I love acting. The idea of it, the craft behind it, the way it is immortalized and how it can hit home. When the Golden Globes aired in January, I had this fleeting thought about being able to talk with every single person at every single table about a project they did that means so much to me. So the concept of saying "favorite actor" is something I don't take lightly. Gene Hackman just may be my favorite actor of all time.
The way he got inside his characters, good or bad, happy or most often sad, has always resonated with me. There was always more to a Hackman character than what was on the printed page. He was able to just go deeper in both dramas and comedies, and even in a superhero franchise. So picking just 10 favorite movies is an impossible task. These are my 10 today (with an addendum from Sestra Leah), tomorrow the list could surely be different. I suspect it will change every time I watch a movie he was in.
1. The Royal Tenenbaums (2001): I'm very confident about making this Wes Anderson film my top choice. This is a performance for the ages, a real standout amongst the idiosyncratic beings that tend to saturate Anderson's quixotic universe. In Hackman's hands, title character Royal Tenenbaum was not only the fulcrum of that family, but he also gets to the core of the writer/director's vision. The character was so inherently flawed, his decision-making faulty and his heart sometimes inscrutable. But because of Hackman's performance, you just keep rooting for Royal, even when he says and does really appalling things. That sounds like a daunting task, and over the years, we've gleaned that it wasn't an easy shoot for the parties involved. But what they gave us must have fed off that antagonism, it serves the film and perhaps makes it even more than it would be otherwise. There's chemistry between Hackman and every other actor in the film -- from the splendid Anjelica Huston as his estranged wife, Etheline, to the endearing Kumar Pallana as his plucky pal, Pagoda. Even scenes of Royal running around town with grandchildren Uzi and Ari (Jonah Meyerson and Grant Rosenmeyer) rise above the garden-variety nature of such cinematic montages, with a callback to that scene eventually putting the perfect bow on this gift that keeps on giving. Three more Hackman performances were released after The Royal Tenenbaums, but I consider it his crowning glory.
2. Superman: The Movie (1978): Hackman is the Sestras' Lex Luthor. The my "fill in the name of a character who has had many incarnations" sentiment is one that gets wildly argued and defended in modern-day culture. We first saw Hackman in Superman, and he was everything to the film and the ongoing franchise. When you have Christopher Reeve being so stalwart and true as both Kal-El and Clark Kent, you need a villain who is exactly the opposite. Hackman's Lex Luthor was over the top, sure, but he really needed to be. If he was just a bad guy doing bad things, yeah, you'd root for the superhero but you might not actually be invested in him. Lex even tortures the people closest to him -- Otis (Ned Beatty) physically and Miss Teschmacher (Valerie Perrine) psychologically. He's a comic book villain come gloriously to life in technicolor, and he set the stage for all the baddies who invariably came after him.
3. Hoosiers (1986): Sports movies are a dime a dozen, especially ones of the underdog variety. But this one rises above the rest and it's largely due to Hackman. His coach Norman Dale has a checkered past and he doesn't want to run the high school basketball team the same way it's always been done in the small town of Hickory, Indiana. These aren't recipes for success, but definitely a blueprint for a good movie. Dale incrementally makes headway -- starting to win games helps, of course -- but the road to the state championship doesn't gloss over the details and it makes every shot even more meaningful.
4. The Conversation (1974): Surveillance expert Harry Caul is another perfect outlet for Hackman's talents, because there's a lot of internalization involved in the story. The wiretapper is hired to monitor the convo of two people walking through a busy New York City park, but through the painstaking process, he starts to piece together parts of a murder plot. With his own personal history weighing heavily upon him, Caul grows more and more concerned about his role in the outcome of the job. It's a gritty '70s movie that will unsettle you at the very least.
5. I Never Sang for My Father (1970): A lot of us may face heartbreaking realities with parental units as we get older. Hackman's performance as Gene Garrison is not only recognizable in that regard, but also offers a measure of comfort and validation of your own feelings. The film's early squabbles over a parent's need and desire to be independent hit close to home as we look to provide care for those who once did so invaluably for us. The late quarrels with dad Tom Garrison (Melvyn Douglas) make me thankful my main parental relationship has been nothing like that, and ultimately this is just a searing story in which the ultimate truth is about being mindful of the overlap.
6. The French Connection (1971): Hackman won the first of his two Academy Awards for playing Popeye Doyle, and it was the ideal matchup of actor and character because Doyle is a dedicated detective with a heck of a lot of baggage. He breaks rules, he drinks a lot, he's not exactly politically correct -- even in the '70s when that wasn't quite as triggering as it is now, it was pretty evident that Popeye isn't exactly a police poster boy. It's another dynamic Hackman performance, and it comes complete with an edge-of-your-seat car chase that was unconventionally filmed without the proper permits, and even to this day, elicits a lot more fear and excitement than those of the CGI variety.
