Legendary actor Gene Hackman did the rarest thing in Hollywood: He retired from acting more than 20 years ago, and despite being courted by many filmmakers over the years, Hackman remained retired. To celebrate the release of the new beautifully restored edition of Francis Ford Coppla’s paranoid classic The Conversation 4K UHD 2 Disc Collector’s Edition and Digital, we’re going to highlight 5 of Gene Hackman’s best roles.
Unforgiven
In his role as Little Bill in Clint Eastwood’s Oscar-winning western, Gene Hackman’s portrayal of the brutally pragmatic sheriff was a standout performance in a film full of standout performances. A deeply unpleasant character by all accounts, Hackman’s layered performance is full of soft-spoken menace, perhaps the very worst kind of villain as Little Bill truly believes he is deploying justice, and worse yet, a good man. His dream of building a house so he may one day sit on the porch he built and watch the sunset may sound like the hopes of a humble and decent person, but Little Bill is neither of those things.
Superman The Motion Picture
Richard Donner’s Superman remains the gold standard of comic book movies more than 45 years after it first appeared in cinemas. Including Superman doesn’t mean Hackman’s performance is better than that of powerhouse films like Bonnie and Clyde, The French Connection, or Misssipi Burning; those are all weighty roles in very dramatic films.
Lending tremendous credibility to what many insiders at the time wrote off as a doomed enterprise, Hackman’s turn as Superman’s arc-enemy Lex Luthor was my introduction to him as an actor. I hadn’t seen any of the movies he was known for; to me, he was (and always will be) the original Lex Luthor. Striking a perfect balance between comedic and charmed menace, Hackman brings his A-game to the granddaddy of superhero movies.
The Royal Tenenbaums
Now, I was going to put gritty 70s thriller The French Connection here, but that’s a landmark classic, and I wanted to show off more range from The Hackman.
Wes Anderson’s vibrant comedy is an acquired taste, but if you’re up for the ride, it showcases Hackman’s lighter touch for portraying a profoundly flawed yet oddly likeable father seeking redemption and a chance to make things right with his family. Supported by a fantastic soundtrack, Anderson’s film unquestionably highlights everything that made Hackman one of the best actors of his generation: funny, poignant, and decidedly heartfelt. It’s a remarkable late-career achievement, even more so as it was one of his final films before his retirement.
The Conversation
The character of the shy surveillance expert Harry Caul showcases his brilliance as an actor with a performance so wildly different from anything we have seen him do previously. Before The Conversation, Hackman was synonymous with playing larger-than-life characters, but here, everything is dialled down; Harry’s life of order and structure gives way to paranoia and chaos.
Sandwiched between The Godfather (1972) and The Godfather Part II (1974), it’s an existential spy thriller about a withdrawn and fiercely private surveillance expert who begins to suspect that the conversation he has been hired to bug between a man and a woman, will lead to their untimely deaths, as much of a character study as it is a thriller while being highly (and unexpectedly) of the moment politically as America was enduring the Watergate scandal. Its theme of someone listening to our every word and privacy becoming obsolete is shockingly relevant 50 years after its release. Did Coppola know something about the future when he made the film?
Hackman’s collaboration with director Francis Ford Coppola might have been a well-documented challenging experience, but it resulted in one of his best and most layered performances.
The Quick and The Dead
I know I’m committing some crime against cinema for putting Sam Raimi’s deliriously enjoyable pulp western above The Conversation; as we’ve established above, Caul is potentially his best performance, but The Quick and the Dead is Hackman having an absolute riot of a time. Besides, that last scene from The Conversation with Harry sitting slumped against the wall of his half-destroyed apartment as that gentle saxophone music ushers in the credits is too haunting a note to leave this list on.
Hackman’s scene-stealing and scenery-chewing Mayor John Herod is so big and full of all the exuberance you’d expect, nay, demand from the legendary actor. His “If you live to see the dawn rise, it’s because I have allowed it” speech to the terrified townsfolk is perfectly pitched, and unlike Little Bill from Unforgiven, John Herod knows he’s pure evil.
It might be home to Sharon Stone and early roles for Russell Crowe and a pre-Titanic Leonardo DiCaprio, but it’s Gene Hackman’s show. Arriving just a couple of years after his Oscar-winning turn in Unforgiven, Hackman isn’t trying to win another gold statue; he’s going for gasps. Channelling the type of villain that audiences would love to boo, Hackman is clearly having a tremendous time.
The Conversation 4K restoration is still showing in selected cinemas, and will be released on 2-disc 4K UHD Collector’s edition and on digital from July 15.
