Gene Hackman
The Conversation
No Way Out
Well, dear readers, we have survived the Oscars and soldiered through another eventful, exhausting awards season. Without going into too much depth, my thoughts on the Oscars are a mixed bag. Conan steered this doomed ship of an awards show with astounding ease and charm, just as I knew he would. I’m thrilled that The Substance won for best makeup & hairstyling, and even though I wholeheartedly believe that Demi Moore deserved to win Best Actress, it makes more thematic sense for the young ingenue Mikey Madison to win—in other words, The Substance is a mere exaggeration of real life. (I refuse to participate in the weirdly conservative, sex-negative discourse surrounding Anora, btw, I liked the movie and that’s basically all I have to say on the subject!) I’m so happy I’m Still Here won Best International Film, it was such a well-earned win for this underdog and viva Brazil! My sweet, bitchy Conclave won Best Adapted Screenplay which feels correct, and the Latvian animated film Flow and Palestinian-Israeli film No Other Land winning is also momentous for a myriad of history-making reasons. To add insult to the injury of Adrien Brody winning Best Actor over Ralph Fiennes, Colman Domingo, Timothée Chalamet, and Sebastian Stan (all with zero Oscars while this man already had one), Mr. Brody gave the longest acceptance speech in Oscars history, where he mostly rambled and patted himself on the back and told the orchestra to stop playing him off because it “wasn’t his first rodeo.” Since it wasn’t his first rodeo, that’s all the more reason to be concise and respectful with your time on stage, and not to gloat and say faux-philosophical musings while Cillian Murphy is forced to stand behind him, looking miserable. It’s insane that Nickel Boys won nothing, it’s insane that Sing Sing won nothing, but most insane of all is that the highly-offensive Emilia Pérez won two awards—one of which involved the French songwriter’s self-indulgently singing on stage, presumptuously-expecting anyone else to sing along. The real award is the fact that I never have to talk about Emilia Pérez ever again! But in the midst of the Oscars chaos, toward the end of the show, when the In Memoriam played and cruelly left out Shannen Doherty and Tony Todd and countless others, I thought I ought to dedicate a double feature to Gene Hackman, who passed away recently. The precise details of this Hollywood legend’s death are still a bit of a mystery, as he, his wife, and one of their three dogs were all found dead and partially-mummified in their Santa Fe home last week. His pacemaker indicated that he passed away on February 17th, and by all accounts, this 95 year old was surprisingly healthy and cognizant, leading to some confusion and concern surrounding his death. As much as I like to speculate and do my own investigating, tonight we’ll just be focusing on the illustrious and diverse career of this character-actor-turned-leading-man-turned-character-actor, who made blockbuster after blockbuster up until his retirement. Gene Hackman was born on January 30th, 1930 in San Bernardino, California, and when he saw Marlon Brando in A Streetcar Named Desire, he knew he wanted to be an actor. At 16, he lied about his age and enlisted in the Marines, and served four and a half years as a field-radio operator. His mother died in a fire caused by a smoking accident, he tried college for a bit, but eventually in 1956 he found his way to the Pasadena Playhouse where he met Dustin Hoffman, and both actors were voted “least-likely to succeed.” California was giving him no love, so Hackman moved to New York City, where he often shared apartments with Dustin Hoffman and Robert Duvall throughout the 60s. While taking minor acting roles, Gene worked at a Howard Johnson restaurant, where he once encountered a former instructor from the Pasadena Playhouse—a man who told Hackman that this job proved that he wouldn’t amount to anything. For whatever reason, no one believed in this guy, but the critics only motivated him further. He began acting on stage, in off-Broadway and eventually on-Broadway plays, he was even initially cast as Mr. Robinson in The Graduate, but Mike Nichols fired him after three weeks for being too young. (It’s funny, to this naïve, youngish critic, Gene Hackman always looked like an old man, and I guess his looks fooled Nichols, too.) His first, major breakout role was in Arthur Penn’s classic Bonnie and Clyde as Buck Barrow—a boisterous, instantly-iconic role that earned him a Best Supporting Actor nomination at the Academy Awards. From here, Hackman no longer had to worry about finding consistent work, as he accepted a plethora of fascinating, exciting acting jobs. He even nearly played Mike Brady on The Brady Bunch, but opted for more film roles instead. Hackman played one memorable character after another, from his roles in Marooned, The French Connection, The Poseidon Adventure, Scarecrow, Young Frankenstein, Night Moves, A Bridge Too Far, Superman, Hoosiers, Mississippi Burning, Postcards from the Edge, Unforgiven, The Firm, Crimson Tide, Get Shorty, The Birdcage, Enemy of the State, The Replacements, Heartbreakers, The Royal Tenenbaums (my personal favorite of his), as well as tonight’s two films.
