Instead, Hackman was often vital and compelling. He seemed to relish serving as trial-by-fire for a new generation of movie stars. Placing a young actor in a movie opposite Hackman was a reliable way of testing their mettle.

Take a look at that list of actors and films. The quality of the individual movie is directly proportional to the quality of the star that Hackman is playing against. In particular, the scenes between Hackman and Washington in Crimson Tide are some of the most charged dialogue scenes of that decade, two of the very best performers to ever do it getting to play off a partner who can match their level and push them to do better. Hackman was the standard against which talent could be measured.

This is not to suggest that Hackman’s filmography is consistently brilliant. Any actor who works so consistently for that long is going to make some awful films. Indeed, Hackman basically stepped away from acting after the underwhelming one-two punch of Runaway Jury in 2003 and Welcome to Mooseport in 2004. Runaway Jury famously reunited him with Hoffman, but was such a boondoggle that the only scene the pair shared together was a last-minute addition to the script. Welcome to Mooseport paired him with Ray Romano, who is no Denzel Washington.

Hackman would later acknowledge that he retired for medical reasons. “The straw that broke the camel’s back was actually a stress test that I took in New York,” Hackman explained in 2009. “The doctor advised me that my heart wasn’t in the kind of shape that I should be putting it under any stress.” He would do some writing and some voiceover work, take part in some retrospectives, but he largely retired from public life halfway through the first decade of the new millennium.

There is undoubtedly a sense of loss and tragedy in this. Hackman never got the chance to come back and do a proper farewell film, like Robert Redford did with The Old Man and the Gun or Harry Dean Stanton with Lucky. Then again, one gets the sense from his filmography that Hackman might have felt such a big song-and-dance to be undignified. Hackman worked until he couldn’t, and he worked damn hard. Then he stepped off the stage on his own terms.

There is dignity in this. Hackman retired relatively close to that impressive run of 1990s movies, and at a point where Hollywood seemed to change. The later years of Robert DeNiro and Al Pacino include classics like The Irishman, but a lot of their recent work is closer in quality to Righteous Kill. Hackman never quite had to make his version of Dirty Grandpa or Hangman. His obituaries don’t feature headlines referencing tiny roles in major franchises that eclipse his incredible career.

It is perhaps fitting to give Hackman the last word here. In a GQ interview from 2011, Hackman was asked how he would like to be remembered. “As a decent actor,” he admitted. “As someone who tried to portray what was given to them in an honest fashion. I don't know, beyond that.”