On the Mount Rushmore of great American actors — specifically those who emerged in the late 1960s and brought a transformative, bone-deep intensity to their craft over the industry-redefining decade that followed — four faces loom large: Al Pacino, Jack Nicholson, Dustin Hoffman and Gene Hackman.
The eldest of that contingent, Hackman is less familiar to young audiences than the others, having withdrawn from acting more than 20 years ago, in order to write and paint in Santa Fe, New Mexico. Over an four-decade screen career, the stage-trained star gravitated to complex movies for grown-up audiences (the only significant exception being his iconic turn as Lex Luthor in the “Superman” franchise), and might have been entirely forgotten by Gen Z, if not for his performance as the gruff patriarch in Wes Anderson’s cult favorite “The Royal Tenenbaums.”
Hackman’s unexpected and unusual death (he was discovered alongside his wife and dog) offers a chance to look back at a tall, commanding leading man with the versatility of a character actor. He could get huge laughs — as the blind hermit in “Young Frankenstein,” Buck Barrow in “Bonnie and Clyde” or a homophobic conservative senator forced to cross-dress his way out of a scandal in the “The Birdcage” — but was best in serious mode, representing men all but destroyed by their commitment to responsibilities. Here I’m thinking of “The French Connection,” “Night Moves” and “The Conversation,” or even the rousing small-town coach he played a decade later in “Hoosiers.”
The star could chew the scenery with the best of those ’70s-era legends, but more often chose to convey crucial information about a character’s motives or insecurities through the subtlest of facial expressions or fluctuations of voice. Pacino (opposite whose freewheeling drifter he played a supportive pal in “Scarecrow”) and Hoffman (who shared an apartment with Hackman during their early New York years) respected the hell out of a sensitive and thoughtful soul who embodied some of the most ferocious and self-destructively obsessive characters in modern cinema, from Jimmy “Popeye” Doyle (the monomaniacal “French Connection” cop who gets hooked on heroin in its even more extreme sequel) to the power-drunk frontier sheriff Little Bill in “Unforgiven” (1992).
He won Oscars for those two movies, but was equally commanding as the apocalyptic submarine captain in “Crimson Tide” and corrupt Secretary of Defense in “No Way Out” — both examples of roles in which Hackman makes a powerful impression, while calibrating his performance to let the younger star shine. He could elevate a potboiler (like “Absolute Power,” “Extreme Measures” or “Runaway Jury”) by his mere presence, though it’s the work he did in the 1970s that holds up best, where no sign of ego remains as Hackman disappears into the skin of a scruffy human tumbleweed like Max (in “Scarecrow”) or the meat-cleaving Mary Ann (his first great villain, in the bloody, all-but-forgotten slaughterhouse thriller “Prime Cut”).
Hackman and the rest of his generation of actors were kids when their version of the atomic bomb dropped — not the thermonuclear weapon developed by the J. Robert Oppenheimer and company, but the seismic impact that Marlon Brando made doing “A Streetcar Named Desire” on Broadway, then a few years later on film. Everyone who came after, from James Dean to Warren Beatty to the four living legends I floated, was influenced by Brando. And yet, I’ve long felt that Hackman’s career-defining role — as surveillance wizard Harry Caul in Francis Ford Coppola’s Cannes-winning masterpiece, “The Conversation” — matches the performance Brando gave two years earlier in “The Godfather.”
With his receding hairline and self-effacing body language, Hackman embodies the antithesis of the sexy, Hollywood-manufactured secret agent archetype suggested by James Bond and his brethren. Looking almost moth-like behind wireframe glasses and a thin plastic raincoat, Caul comes off as a dweeb, not debonair: unlucky with the ladies, physically uncomfortable around other people, racked by the guilt of a past assignment. Bond never showed a second’s thought about his victims, and yet, when “The Conversation” was released in 1974, two years after the Watergate break-in, Hackman laid bare the conscience of a tormented functionary in a far larger conspiracy.
Film editor Walter Murch developed his own sense of his craft around the realization that many of the cuts in that movie occurred at moments when Hackman’s character blinks. Though “The Conversation” is Coppola’s quietest — eavesdropping on the eavesdropper and observing Caul’s all-consuming desire to understand and eventually intervene in an ambiguous still-to-be-perpetrated assassination — Hackman’s flop-sweat antihero represented the human cost of moral compromise.
Hackman often described himself as a “physical actor,” which doesn’t mean one who throws punches or saves the day (which he did, by sacrificing himself, in “The Poseidon Adventure”). Rather, he revealed his characters through their actions, whether endlessly rewinding the incriminating tape or ripping up the floorboards in his bugged apartment. Or consider the unconventional barbershop interrogation in “Mississippi Burning,” where his FBI agent steps in and questions a local law enforcement officer (played by Brad Dourif) while completing his shave with a straight razor. Hackman didn’t write the scene, but he brought an unpredictable conviction to it, where even his partner (Willem Dafoe) seems uncertain how it will play out.
Writer-director Alexander Payne tried to coax him out of retirement for “Nebraska” (the “Sideways” filmmaker had written “About Schmidt” with Hackman in mind a few years earlier), but the actor preferred his privacy. He was uncomfortable with interviews and often struggled to discuss his craft. But he understood human nature — which is ironic, since Hackman’s character denied as much in “The Conversation.” “I don’t know anything about curiosity. That’s not part of what I do,” Caul insisted, but take a look back at any one of the 80-odd roles in Hackman’s immortal filmography, and you’ll find just the opposite is true.