Up first is a deep-cut neo-noir thriller from Francis Ford Coppola, where Hackman gives a very different, very subtle performance from what he’s known for, this is the 1974 film The Conversation. The film opens on a bright, sunny day in San Francisco, where the camera slowly pans and steadily zooms in on the crowd gathered at Union Square. The music is lively and jazzy to a degree that made it feel like Mardi Gras, a mime is performing, and a couple (played by Cindy Williams and Frederic Forrest) are clinging to one another as they stroll. This couple becomes the focus of the camera, and eventually the sounds of their voices become more clear and distinct among the other noises. We see several suspicious-looking characters near the couple, one of whom is Harry Caul (Hackman), who, after sometime, wanders into a suspicious-looking van. Harry is a surveillance expert and freelance wiretapper, who works with iconic character actor John Cazle, and their latest client goes by the moniker “The Director” (Robert Duvall, who, side-note, is uncredited in this film just as he was in Invasion of the Body Snatchers, which is interesting to moi.) They’ve been tasked with eavesdropping on this couple, and after sorting through the distorted, muffled audio over and over again, Harry uncovers something crucial: the man tells the woman “he’d kill us if he got the chance.” Harry tries his best to stay uncurious and uninvolved with the parties associated with each job, but this troubling audio seems to have stirred up some of Harry’s guilt from the past, as well as stoke the fires of his overwhelming paranoia. His apartment door is affixed with several additional locks that he installed himself, and he’s quite disturbed one day to find a birthday gift from his landlord inside. He calls up the landlord and demands to know how he got inside, and emphasizes how much more comfortable he’d be if he were the only one with a key. Harry keeps to himself and shares his secrets with no one—including Amy (Teri Garr), a sweet woman he sleeps with casually, but really only sees at night, on his terms. Feeling extra cautious and concerned with his latest job, Harry decides not to pass this audio along to The Director’s middle man (Harrison Ford), which doesn’t go over well. And as his clients and his peers in surveillance seem to pressure him to share more details of this job, Harry is even more convinced that something horrible is about to happen. The Conversation is a tense, auditorily-striking slow burn with a moody, oddly-romantic score and an anxious, insecure, saxophone-playing Gene Hackman. When his associate John Cazle asks him if he’s ever intrigued by the work they do, Harry says “If I’ve learned anything while doing this job it’s that I don’t know anything about human nature and I don’t care about curiosity”, but ironically, Hackman proves how adept of a student of human nature he is with this role. I’m so used to seeing him play these confident, sometimes cocky, self-assured and powerful men on screen, that Gene Hackman’s sensitive and frightened portrayal of Harry Caul took me by total surprise. And to watch him meticulously, obsessively comb through this one audio took me back to my brief stint as a transcriber for the police—one of the many odd (and desperate) jobs I had while I was unemployed—which provided me with about the same amount of anxiety that Hackman depicts here. I was pretty gripped by this film, even when it dragged, because this softer side of Hackman was just fascinating and mesmerizing to observe.
Tonight’s next film, however, presents us with the bold, brave, albeit complex version of Hackman that we’re all used to: in Roger Donaldson’s 1987 film No Way Out. There were so many Gene Hackman classics to choose from this week, but I really wanted to show the full range of this man’s talents, and how compelling he can be, no matter how morally-ambiguous his character is written to be. Based on Kenneth Fearing’s 1947 novel The Big Clock, No Way Out presents us with a more familiar Gene Hackman, as he plays the tough and corrupt United States Secretary of Defense David Brice. Kevin Costner plays Lieutenant Commander Tom Farrell, who has just arrived at a fancy, schmancy likely-political gala in D.C. Almost immediately, Tom locks eyes with Susan Atwell (Sean Young), a mysterious and vivacious woman who goes through the security checkpoint at the same time as Tom, cheekily-remarking, “Lucky it’s not a bullshit detector or none of us would get in.” Tom and Susan hit it off instantly, and he invites her to get out of this stuffy party, to which she similarly-cheekily-responds, “My date wouldn’t like it but so what, his wife would be delighted!” Within moments, they’re in the back of a limo hooking up, as if this film is trying to beat the world record for how soon into a movie that we get to see titties. Moments like these have the potential to be hot, especially when Kevin Costner is involved, but the obnoxiously-80s music playing the background drowned out all of the eroticism. It’s as if Gene Hackman was still playing his sax in The Conversation, but alas, he doesn’t appear in No Way Out until a bit later—when it’s revealed that Susan is his mistress. As if he weren’t likely-crooked enough for being the Secretary of Defense to the United States government, Brice wants his sidepiece all to himself, and when he finds out that Susan is seeing someone else, there’s hell to pay. No Way Out has so many twists and turns—beyond Kevin Costner and Gene Hackman being Eskimo brothers—that providing more plot details would just spoil all the fun. Kevin Costner is a reliably-cool customer in this, and Sean Young is serving a little bit of Greta Gerwig-twee-quirkiness here, which randomly worked well together. And the man of the evening commanded just as much presence as ever—as the tensions rise and his own scandals risk seeing the light of day. As loud as the 1980s music, hairstyles, sensibilities, and Russia-related anxieties were, this film is just as successfully paranoid and suspenseful and subtle as The Conversation. Desson Thomson of The Washington Post wrote, "The film makes such good use of Washington and builds suspense so well that it transcends a plot bordering on ridiculous", but I would argue that, in this day and age and dystopia, this kind of psycho-sexual-political scandal feels entirely plausible. Robert Mitchum, Paul Newman, James Coburn, and Gregory Peck all turned down the part of David Brice, but I really couldn’t imagine anyone but Gene Hackman in this role. He always had the energy and aura of someone in a place of authority, even as soft and quiet as he was in The Conversation, he presents as someone who knows what they’re doing. Hackman isn’t heroic or redeemable or even that likable in No Way Out, but he still occupies that rare space of someone who is entirely watchable and believable. With the loss of Gene Hackman, the world has lost a true artist and entertainer, who could play rapturously-funny just as easily as he could play devastatingly-serious. He may have looked like an old man his whole life, but he also looked like the best leading man, supporting role, or cameo-casting one could hope for. He was the kind of star who hated being associated with stardom, the kind of honest, no-nonsense worker who once said that “two of the most important factors in deciding on which films (he’d) work on are the script and the money.” He made Richard Nixon’s list of enemies, he competed in Sports Car Club of America races, he survived a heart attack, and he wrote nine novels. He was an actor’s actor, an intimidatingly-natural performer who was allegedly shy and soft-spoken in real life. Rest in peace, Gene Hackman, you theatrical genius and multi-generational icon. I’m happy we made it through awards season, but I’m sad we lost a real one like Gene. :( Until next time, toodles!
