Jan. 30, 2010

Gene Hackman, one of the premeire 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? Hackman's last screen appearance was in an immediately forgettable Ray Romano (!) comedy back in 2006; he’s chosen instead to focus mainly on writing novels in his twilight years. But he's earned the right to do any damn thing he pleases, to say the least.

In movie after movie over the course of a remarkable career, Hackman has never been anything less than utterly believable, regardless of how weak the picture itself might be. He always brings his “A” game, and stays focused on finding the core truths that drive his characters, which, in turn, pulls viewers into the narrative. That's the ultimate goal of commercial film acting, and it amazes me how many movie stars are incapable of recognizing that fact.

You can tell from the integrity of his performances that Hackman is 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. Hackman has said that he’s often accepted film roles that are beneath his talent because his family was so poor when he was growing up, he’s forever felt his comfortable Hollywood existence could be snatched away at a moment’s notice.

He escaped, for a little while, to the Marine Corps at the age of 16, after which he moved to New York City. Then he ventured back to California to become an actor. There, at the Pasadena Playhouse, he met his lifelong friend, a sarcastic little guy you may also have heard of named Dustin Hoffman.

Hackman would later head 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 several lean years 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 crowning 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 opens, Caul, a legend in the world of illegal surveillance, 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. Harry gets his recording, but breaks a cardinal rule when he starts paying attention to what’s actually being said on the tape, rather than simply cleaning up the sound as much as possible and taking his payment.

Over time, Harry grows convinced that the corporate bigwig who hired him is going find reason to murder the couple within the contents of the tape, 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 movie's pivotal scene, Harry establishes 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. 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 lying down in a bathroom, listening through a wall to muffled voices at toilet bowl level.

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

It'’s the driven, focused work of genuinely brilliant actor, in one of the greatest performances in movie history. You can practically hear the white noise rising in Harry's mind when he realizes what he's done. Or, as the movie eventually makes clear, what he thinks he's done.

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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