In a year of fallen stars, Gene Hackman still looms largest; not even Robert Redford got as much press as Hackman. Was Redford less famous? No. Was his death less interesting? Definitely: The New York Times wrote, “He died in his sleep… He was in ‘the place he loved surrounded by those he loved,… He often said he liked Utah because it gave him a sense of peace and was the antithesis of Hollywood superficiality.” Hackman was a horse of different color.
“Hollywood’s Consummate Everyman,” according to The New York Times and just about everyone else, died on or around February 18; his wife, Betsy Arakawa, died on or around February 12. Their bodies weren’t discovered until February 26, and the story broke the next day. Initially described as “mummified,” it was speculated that determining causes of death would be impossible, but on March 7, authorities in Santa Fe announced that Arakawa died of hantavirus, and that Hackman, suffering from Alzheimer’s and unable to comprehend his wife’s death, starved to death as he wandered around their house for nearly a week. One of their dogs, recuperating from surgery in a locked crate, also died; two other dogs survived, roaming the property freely.
The media covered this gruesome scene for weeks, with each new piece of information providing just enough juice to justify new headlines and keep people paying attention and playing along. At first, all anyone knew was that the couple had been found dead along with their dog—were they murdered? Why would anyone want to murder Gene Hackman and his wife? And their dog? That was the detail that made it bizarre to begin with, and it only got weirder. Hantavirus? And the image of an incapacitated Hackman dying in utter agony and bewilderment. No wonder the media covered it for six weeks.
More than their politics or personal life, the way an artist dies has a remarkable effect on their body of work, now completed. Only then does the frame appear, and all of the accolades that might’ve been missing or held back come in full force—huge, blaring headlines like “MUMMY DEATH” HORROR / GENE HACKMAN, WIFE, DOG FOUND IN HOME / SCATTERED PILLS / INVESTIGATION LAUNCHED / “SUSPICIOUS” FRANTIC 911 CALL / MYSTERY GROWS / TRIBUTES FOR HOLLYWOOD LEGEND, along with simpler, somber tributes at the Oscar’s from those who actually knew him and worked with him.
When I heard the news, I felt compelled to watch every Hackman movie I hadn’t seen yet. Hackman worked relentlessly to the end of his career: in 2001, he made five movies, one of which (The Royal Tenenbaums) made it into the openings of his obituaries. If I hadn’t seen Another Woman, Cisco Pike, Narrow Margin, or Eureka before, they would’ve made it onto this list. Maybe not Downhill Racer, the only movie that Hackman and Redford acted in together (they’re both among the all-star cast of A Bridge Too Far), nor Runaway Jury, his only collaboration with Dustin Hoffman. I remember seeing that movie at the Towson Commons 8, when Hackman’s name was still plastered on buses and billboards in print as big as the title. At any given time, there are only a handful of actors that can command that level of interest, to the point where the movie itself is sort of irrelevant next to the presence of a given star. A number of actors could’ve helmed Behind Enemy Lines, The Chamber, or Extreme Measures, but they needed a star to exist in the first place. These are the actors you know first by osmosis, a fact of life, part of the edifice. Hackman never went too long without appearing in a great movie, or at least a big hit, and his paycheck jobs never tarnished his reputation as a great actor, Hollywood’s consummate everyman.
3. Zandy’s Bride: Who knew Jan Troell followed up The Emigrants and The New Land with this Hollywood Western? More McCabe & Mrs. Miller than True Grit, but with none of Robert Altman’s wit—or any sense of humor at all—Zandy’s Bride plays out like a Michael Haneke movie. Hackman plays Zandy Allen, a super-psycho even for the 1870s. He buys his bride (Liv Ullmann) in the mail, and when she arrives from Europe, he immediately starts knocking her looks, her intelligence, and pretty soon he’s beating on her every chance he gets.