7. The Birdcage (1996): I'd include Hackman just for the outrageous sight of him dressing as a drag queen, but it's everything that gets his Senator Keeley to that moment that makes it even more fun. See, the embattled conservative politician has traveled to Miami with wife Louise (Dianne Wiest) to meet the future in-laws -- so they think -- of daughter Barbara (Calista Flockhart). Little does he know (or really suspect) that Armand (Robin Williams) and Albert (Nathan Lane) are gay and Albert is masquerading as the mom of Val (Dan Futterman). Yes, chaos ensues to the point that the only escape is to become everything his narrow mind was against.
8. The Poseidon Adventure (1972): Disaster movies were all the rage in the '70s, and this one predates Titanic on the sinking vessel front. A luxury liner on its final voyage is befelled by a mammoth tidal wave that literally turns everyone's world upside down. As Reverend Scott, Hackman is the only one with the foresight to know the only chance of possible rescue will come by passengers making their way to the ship's hull. Only a handful of fellow travelers -- including Susan (Pamela Sue Martin), Belle (Shelley Winters) and Rogo (Ernest Borgnine) -- agree to this plan and they make their way through the doomed ship, dwindling in numbers while facing various perils.
9. Marooned (1969): I like a good space movie. This is almost one of those, bolstered largely by an all-star cast. We know the reality of Apollo 13, but what's only been hypothesized about is what if a rocket that needs to fire for the craft to return home just doesn't do it? Buzz Lloyd (Hackman), Jim Pruett (Richard Crenna) and Clayton Stone (James Franciscus) are the spacemen left in space -- and Gene has the meatiest role because Buzz understandably gets more unhinged as time goes by and the futility of rescue or repair becomes apparent. Space program chief Gregory Peck seems cool as a cucumber, of course, he's home on terra firma, so he can do things like worry about the future of the space program, even before the astronauts' fate has been sealed.
10. Loose Cannons (1990): Including this one as a guilty pleasure, not because it's among the best movies Hackman was ever in, but because I do enjoy watching it. Again playing a cop, Mac Stern is forced to team up with Ellis Fielding (Dan Aykroyd), a detective who developed extreme dissociative identity disorder after an undercover drug operation he was part of went disastrously wrong. The flick is mainly an opportunity to show off Aykroyd's penchant for impressions of pop-culture characters, but it's Hackman's reaction to him -- as well as Dom De Luise as turned witness Harry Gutterman -- that makes it such a treat. It's a crime this buddy cop movie couldn't get arrested.
Ten movies -- not really enough to explain the scope of my affection for Hackman. It's the tip of the iceberg. I didn't even get to Mississippi Burning and Scarecrow, Downhill Racer and Twice in a Lifetime, Night Moves and The Package. Even when Hackman was not the center of attention, he commanded it. He upped already respectable antes on (off the top of my head) Young Frankenstein, Postcards from the Edge, No Way Out and Unforgiven by giving them extra gravity and resonance. He made everyone around him better. I'm off to watch more ... so I can revise this list tomorrow.
And here's Sestra Leah with more on Hackman's Superman stature:
On a larger scale, Gene Hackman’s Luthor is our generation’s Lex. It probably helped that I didn’t read a Superman (or Action Comics) comic book prior to seeing the Superman movie in 1978. (The same strategy later worked for me with “my” Batman in 1989.) When I first saw Lex Luthor, it was Hackman in his 1970s-suited attire. Luckily, he’s not supposed to be a fashion icon, he’s a criminal mastermind! I enjoyed watching his Lex Luthor get thwarted time and again. He truly seems surprised when he loses. It’s probably good he doesn’t have sway over throngs of followers in the movie, but you’d think he could convince more than a bumbling fool and a lovestruck bombshell to be his accomplices. You don’t even get to see the worst of Luthor in the original cut of Superman. Did you know he tried to kill Eve Teschmacher by feeding her to a lion? If someone ever claims they tried to kill you because they "love you," run! Too bad she didn’t keep running; Eve ended up helping Lex escape from prison in Superman II. (Sorry, Otis.)
We missed out on what Hackman could have brought to the table for Superman III, thanks to the behind-the-scenes shenanigans between producers Alexander and Ilya Salkind and director Richard Donner. Gene (and other actors) took sides in the drama, which resulted in several of his final scenes in the original Superman II being “played” by a stunt man. Speaking of Superman III, instead of Lex, we were stuck with Robert Vaughn’s Ross Webster, a two-dimensional character created solely for the movie, even though there were more than 40 years of comic book villains to choose from. It’s like the Salkinds (and replacement director Richard Lester) knew they made a mistake. Hackman was somehow convinced to come back to the franchise for Superman IV. Sure, it’s not at the top of anyone’s list but it brought “our” Superman and “our” Lex Luthor back together for one last over-the-top adventure. I’ll take that pairing over Brandon Routh/Kevin Spacey, Henry Cavill/Jesse Eisenberg and (probably) David Corenswet/Nicholas Hoult any day of the week. Plus, it gave us the pairing of Hackman and Jon Cryer (think teenage Otis) who would end up playing my second favorite Lex Luthor on the CW’s Supergirl TV series. I hope Jon intentionally followed Gene’s lead.
