The best of Gene Hackman

The film world was shocked by the news last week of the discovery of the bodies of actor Gene Hackman and his wife, pianist Betsy Arakawa, in their Santa Fe home.

Hackman, who retired from acting in 2004 was a two-time Oscar winner and considered by many to be the greatest US actor of his generation. In a four-decade career that saw the former marine and late bloomer actor create some of the most memorable performances of New Hollywood’s 1970s golden age, Hackman, in defiance of his acting teachers’ belief that he would never make it, made it and then some.

He leaves behind him countless performances that will live on for generations. Here are three of the best of his films that continue to offer inspiration to new actors and pay fitting tribute to his immense contribution to the history of the movies.

THE ART-HOUSE ESSENTIAL:

The Conversation – YouTube

You can thank Richard Nixon and his duplicity for creating paranoia about the US government that sowed the seeds for the current era of conspiracy theories, fake news and mistrust of institutions. You can also thank Tricky Dick for the mushrooming of the paranoid political thriller, a genre that gave us some of the best films of the 1970s. Perhaps there’s no better example of the genre than this 1974 classic Palme D’Or winner directed by Francis Ford Coppola. After the mammoth success of his genre redefining gangster epic The Godfather, Coppola decided to go a lot smaller and more claustrophobic in his intensely paranoid creation of Hackman’s masterful surveillance genius Harry Caul.

While working a wiretapping job in San Francisco, Hackman’s Caul picks up a conversation with an ambiguous meaning, which he interprets as a sign of a wide-ranging conspiracy. In his maniacal effort to interpret what he’s heard, Caul becomes increasingly paranoid, shutting out the world and those around him and becomes convinced he’s recorded a murder that no one wants him to talk about.

A brilliant examination of the philosophical dilemma of watching versus participating The Conversation, which had completed shooting in 1972, predated the revelations of the Watergate break-in that would ultimately bring down Nixon, leading to audiences interpreting the released film as a reaction to that event, even as it had finished shooting before it. Brilliantly edited by sound and editing genius Walter Murch and held together by a quietly devastating performance from Hackman, it’s one of the great films of the era, one whose prescient points about technology’s role in modern society still ring true 50 years later.

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THE STONE-COLD CLASSIC:

The French Connection and The French Connection II – Disney Plus

Director William Friedkin’s energetic neo-noir police procedural broke the mold for the way that these kinds of films would be made when it was released in 1971. Heavily influenced by the French gangster films of Jean-Pierre Melville and using documentary style hand-held camera techniques inspired by Costa-Gavras’ seminal 1969 political thriller Z, the film tells the story of Hackman’s morally dubious New York cop, Popeye Doyle, as he hunts down a drug dealer in the gritty, tough environs of dangerous 1970s New York City.

Famously, the film also features perhaps the most notorious car chase in movie history, filmed in Brooklyn on a street running under a train line and seeing Doyle commandeer a civilian car and racing it through real traffic in a desperate attempt to catch his drug dealing prey. Hackman’s violent anti-hero and his portrayal of him was at the time something completely new in US crime films, and Doyle would become the blueprint for a new kind of movie cop that still predominates in the genre today.

Hackman made the role his own and so iconic that his performance earned him a best actor Oscar and cemented Doyle and his pork pie hat firmly in the consciousness of US popular culture.

In 1975 Hackman signed on to reprise his role as Doyle in The French Connection II, directed by John Frankenheimer and featuring a storyline that takes the New York cop to the rough and nasty streets of Marseille, still in search of his drug-dealer nemesis and willing to do whatever it takes to finally capture him. It’s one of the better sequels in movie history, even if it doesn’t quite reach the heights of the original and Hackman’s performance is as ever compellingly complex.

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THE DIAMOND IN THE ROUGH:

Hoosiers — Rent or buy from Apple TV

The underdog sports story has become something of a cliché these days with its familiar beats that see a struggling team full of heart and talent floundering until the arrival of a coach who whips his charges into shape, guides them to unimagined success and delivers an inspirational locker-room speech that pushes them over the top to victory at the crucial, final encounter.

Director David Anspaugh’s 1986 sports drama is set in 1950s Indiana and follows the trials and tribulations of a small-town high school basketball team who are inspired by Hackman’s coach Norman Dale to realise their full potential and clinch a seemingly impossible state championship title.

What makes it stand out above its competitors is the film’s keen eye for detail, a nuanced study of character care of writer Angelo Pizzo and of course Hackman’s memorable performance as the central character of coach Dale — a complex mix of “good ole boy” likeability and murky moral ambiguity that elevates everything to ultimately make Hoosiers both familiar and better than many other examples of the genre.

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