He Never Made the Same Choice Twice: 10 of Our Favorite Gene Hackman Performances | Features

The world lost one of the best actors of his or any generation in February when Gene Hackman left us. He hadn’t worked in two decades, but it still hurt to know that he was truly gone, and it got the entire world thinking of their favorite acting turns from the two-time Oscar winner. We asked some of our regular critics to pick a performance that they wanted to exalt and got such an incredible sampling of the history of movies through the work of one of its best.

And we didn’t even scratch the surface of Hackman’s filmography. The absence of “Superman,” “Crimson Tide,” “Bonnie and Clyde,” and even “The Royal Tenenbaums” from this feature is no slight on those movies and Hackman’s work in them as much as it’s indicative of how deep his resume was over his 40-year career. Here are 10 Gene Hackman performances we love. They are not the only 10, but they are 10 great ones.

John Herod in “The Quick and the Dead“

Sam Raimi’s 1995 Western “The Quick and the Dead” is bigger than life in every aspect, from the Looney Tunes-meets-Sergio Leone gunfights to the names of people and places: Sharon Stone’s vengeful gunslinger heroine is known only as “The Lady,” and a town that revolves around gunfighting is called Redemption, and Gene Hackman’s villain is a combination sheriff and town dictator called John Herod, named after the king in the old Testament who presided over a massacre of innocents. But as in “The Royal Tenenbaums,” an equally stylized but far more successful film released six years after, Hackman manages to participate fully in the film’s unique vision while grounding and humanizing his character. 

Herod, whose gang took over the town a generation earlier, is a rat bastard in the vein of Henry Fonda’s bad guy in Leone’s “Once Upon a Time in the West” but with a seemingly ageless dexterity and endurance. He takes on all challengers in the town’s seemingly continuous tournament of gun downs, torments a former member of the gang (Russell Crowe’s Cort) who renounced violence and became a preacher, disavows his parentage of The Kid (Leonardo DiCaprio) who’s come to earn his respect and be acknowledged as his son, and changing the rules of the contest on a whim, knowing that nobody dares tell him no. Hackman has always been a master of simmering menace, but he cranks it up to a boil here. 

At the same time, though, he gives us a thoughtfully etched portrait of a man who is dead inside, feeling only dark emotions such as anger, pride, and envy (he seems to loathe Cort because he could never be Cort) and understanding more positive types of feeling (love, empathy, mercy) only as abstractions. And in his quieter, more humbled moments, he seems to know how defective he is. The fearful knowledge festers in the back of his mind, to be unleashed as destruction. (Matt Zoller Seitz)

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Joe Moore in “Heist“

In a lot of caper movies, the protagonist is a master thief who’s preparing to hang up his shoes and depart for some sunny clime after pulling One Last Job, the escapade that will set him up for life. At the beginning of “Heist,” Gene Hackman’s Joe has actually pulled said job and has all but hoisted sail on his gorgeous boat when his fencer and financier, a walking nightmare named Bergman, calls and starts poking him about a potential operation referred to as “The Swiss Job.” Joe demurs, but Bernstein convinces him that he hasn’t got a choice.

“Heist” is written and directed by David Mamet, so you know right off the bat that very little of what you’re seeing is going to be as it seems, and that there will be many twists and turns and betrayals. Hackman’s Joe is a Mamet game master par excellence. Mamet has said of screenwriting, “the main character must have a simple, straightforward, pressing need which impels him or her to show up in the scene.” Joe’s need is money, specifically in the form of Gold. As Danny De Vito’s Bernstein puts it, in one of Mamet’s most famous lines, “Everybody needs money. That’s why they call it money.”

In addition to being a thief, Joe’s also a bit of a poker player, that is, a con man, and no matter how desperate his need becomes, he never lets himself look like a man whose head is anything but above water. Of the many obstacles thrown in his way, the most onerous is Sam Rockwell’s Jimmy Silk, Bernstein’s swaggering imbecile nephew, who Bernstein foists on Joe’s crackerjack crew.

