Gene Hackman: 20 Essential Movies

He played cocky cops, doomed detectives, corporate fat cats, kindly coaches, and any number of Grade-A All-American assholes — both the sheer range and the overall reliability of the gentleman’s work over four decades is astounding. Yet the one thing the late Gene Hackman, who was found dead in his home in Santa Fe, New Mexico, on Feb. 26, never did was phone it in. He was an actor’s actor, the sort of performer who cut his teeth in theater and TV in the 1960s, alongside fellow future legends like Dustin Hoffman and Robert Duvall, fit in perfectly with the moody-antihero vibes of the 1970s, and excelled at playing powerful and flawed men in the Reagan era of the 1980s. There was something so natural about whatever Hackman did onscreen, whether he was screaming in fury or shyly giving an “aw, shucks” smile. Sometimes he even managed to do both at the same time.

But his body of work attests to someone who was committed to not only perfecting the craft but also pushing himself forward in the name of always locating what made these people tick. The question was never whether Hackman belongs on the Mount Rushmore of Screen Legends. It was, to borrow the headline of Rob Sheffield’s appreciation: Was Gene Hackman a Great American Actor, or the Greatest American Actor?

These 20 roles represent Hackman at his finest — from his breakthrough as part of the Barrow Gang to an aging patriarch conning his way back into his family. There will never be another star like him.

‘Bonnie and Clyde’ (1967)

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Hackman was just another working actor, alternating between theater gigs and TV series one-offs when he was cast in a small part opposite Warren Beatty in Lilith (1964); Beatty was so blown away by their scene together that he reportedly told director Robert Rossen, “I gotta not lose this guy.” Years later, when director Arthur Penn was looking to cast Clyde’s older brother, Buck, Beatty remembered Hackman — and the 37-year-old actor suddenly found himself co-starring in one of the defining films of the 1960s. From the second he shows up, affectionately mock fighting with his younger sibling, you get an incredible sense of the way that Hackman fills up the space onscreen. (He long credited Penn as teaching him to act to the camera.) His Buck virtually leaps over the teller’s window during their first robbery. And when it came time to film his death scene, Hackman rehearsed the moment by running around his motel room “on all fours, trying to emulate the movements of a bull that had been wounded in the back of the neck and is dying.” The result earned him his first of five Oscar nominations. A movie star was born. —David Fear

‘The French Connection’ (1971)

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Before the 1970s officially become the decade of the antihero — and long before the “difficult men” of the Prestige TV era — there was Jimmy “Popeye” Doyle, a New York City cop willing to do whatever it takes to bust up the source of a transcontinental heroin-smuggling ring. Hackman knew the role would be dynamite, yet he was wary of glorifying someone so odious and outright racist. And director William Friedkin had planned on pushing Doyle to the outer limits of acceptability; the filmmaker later said that despite the fact Hackman had gone on ride-alongs with Eddie Egan, a.k.a. the real-life Popeye, his lead was so put off by the ugly places he had to go to that Hackman allegedly quit on the second day of production. He was eventually coaxed back, and struggled to find a way in to playing Egan until one day, he noticed the cop “dipping a cruller into a cup of coffee and then pitching it over his head. There was something in his attitude that made everything very clear: This guy doesn’t give a shit about anything except his work.” Bingo! The role won Hackman his first Academy Award. Everyone remembers the famous chase scene — the actor later joked that maybe the car should have won the Oscar — but Hackman is the engine that drives the whole movie. —D.F.

‘The Poseidon Adventure’ (1972)

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This torrid tale of a capsized cruise liner is arguably the best of producer Irwin Allen’s 1970s disaster movies, which is a low bar to clear. (Though the movie did earn Shelly Winters a Best Supporting Actress nomination.) Hackman is an unorthodox priest who’s among the passengers aboard, and the de facto leader of survivors when the ship goes upside down. His main responsibilities include calming the more hysterical folks, counseling common sense, and engaging in screaming matches with Ernest Borgnine. More important, however, Hackman also gives us the perfect example of how a great actor can add depth and feeling to even the cheesiest of blockbusters. Late in the movie, his group comes across an entryway buffeted by steam; if he can shut the pipe down, everyone can get to safety. So the priest leaps, grabs a wheel that hangs above a fiery pit hundreds of feet below, and begins slowly turning it through brute strength. But all the while, Hackman is raging against the Almighty that would allow this to happen: “We didn’t ask you to fight for us, but dammit, don’t fight against us!… You want another life? Then take me!” And for one brief moment, you don’t feel like you’re watching a giant slice of B-list-celebrity cinematic Velveeta, but the story of a holy man raging against an uncaring God. —D.F.

‘Prime Cut’ (1972)

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“You eat guts.” “Yeah … I like ’em!” It takes a lot to go head to head with Lee Marvin in a tough-guy showdown, but damned if Hackman does not hold his own against the flintiest actor alive in Michael Ritchie’s highly underrated 1970s crime thriller. That above exchange happens early, when Marvin’s Chicago Mob enforcer decides to pay Hackman’s Kansas City, Missouri, slaughterhouse owner, inexplicably named “Mary Ann,” a visit — it seems a made man showed up dead in one of his processing plants, and the wiseguy wants answers. Things get rough, to say the least. Once again paired with the Downhill Racer director, Hackman was happy to take on the smaller, more villainous role because, according to Ritchie, he was more of a character actor at heart. Yes, he’d played the lead in some “New York street picture” that had not yet come out while Prime Cut was being shot, but that was likely a lark. It was called The French Connection and, well, you know the rest. Yet his turn in this pulpy crime flick is a perfect example of the way Hackman could turn even throwaway bits of business into showstoppers. Watch the way he winks at Marvin when he replies to that “guts” line. You understand just how powerful and sleazy this horrible man is in a single exchange. —D.F.

