Why Gene Hackman Really Was The GOAT
Sin With A Smile - The Genius Of Gene Hackman
Even when he first arrived, Hackman's screen presence felt fully formed and statuesque, a combination of his burly physicality, rugged features, and the avant-garde nature of his breakout performance as Buck Barrow in the transformative Bonnie and Clyde. Arthur Penn's 1967 film - which depicts the combustion of the Great Depression's most iconic gangsters - has rightly been canonised for its watershed contributions to the New Wave, a focal point alongside Sam Peckinpah's The Wild Bunch that redefined violence in celluloid. But it's also a masterpiece in its own right, anchored by two remarkable performances from Warren Beatty and Faye Dunaway as Clyde and Bonnie, and a scene-stealing turn from Hackman as Buck.
Like their adoring public, Buck is swept up in the mythology of his sibling's criminal partnership - less a hardened criminal and more a giddy, tragic figure whose newfound freedom eventually costs him his life. There's a childlike innocence to his and Clyde's relationship, which is juxtaposed with Buck's marriage to Estelle Parsons' Blanche, as well as the shrinking playground the Barrow Gang are given to exist. They're pushed to the edge of the world, a figurative journey made literal in a gorgeous moment where Bonnie and Clyde find a convoy of Dustbowl Migrants taking respite at the edge of a lake. They've outrun all they can, and all that's left is poverty and heartbreak.
The film very much belongs to Beatty and Dunawaye, the former of whom was instrumental as a producer and was, of course, a pivotal figure in the New Hollywood movement, but Hackman's turn - which was nominated in the Best Supporting Actor category at the Oscars - is significant. Beatty was transgressive and raw, but he could have just as easily been a leading man of Hollywood's Golden Age. Hackman, conversely, was cut from a new cloth, the erratic and sympathetic Buck exemplifying the nuance of a burgeoning acting tradition, where cinema was more existential, and the leading men just as susceptible.
This isn't to simplify the evolution of the medium pre and post-Bonnie and Clyde, as the Old Hollywood was filled with just as much nuance and darkness, but it was carried in a different way. Hackman fit this new, documentarian style to a tee, with Buck showing all the promise that the actor would run away with in the ensuing decades - a promise enshrined in William Friedkin's The French Connection.
Friedkin, who we sadly also lost in 2023, was among a select crop of Hollywood talent that defined seventies cinema, but his 1971 film The French Connection was so imperious - so encapsulating in tone, content and atmosphere - that it almost feels like it had the last word on that era before his peers had arrived to the party.
More than Alan J. Pakula's All the President's Men or Francis Ford Coppola's underseen surveillance masterpiece The Conversation (which also starred Hackman), The French Connection seemed to distill and instantly capture the rage and decay of a decade where the US became untethered from continuity; where traditions were upended in the wake of unceasing crises, and the answers - let alone the prospect of a resolution, good or bad - seemed like fantasy. Like Hackman, Friedkin's film arrived fully formed - propulsive, gritty, and so close to the wintery streets of New York that the chill pierced the canvas.
That The French Connection feels like it was so prophetic of the Watergate era is a testament to Friedkin's ground-level perspective, but the film orbits Hackman, whose performance as the Ahab-like cop Popeye Doyle was so fierce and frenetic that it earned him the Academy Award for Best Actor.
Through Doyle, Friedkin paints an unvarnished portrait of policing, in turn revealing the translucent nature of the line between justice and criminality, as Hackman's detective doggedly pursues a French narcotics smuggler without care for anything or anyone who gets in his way. In the end, all that Doyle is left with is the chase - alone with the cold, nothing but ghosts for company. Hackman wears that isolation behind a mask of gruff bravado, masterfully layering the character's pain in between fits of rage and ugly humour. In the end, we pity Popeye. Not because he fails in his pursuit, but because he's too obsessed to realise that he's just as much of a monster as the man he's hunting.
The French Connection is undoubtedly Hackman's most iconic performance, and perhaps even his greatest film, but there were other highs from the decade that foreshadowed his staying power. In addition to Francis Ford Coppola's aforementioned The Conversation, Hackman re-teamed with Bonnie and Clyde filmmaker Arthur Penn for the 1975 neo-noir Night Moves, which dialled up the genre's already unforgiving impulses to new levels of devastation, with the actor playing a retired football star-turned-P.I. who takes on a missing persons case and ends up digging up the bones of Old Hollywood. (It also features an iconic fondu moment between Hackman and Susan Clark.)
Night Moves was an overlooked piece of genre fiction from that decade that has since become a cult classic, but Hackman's other assignments didn't take as long to find an audience. He quickly developed into a significant box office draw, taking on a variety of assignments that illustrated his acting range. An uncredited cameo in Young Frankenstein (organised by his Bonnie and Clyde co-star and fellow Gene, Gene Wilder) proved his comedic talents, while a legendary turn as DC supervillain Lex Luthor in Richard Donner's Superman made for an equally perfect change of pace.
Thrillers, action, drama, comedy - as the decade progressed, Hackman established himself as a genre journeyman who could elevate even the most typical Hollywood fare. His twinkle-eyed humanity remained a constant, even as the landscape around him began to change. The New Hollywood was fading away, but Hackman, like so many of the commanding figures he portrayed on screen, stood resolute.
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