And as loyal as Joe is to his crew (which includes stalwarts Delroy Lindo and Ricky Jay, with Mamet’s wife Rebecca Pidgeon in the role of its female component), he’s always got his eye on the gold, the pressing need. This is one of Hackman’s most virtuoso performances, because aside from the aforementioned pressing need, he doesn’t let you see what’s on his mind as he strategizes his way around setbacks that become progressively more lethal.

Which is to say that Mamet’s cogent direction always lets you see what Joe is doing. But Hackman rarely if ever lets you know what Joe is really thinking at any given moment. Part of the movie’s fun is in trying to keep pace with this definitively wily character. (Glenn Kenny)

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Harry Zimm in “Get Shorty“

Gene Hackman was a marvelously versatile actor who always understood the world, the characters, the tempo, and the tone of the films he was in and enough star power to carry a lead role. But I like to think the characters he enjoyed the most were in ensemble comedies. In “Get Shorty,” John Travolta plays Chili Palmer, an enforcer for a loan shark, who finds his skills are even more suitable for Hollywood film production. Hackman plays Harry Zimm, a producer of low budget horror movies like “Grotesque Part II,” “Bride of the Mutant,” and a “Slime Creatures” trilogy. Awakened in the middle of the night by Palmer, who has come to collect a gambling debt, Zimm tries to bluff his way into an extension but soon switches into Hollywood hustle mode, proudly presenting himself as though he’s wooing an investor: “I produce feature motion pictures, no TV.”  Zimm is a classic Hollywood figure with more ambition than talent. Hackman shows us that because Zimm is always pitching, he is always acting. We see him shift personas as he cajoles his drug dealer investors and struggles to appear in control after being beat up, framed for murder, and high on painkillers. As the hack producer tries to imitate Chili’s effortlessly cool and tough demeanor, Hackman’s performance is perfectly imperfect, shrewdly observed, and wildly funny. (Nell Minow)

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Harry Caul in “The Conversation“

“He was once somebody’s baby boy, and he had a mother and father who loved him, and now there he is half-dead on a park bench.” It’s a line heard more than a half-dozen times in Francis Ford Coppola’s masterful 1974 character study, a snippet of a conversation recorded by surveillance expert Harry Caul. It’s a thought expressed by one of the people that Caul is surveilling that’s about an unhoused man on a bench, but it’ also always felt to me like it’s also about Harry himself, first seen sitting on a bench, a man with no family ties, often looking “half-dead.”

Gene Hackman plays Caul like a ghost, a hollow man who is approached throughout the film to make actual connections with a girlfriend (Teri Garr), co-worker (John Cazale), and even the gregarious peers in his industry. He has no interest in humanity. He is a shadow whose stated goal is to get the best recording, regardless of what’s actually being said. In that sense, he is going through the motions of life without the substance. It’s when he becomes fascinated with the actual conversation itself, and what it means, that his carefully constructed world starts to collapse. Hackman captures the disintegrating impact of paranoia without the typical overcooked mannerisms that other actors would have used like a crutch.

As Scout stated so well in his tribute, Hackman was a performer who used small gestures to feel 100% genuine at all times, and I’ve always considered “The Conversation” the best example of this: an acting master class of small choices, minor beats, and unhurried line readings. The pause after “I’m not afraid of death … I am afraid of murder” during the dream sequence that propels the film into its final act is just one of dozens of times Hackman captures how a man who has purposefully made himself “half-dead” to be better at his job is now realizing the impact of being “half-alive” too. (Brian Tallerico)

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Mary Ann in “Prime Cut”

Gene Hackman was widely celebrated for the everyman quality that he brought to many of the characters that he portrayed over the years—the kind of thing that so many actors have attempted to convey and which so few have been able to pull off to the degree that he did. At the same time, when he was given the opportunity to play a role that required a more overtly larger-than-life approach—as he did in the “Superman” films and his scene-stealing turn in “Heartbreakers”—he was always up for the challenge.

