When you first see Gene Hackman in “The French Connection,” he’s wearing a Santa suit, conversing with a bunch of kids. It’s a jolly image that runs counter to what we’ll soon come to know about Jimmy “Popeye” Doyle, the porkpie-hat-wearing detective that became one of Hackman’s most notable roles. The Santa disguise starts to peel off as he leaves the children behind to sprint after and brutalize a perp. Kindly Santa, this man is not.
But that was the extraordinary power of Hackman, who was found dead Wednesday at his home in Santa Fe., N.M., at the age of 95. Throughout his long career — that was somehow too short, thanks to a conscious retirement — he mixed warmth with menace. He could be paternal as well as terrifying, sometimes all within the same film.
Hackman often played men doggedly pursuing impossible goals despite looming threats and their superiors telling them to back off, but there was a doggedness about him, too. He had a pugnacious ability to almost goad you into liking men who would otherwise be despicable, be they criminals, cops or just absentee fathers. Despite their often unsavory behavior, Hackman made it fun to spend time with these people, even if you might not want to encounter them in real life.
Hackman never quite made sense as a movie star. When he was cast alongside Warren Beatty in Arthur Penn’s “Bonnie and Clyde” (1967), the movie that would net him his first Oscar nomination, that became obvious. While Beatty as one of the eponymous robbers was smooth with a luscious mane of black hair, Hackman’s Buck Barrow, Clyde’s brother, was jittery and balding — but no less an entrancing and terrifying presence, with a livewire energy that felt genuinely unmoored.
Hackman routinely inspired the use of the term “Everyman” in articles, but that seemed like an incomplete way of capturing his appeal. In 1989, The New York Times Magazine qualified that description by calling him “Hollywood’s Uncommon Everyman.” Twelve years later, The Times described him as “Hollywood’s Every Angry Man.” He was an Everyman with an asterisk.
Offscreen he was known as a prickly figure who sometimes fought with directors, and even at his most universally appealing, he had a gruffness. Take for instance his big pump-up speech in “Hoosiers” (1986), the basketball drama in which he played a strict but life-changing coach. Delivered by any other actor, it would be filled with smarmy treacle. But in Hackman’s hands there is a blunt practicality to the way he encourages the Indiana teenagers to do their best.
“Hoosiers,” like so many other memorable Hackman roles, could be defined by persistence — a persistence that was not always met with victory. In “The French Connection,” the 1971 film directed by William Friedkin, Popeye’s relentless pursuit of heroin dealers turns into something almost akin to mania. You can feel how much energy he expends in the chase sequence at the movie’s climax. He doesn’t make the job look easy. And in the end, it’s mostly fruitless. Friedkin’s closing cards emphasize how the criminals mostly got away, with minimal repercussions.
Three years later, in Francis Ford Coppola’s “The Conversation” (1974), Hackman played another man plagued by the knowledge that wrongdoing was afoot. But while he brought a visceral amorality to Popeye, Hackman highlighted the surveillance expert Harry Caul’s piousness: a fear of God coupled with his determination to discover just what a young couple is saying in a park. By the end, he’s left with just himself and a home he has torn apart trying to suss out who might be listening.
Hackman’s hard-boiled demeanor made him a natural fit for lawmen — whether on a righteous quest, like his Oscar-nominated turn as an F.B.I. agent in “Mississippi Burning” (1988) or corrupted by authority, as in his Oscar-winning performance as the villainous sheriff in the western “Unforgiven” (1992).
Still, while Hackman was revered for his intensity in dramas, he could also channel that into humorous work that was equally, if not sometimes more, rewarding for the viewer. One of his greatest scenes comes in Mike Nichols’s “The Birdcage” (1996), in which Hackman plays a Republican senator, Keeley, embroiled in a controversy, who unwittingly visits the gay parents of his daughter’s fiancé. Asked casually how his trip was, he starts pontificating about seasons and foliage. The answer to a simple question turns into a stump speech.
It would have been easy to portray the family-values-spouting Senator Keeley as a bigot who undergoes a change of heart, but Hackman unexpectedly chooses to make him mostly just confused, determined to power through his nervousness by speaking, however inane he might sound. It’s emblematic of how Hackman kept his viewers on the edge of their seats every time he appeared onscreen.
That consistently unexpected quality is something Wes Anderson capitalized on when he cast Hackman as the patriarch in “The Royal Tenenbaums” (2001). Royal Tenenbaum, perhaps Hackman’s final great role, is a spark plug and a lovable cad. He’s also a disastrous father barreling back into his children’s lives, and a liar with a twinkle in his eye.
In a montage, Anderson captures Royal taking his uptight grandchildren out on the town to the sound of Paul Simon’s “Me and Julio Down by the Schoolyard.” At one point, Hackman rides a go-kart, his knees sticking out and a big smile on his face. It’s a beat that’s nearly the inverse of the famous image of Hackman behind the wheel in “The French Connection.” He’s not being consumed with a near rage in pursuit of an enemy; he is just joyriding. But Royal also had a fury buried inside him, and that’s what made Hackman one of the most compelling performers of all time: You never knew what you were going to get.