The punishment begins: Zandy rapes Hannah, and when she becomes pregnant, she mourns the coming of the “rape baby.” Zandy goes off for several months herding cattle and horses, and Hannah grows a garden. When he returns, he insists on driving his animals through her garden, ruining it purely out of spite. What’s she going to do? Where’s she going to go? Zandy’s Bride more closely resembles exploitation films of the time than most American Westerns, or Troell’s stately Swedish films.
Lusciously photographed by Jordan Cronenweth and Frank M. Holgate, Zandy’s Bride is so one-note and unrelenting that it never really comes off, as sober as it is harsh. The couple’s reluctant marriage reads like a death sentence, the ending of Fassbinder’s Martha with none of perversion of a masochist and a sadist ending up happy together. Hannah’s miserable, Zandy is never going to change, and he’ll probably die prematurely, leaving her with nothing. Frontier days: this movie makes Heaven’s Gate look like a party. (DRAMA.)
Loose Cannons: Deliriously stupid, the best display of a particular Hackman comic persona: the caustic buffoon, born in prisons (Riot, A Covenant with Death), nurtured in police station and boardrooms (Cisco Pike, Prime Cut), and finally realized fully out West, at both ends of his career (Unforgiven, The Quick and the Dead, The Hunting Party). Most of those movies have to be nasty, and Loose Cannons allows Hackman to be sillier than usual. It’s not the most flamboyant comic performance of his career—that’s Heartbreakers, no question, where he plays a chain-smoking cigarette magnate made up with cartoon liver spots, constantly coughing and prat falling—but he steals it as the semi-straight man.
A rip-off of Lethal Weapon and Midnight Run, Loose Cannons follows Vice Squad Cop Hackman from busting noisy lovers to outrunning and gunning the Russian mob. Compromising footage has been stolen, a prominent politician’s reputation is in jeopardy; cars must crash, people must die. But from the beginning, Loose Cannons isn’t as neat or as nice as its mega-hit predecessors, nor as realistically grim as The French Connection, which introduces Hackman in a similar scene.
Dan Aykroyd, a terrible actor and an even worse comedian, is tolerable when Hackman is in the backseat cleaning his blunderbuss screaming about professional ethics with as much intensity as any of his military movies. Aykroyd plays a character with multiple personalities, and he’s beyond annoying; Hackman’s Hackman, the perfect straight man who’s also a little stupid. Aykroyd needs voices, high concepts, talented co-stars; all Hackman needs is a wink and a snort and he’s home dry in a forgotten Bush 41 action comedy directed by Bob Black Christmas Clark, also known as Bob Porky’s Clark. That movie kickstarted the American sex comedy, whereas Loose Cannons came and went without a peep; released near the end of the Cold War and several nearly exhausted Hollywood cycles, it had no context or chemistry to make it more than a cash-in, but it’s nevertheless still very funny.
Hackman made a lot of comedies—Get Shorty, The Birdcage, The Replacements—but he never needed costumes or accents. Except Scarecrow (overrated).
The Hunting Party: A brutal 1970s Western spin on The Most Dangerous Game. Proud of its blood and “reality” like Soldier Blue and Little Big Man, The Hunting Party begins with Hackman and wife (Candice Bergen) on a train going through the desert with their rich friends. The train’s attacked by notorious bandit Oliver Reed and his gang (among them L.Q. Jones, Mitchell Ryan, and Ron Howard). Bergen’s taken by Reed as bounty, and Hackman quickly considers her spoiled goods; sets out on killing them both.
His friends are in on it initially, but by the time they reach the middle of the desert, so many people have been killed, the only thing keeping the chase going is Hackman’s compulsion to put Bergen and Reed in their place: the ground. This guy might’ve been Zandy Allen in a past life, but that bastard figured out a happy ending for himself. The Hunting Party subverts a uniquely popular genre that Hollywood hasn’t relied on since… the 1970s. What was once shocking now comes off high-handed and blunt today; what does work is the violence.