Another great example of this came when he co-starred in Michael Ritchie’s “Prime Cut,” a darkly comedic thriller that remains as hair-raising today as it did when it came out in 1972, perhaps even more so. In it, he plays Mary Ann, a cheerfully depraved guy whose meat packing concern is a front for running drugs and prostitutes (the latter he keeps locked up in pens) and who sends people representing his enemies back to their bosses in the form of hot dogs. From the first moment we see him, talking tough with no less a screen presence than Lee Marvin while slurping up a plate of beef guts, it is readily apparent that he has not only found just the right performance mode to match the lurid lunacy of the material but is having a grand old time doing it. He is the black bloody heart (among other body parts) of the films and even though he isn’t on the screen nearly enough (the film’s only real flaw), you can feel his malevolent presence over every scene and even in a film that otherwise wallows in gleeful, grisly excess, Hackman, as he would do throughout his career, leaves you wanting more. (Peter Sobczynski)

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Brill in “Enemy of the State“

The hardest job for an actor often happens when they must return to a character they laid down long ago. Though Hackman’s role in Tony Scott’s surveillance thriller “Enemy of the State” isn’t a direct sequel to Francis Ford Coppola’s “The Conversation,” Brill, the reclusive tech genius who helps Will Smith’s lawyer-on-the-run character Robert Dean, is spiritually close to the man he plays in Coppola’s picture. For Hackman, the return must have felt a tad bit familiar because “Enemy of the State” not only represented his second collaboration with Scott after “Crimson Tide,” it also followed a similar framing of the lauded actor being paired with a young Black co-star. 

In “Enemy of the State,” Hackman appears much later than you expect. With the government chasing him because of top secret footage in his possession, Smith turns to Hackman for help because Brill makes money conducting surveillance operations for him. While the part isn’t nearly as introspective as Coppola’s film demands, Hackman still has the tough task of balancing the memory of that role with the blockbuster demands of a contemporary thriller. He possesses a fast patter, grizzled comic timing and an easy rapport with Smith. Most of all, he isn’t necessarily chewing the scenery. There is an immediacy, a unique precision particular to Hackman that turns hackneyed dialogue into collar-tightening intrigue. That ability to conjure suspense from popcorn material is what made Hackman at once the best character of his generation and a singular movie star. (Robert Daniels)

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Popeye Doyle in “The French Connection“

“You pick your feet in Poughkeepsie?”

Gene Hackman was the last choice to play Popeye Doyle, the gruff, violent thug at the center of William Friedkin’s crackerjack police procedural “The French Connection.” Friedkin didn’t want someone as relatively green as Hackman, who’d never led a picture like this before; but after Paul Newman was too pricey, Peter Boyle hated the violence, and Steve McQueen didn’t want a repeat of “Bullitt,” they landed on Hackman. And what a turn it is, despite Hackman’s own behind the scenes objections to Doyle’s vulgar, racist behavior (based on real-life NYPD cop Eddie Egan); all hangdog exhaustion and pent-up rage, his Doyle is a womanizing ball of anger, all too happy to bend or break the rules to get his man.

Yet, with Hackman in the hot seat, there’s not a tinge of romance to that kind of loose cannon. The little glimpses we get of his off-duty life are hardly admirable: burying his face in his hands (and a bottle) at a dive bar, waking up hungover to find himself handcuffed to the bedframe by the latest in a series of one-night stands. He chats up kids in a Santa Claus outfit seconds before running full speed at a perp in the same red suit; he shoots his mark in the back at the end of the film’s infamous car chase. Doyle is a frazzled ball of nerves (due in no small part to Friedkin’s real-life needling of Hackman behind the camera, right down to faking disappointment after the actor delivered a pitch-perfect take), a guy determined to catch the bad guy mostly because he has so little else going for him. It’s a shit-or-get-off-the-pot moment for both character and actor, and Hackman plays him like it’s his last chance as a leading man. The Oscar he won for it—and the decades of hollowed-out paranoiacs he’d build off it—is a testament to getting it just right. (Clint Worthington)

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Little Bill Daggett in “Unforgiven“

Gene Hackman’s voice was like razorblade—sharp, cutting, unmistakably big screen. And if the notes of intimidation you’d hear from his morally ambiguous characters could be upstaged at all, they could only be bested by Hackman’s own rascally, even sexy smile, curdling around his lips in amusement, in complete disagreement with the piercing menace his eyes would discharge. He was distinct and unforgettable in every single part that he played, long before mainstream Hollywood stopped elevating the faces of unique character actors of his sort.

