Gene Hackman Brought Real Men To Movies

IF GENE HACKMAN movies want you to know one thing, it’s that Gene Hackman can’t have everything. No matter how close his anti-heroes get to catching their man, or getting off scot-free, or untangling themselves from conspiracy, there’s often some intangible, existential cost that their survival depends on. Consider the hollow determination on Popeye Doyle’s face at the climax of The French Connection, as he assures his partner he’ll catch the European drug fiend, willfully ignoring that he’s just accidentally blown away a federal agent. Or the self-destructive finale of The Conversation, where Harry Caul tears into his floorboards and walls looking for concealed listening devices, only to sit, resigned and powerless, playing the saxophone in his tarnished home.

Hackman, who just died at 95, was a captivating screen presence who represented a recognizable, compromised, and honest form of masculinity that helped to effectively upend the Hollywood leading man for good. He belonged to a new type of mainstream cinema promised by the New Hollywood crop of artists—films that sat at the intersection of ingenuity and entertainment, and reflected the reality of a changing America with a confronting candor.

Look at any of Hackman’s ’70s pictures: His hairline is receding, his round face has handsome, but plain features, his schlubby physique is a far cry from the devastating allure of Clint Eastwood or Paul Newman. He looked and acted like a real guy, one aware of his flaws and inadequacies and willing himself to shine beyond them, often falling below his own expectations. When he toned down his machismo to channel a capable loser like he did in The Conversation or for stretches of The Firm, he performed. When another character crosses a line, his cheek muscles slackened, like it was offensive to catch him off-guard. When he had to be sexy, his concentrated stare could feel messy, rugged and intoxicating; when he had to be tender, scenes would become recognizably awkward—the type of embarrassment you feel witnessing an intimate encounter between two people who think they have privacy.

With an unpolished but unforced charm, and a keen ability to channel determination and urgency, Hackman’s journey from the heights of New Hollywood led him to playing a supervillain, an editor to a revolutionary journalist, and about half a dozen military personnel. Not many leading men could pull off a world class depressive slump, a golden shit-eating grin, and a terrifying authoritative stare, but pick a random Gene Hackman movie and you’re sure to come across one of the three. He could be animated, aggressive, paranoid, or humiliated at his own shortcomings—every excess of emotion felt connected to real human distress, or more accurately, an example of male projection colliding head-on with how incapable men can be of realizing their own ambitions.

Before he was an actor, Hackman was in the Marine Corps. In his early performing years, he took any paying job that would get him from one acting gig to another—during this time, he and his friend Dustin Hoffman were mocked and rejected by their peers for trying to break into acting. Hackman described this stretch of uncastability as “psychological warfare,” but described the process of being a trained actor with no job offers as like a narcotic. Before he even broke out, Hackman’s life had been defined by authority and withholding validation in a way that made the actor hyper-introspective and conscious of what he could offer. The result is an actor who won’t suffer fools, and a reflexive knowledge of what he can do and why it works—which, in turn, gave him a reputation for crotchety, short-tempered behavior that some directors could reign in and others simply had to deal with. No one would fault him, however, for being famously proud of his spot on former President Richard Nixon’s list of enemies.

Hackman’s military history and graduation from the subversive stories of the ’70s are crucial to his ’90s “conservative” era, where he played a series of flawed, antagonistic, self-righteous authority figures with expert, gravelly authenticity. As the sheriff “Little Bill” in Eastwood’s Unforgiven, Hackman champions a hard work mentality, but his firm law and order stance is revealed to be an allergy to remorse and empathy and a slippery slope to fascism. In Crimson Tide, submarine captain Frank Ramsay’s reluctance to cede any ground to the younger, “undeserving” generation of officers pushes his crew headfirst towards nuclear armageddon. And in the outrageous queer comedy The Birdcage, Hackman’s straight-laced Republican senator is a pitch-perfect parody of inflexible conservative tedium, flabbergasted and appalled by anyone overstepping Christian moral boundaries.

All of the men Hackman plays are some kind of wounded, aware of their fallibilities but rarely admitting the hold it has over them. He toed the line between unreachable celebrity and disarmingly, tangibly real—his characters were conscious of what masculinity they were emulating, and if they let any glimmer of indecision or self-deprecating asides through, it was amplified along with their bravado, humor, and sex appeal. The fact that Gene Hackman was so sure of who his characters were is why, whenever we watch him on screen, we’re sure we’re seeing a real guy, displaying just as much confidence, conviction, or frustration as they’re capable of. No other movie star has ever showcased masculinity that felt so contradictory and real—brittle, lively, both sure of itself and afraid of capsizing.