Like Soldier Blue, The Hunting Party has far more blood, cracked skin, and “realistic” injuries and deaths than the typical Western, presented in a way that discourages titillation. Unlike The Wild Bunch or Ulzana’s Raid, it isn’t exactly fun, not so much because of the material, but the presentation—director Don Medford is much less ambivalent about graphic violence than Sam Peckinpah. The Hunting Party is punishing, relentless, and gripping, commanded by Hackman’s spiral into madness, culminating in an unforgettable parched finale in the middle of the desert.
Twice in a Lifetime: At the tail end of the late-1970s/early-1980s divorce cycle typified by films like Shoot the Moon, Kramer vs. Kramer, and Starting Over, and just before Fatal Attraction and its many copycats came along, Hackman starred as the bum dad in this unusually realistic home wrecker drama. From the beginning, he’s a pig, and his wife (Ellen Burstyn) is stifled and unappreciated. He quickly falls for Ann-Margret; they sleep together, get together, and Hackman leaves his family.
Burstyn goes into dissociative denial, but their eldest daughter (Amy Madigan, recently seen as Aunt Gladys in Weapons) is pissed and lets both of them know it. Ally Sheedy, the younger daughter, is distraught but goes with the flow; by the time she’s married at the end of the movie, Hackman can’t even bring himself to go into the church to see his family. They’ve all moved on—so has Ann-Margret—and for the first time in 111 minutes, the boor relents, humbled, walking away from where he isn’t wanted.
Twice in a Lifetime isn’t Terms of Endearment. The out-of-print DVD at Beyond Video is cropped to 4:3 for TV, and it reeks of Lifetime Originals and missed memories of a commercial break past gone two, three, four lifetimes ago. Hackman was notably insecure, lashing out at his directors and occasionally his co-stars; you look at his body of work and find very few risks. Of the major directors he worked with, he stuck with those who came to prominence at the same time as him (Arthur Penn, Mike Nichols, Walter Hill).
Working for scale on The Royal Tenenbaums, Hackman couldn’t be bothered to appreciate the movie he was starring in; he famously hated making Hoosiers and tortured director David Anspaugh from the start of filming through ADR, which he almost didn’t show up for. Now, when he actually saw the movie, Hackman took Anspaugh aside and asked, “How the hell did you do that?” As talented as he was, Hackman, like many actors, had spotty taste and even worse instincts; Scarecrow, his personal favorite, is the only time he comes off as an actor, not whatever character he’s playing. There’s plenty of reality in Scarecrow, but none from its two leads. Like all working actors, Hackman stumbled into fame; his iconic roles were all accidents.
Twilight: No vampires: this the neo-noir directed by Robert Benton in 1998. Benton, a journeyman responsible for a couple of iconic movies (Kramer vs. Kramer, Places in the Heart), died in May at 92. In a year of fallen stars, young and old, Benton’s death barely registered. Why would it? He had a good run. So did Brian Wilson and Sly Stone, but they were far more famous, and they died days apart, at the same age (82). Nothing tragic here, sad nonetheless.
Starring a skeletal Paul Newman, Twilight is a study in elderly ennui, a rare subject in American movies before the mid-2010s. Newman plays a Hollywood P.I. surrounded by other actors as archetypes: Susan Sarandon is the girl, Reese Witherspoon is the daughter, James Garner is the best friend, and Hackman is the old man. Newman stars, but Hackman’s the one who gets the plot going by asking Newman to deliver a package for him. Cue mysterious assassins, a Lieutenant (Stockard Channing) who may be crooked, and many bullets fired at a man who looks like he’s about to keel over.
Newman lived another 10 years, but he was playing croakers as early as 1984 (Harry & Son); Hackman only ever “played elderly” in Twilight. He may be “dying” in The Royal Tenenbaums, but he’s as vital there as he was in the early-1970s. He doesn’t mumble like Newman, and he never hams it up like Al Pacino and Dustin Hoffman. Despite a decent shootout with double crosser James Garner, the most arresting sequence in Twilight is Hackman laid up in bed, watching one of “his” old movies. The movie he’s watching is Downhill Racer.