Jan. 30, 2010

Gene Hackman, one of the greatest film actors of the past 40 years, turns 80 years-old 0n Jan. 30th, and isn’t it great that he’s still out there? His last screen appearance was in an immediately forgettable commercial comedy back in 2006; he’s chosen instead to focus mainly on writing novels in his twilight years. But Hackman has earned the right to do any damn thing he pleases.

In movie after movie over the course of a remarkable career, he’s never been anything less than utterly believable, regardless of how weak the movie itself might be. He always brings his “A” game, staying consistently focused on finding the core truths that drive his characters. Known throughout the film industry as a consummate professional, he’s simply incapable of doing it any other way.

You can tell from his performances that Hackman’s a tough, no-nonsense kind of guy, and his pre-acting life bears that out. Born in San Bernadino, CA, his family moved around a lot before finally settling down in Danville, IL. He’s said that he’s often taken film roles that are beneath him because he was so poor when he was growing up, he’s forever felt that his comfortable Hollywood existence could be snatched away at a moment’s notice.

Hackman's poverty-stricken childhood led him to escape to the Marine Corps at the age of 16, after which he moved to New York, but finally ventured back to California to become an actor. There, at the Pasadena Playhouse, he met his lifelong friend, a sarcastic little guy you also may have heard of named Dustin Hoffman.

Hackman would later move back to New York with Hoffman, where they shared a walk-up apartment with another fledgling thespian named Robert Duvall. All three roommates would struggle for a while in off-Broadway plays, TV commercials, and episodic television, but each would eventually win the Academy Award for Best Actor. Hackman was first, when he collected the honor for his 1971 performance as the obsessed narcotics cop, Jimmy “Popeye” Doyle, in William Friedkin’s “The French Connection.” Years later, he would also win Best Supporting Actor, for his role as the sadistic sheriff in Clint Eastwood’s “Unforgiven.”

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Hackman delivered a string of great performances in the 1970s, because - it’s no secret by now - that’s when Hollywood had an abundance of complex parts to offer ambitious actors, and maverick filmmakers were given a long enough leash to allow everyone from actors to screenwriters to do their best work. I’ve already written extensively about Hackman’s darkly humorous, clenched-jaw turn in ”The French Connection”, but I think his single most towering achievement still might be his performance as Harry Caul, the guilt-racked surveillance expert in Francis Ford Coppola’s 1974 masterpiece, “The Conversation” (Talk about a hot streak— Coppola squeezed the picture in between “The Godfather” and “The Godfather Part 2,” just to make it three in a row.)

As the film begins, Caul, a surveillance legend, has been hired to secretly record a conversation between a young man and woman (Frederick Forrest and Cindy Williams) while they stroll through a park in San Francisco. Later, Harry breaks a cardinal rule when he starts paying attention to what’s actually being said in his recording, rather than simply cleaning up the tape as much as possible and taking his payment. He soon grows convinced that the corporate bigwig who hired him is going to use the recording as reason to murder the couple, and a life of professional immorality finally starts to take its toll on the previously remorseless wiretapper.

A vortex of despair and almost inconceivable loneliness swirls around Harry throughout the film. Not even the false lifeline of the Catholic church, which has apparently saved him in the past, can keep him from being pulled under when he starts to realize he may be party to the deaths of two innocent people.

Harry, like Travis Bickle in ”Taxi Driver” is in a self-made hell, and he's very much on his own. He’s never allowed himself the luxury of real connection with another person - he won’t even tell the dimwitted woman (Teri Garr) he’s sleeping with where he lives - and now he finds himself connecting with two possibly doomed people he's only eavesdropped on.

Hackman’s often silent performance is precisely measured throughout, and, in the end, absolutely devastating. He allows us to see Harry fall apart in increments, transforming him before our eyes from a sharp, cocky professional to a death-rattled emotional orphan.

In the following scene, Harry’s established that the couple he recorded will be meeting up with his faceless employer at a local hotel, so he checks into an adjoining room to listen in. Powerless to help if something horrible takes place, he still needs to know what, if anything, is going to happen to the couple. One has to wonder if it’s lost on Harry that he’s fallen so low he’s literally listening to muffled voices at toilet bowl level.

The moment when he hears his tape being played in the next room, then rewound, is he thinks, the point of no return. But the real blow is yet to come. Note how Hackman slowly strips away Harry’s business-like demeanor until he collapses into an infantile state, hiding under the covers from his personal boogey man, the worthless, disconnected life he’s forged for himself.

That’s the driven, focused work of genuinely great actor. We won't be seeing the likes of Gene Hackman again, and I hope I can raise a toast to him when he turns 100. Although he may not be gracing us with many more big screen performances, his has been a job exceedingly well done.

Paul Tatara