Still, those qualities Hackman naturally possessed were rarely a better fit for a movie than they were for “Unforgiven,” Clint Eastwood’s masterful revisionist western where Hackman plays a man of contradictions: a lawless lawman, a gun-toting small-town sheriff called Little Bill, with ironically strict anti-gun policies. His wrath would eventually face off Bill Munny’s (Eastwood) when the latter—a retired and widowed criminal—arrives in town to murder cowboys who’ve cruelly cut-up a prostitute’s face, in exchange for prize money from the women.

Pick any scene from “Unforgiven” that involves Hackman’s villainous sheriff—from his unnervingly confident mockery of Richard Harris’ ruthless English Bob through the words “the duck of death,” to his merciless killing of Ned Logan (Morgan Freeman), and his brutal dismissal of justice that the prostitutes rightfully demand, and the only word that comes to mind is an overused one seldom this deserved: iconic. And it’s when you fear his character the most that Hackman expands upon his range once more, before falling to his death vulnerably: “I don’t deserve to die like this.” Delivered perfectly, the line hits with unexpected depth in the movie, and feels heart-wrenching today for more reasons than one. (Tomris Laffly)

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William B. Tensy in “Heartbreakers“

David Mirkin was a veteran sitcom writer before he turned to directing, writing some of the best episodes of “Get a Life,” “The Larry Sanders Show” and “The Simpsons,” which means some of the best episodes of television of all time. His feature credits are too short for how smart he was, just the wonderful “Romy and Michele’s High School Reunion” and the riotously cynical “Heartbreakers,” a favorite in my household when I was 12. Gene Hackman is introduced nearly dying of emphysema and throwing his cigarette menacingly into a woman’s champagne glass. And that’s just how it starts. Through the film, in which mother-daughter con artists (Sigourney Weaver and Jennifer Love Hewitt) you can’t wait for Hackman to die but love every second he’s alive being a miserly old bastard, the bane of everyone’s existence, especially his Mrs. Danvers-esque housekeeper (Nora Dunn). He’s the sclerotic, splintering spine of the piece, a man you have a ball hating, and Hackman practically radiates joy being so cartoonishly evil. He never got celebrated enough as a great comedian but it’s clear in a film like this what a clutch player he was, even with such talented foils. (Scout Tafoya)

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Senator Keeley in “The Birdcage“

“The Birdcage,” director Mike Nichols and screenwriter Elaine May’s vibrant take on “La Cage aux Folles,” remains one of the sharpest political satires in all of American cinema, anchored by the late Gene Hackman, who gives one of the most complex, and downright hilarious, performances of his career. Hackman plays the WASPy Senator Kevin Keeley, a reactionary, utlra-conservative Republican senator whose finds himself in a bit of a pickle when his colleague and co-founder of the Coalition for Moral Order, is found dead with an underage sex worker. Keeley sees the engagement of his young daughter Barbara (Calista Flockhart), which he had previously opposed, as a life-line to patch up his image as a leader in party of family values. Little does he know that the parents of her fiancé Val (Dan Futterman), are a Jewish gay couple, Armand and Albert Goldman (Robin Williams, Nathan Lane) who own a drag nightclub in South Beach.

The result is a comedy of manners that lays bare every single hypocritical aspect of contemporary American conservatism. In the film’s early scenes when the scandal breaks, Hackman’s psychical comedy skills manifest the absurdity of Keeley’s politics. While trying to sneak out of his home, he speaks empty platitudes to a gaggle of journalists while balancing on a creaky ladder, offering a half-hearted double-peace-signed salute before crawling back into the window. Once in Florida, he plays the literal straight man to their queer chaos, where his constant, and overly earnest, praise of “Mrs. Coleman,” aka Arnold in conservative old lady drag, reveals the deep hypocrisy of his moral beliefs. Keeley, now in drag himself in order to hide from the rabid press, uttering the line “I don’t want to be the only girl not dancing,” remains one of the film’s best punchlines, while the scene, which demonstrates the transformative power of the art of drag, remains timelier than ever. (Marya E. Gates)

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