‘Scarecrow’ (1973)

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“It was probably my favorite film to work on,” Hackman said in 1986 of this melancholy buddy comedy he made with Al Pacino. “It didn’t work too well at the box office.” No matter: Scarecrow captured the two acting icons back when they were still establishing themselves, fresh off their respective triumphs in The French Connection and The Godfather. But here, they’re scrappy and lived-in as two regular guys who meet in California as they’re both making their way cross-country, their futures hopefully brighter than their pasts. Hackman has rarely been lovelier than as Max, a volatile former convict who wants nothing more than to start a car wash in Pittsburgh. This is a minor-key movie that goes for big emotional moments, studying male friendship as a kind of oddball romance, and in the early 1970s one could have hardly asked for two better performers to portray the drifting, insecure tensions within modern young men. —Tim Grierson

‘The Conversation’ (1974)

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Harry Caul listens for a living. In the insular world of security and surveillance, the man is a living legend. But he’s an extremely private person, obsessive about keeping secrets and covering his tracks  — he knows what happens when your private information goes public. Harry’s also guilt-ridden over what he does, because once upon a time, he took a job that cost folks their lives. And he thinks he’s about to make that same mistake once again. Made in the middle of Francis Ford Coppola’s 1970s hot streak, this portrait in Watergate-era paranoia presented Hackman with a huge challenge: How do you show a person slowly deteriorating when he spends his every waking moment meticulously hiding his thoughts and feelings? It’s one of the great interior performances of the decade — the 180-degree opposite of Popeye Doyle — with Hackman using that signature sunny smile as a shield and bristling ever so slightly whenever some tiny biographical fact is mentioned in casual conversation. Coppola said that he wanted the actor for the part because “he’s so ordinary, so unexceptional in appearance.” But this character study works because Hackman knows exactly when to blend into the background and when to let the cracks in this expert “everyman” snoop’s facade crumble before your eyes. —D.F.

‘Young Frankenstein’ (1974)

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Having threatened Gene Wilder in the back of a getaway car in Bonnie and Clyde, Hackman and the comic actor became friends. One day, the two were playing tennis when Wilder happened to mention he was making another movie with Mel Brooks. Hackman excitedly asked if there was a small part he could play — which is how Brooks ended up casting the Oscar winner in an uncredited role as a blind hermit who takes in Peter Boyle’s bolt-necked creature. You don’t even have to know that the scene is a direct riff on a similar sequence in Frankenstein to find it hilarious, or appreciate how Hackman leans into the ridiculousness of it like a seasoned member of Brooks’ rep company. (No less than Pauline Kael said that the unrecognizable Hackman’s inflections “are so spectacularly assured I thought there was a famous comic hidden under the beard until I recognized his voice.”) And that perfect kicker, in which the hermit bemoans the monster’s hasty exit with “I was going to make espresso!” That was a Hackman ad-lib. 10/10, no notes. —D.F.

‘Bite the Bullet’ (1975)

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Hackman is Sam Clayton, “champion of dumb animals, ladies in distress, lost kids and lost causes” — and the moral compass in Richard Brooks’ rowdy Western, in which adventurers and cowpokes compete in a 700-mile horse race across the U.S. Everyone from Candace Bergen’s ex-belle du jour to Jan-Michael Vincent’s snotnosed outlaw brat are gunning for the bragging rights and $2,000 bounty, but it’s Hackman that you end up rooting for. There’s an inherent kindness in his grizzled, last-of-a-dying-breed frontiersman, and a sense of honor that he and fellow Rough Rider James Coburn still cling to even when the race turns them into rivals. Hackman also gets a hell of a speech, in which he debunks the myth of Teddy Roosevelt’s elite horsemen charging up San Juan Hill; it’s a mournful elegy about heroism that’s a great reminder of how the actor could easily turn a simple monologue into a showstopper. One of his more underrated performances, and one that’s ripe for rediscovery. —D.F.

‘Night Moves’ (1975)

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“With an actor like Gene I don’t need to give precise directions,” filmmaker Arthur Penn once said. “He is able to produce the kind of reaction I’m after quite spontaneously, something he can do differently take after take. It just comes naturally to him.” You need look no further than their collaboration on one of the greatest neo-noirs of the 1970s. Hackman is superb as Harry, a disillusioned detective who’s hired to find a teenage runaway — a seemingly straightforward gig that, naturally, opens the door to secrets he doesn’t want to learn about himself and the world around him. Night Moves gave us a Hackman who could play tough, sexy outcasts still holding onto a shrivel of their conscience — not that such niceties mattered in a broken, cruel society. He was rarely so haunted or heartbreaking. —T.G.

‘Superman’ (1978)

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Imagine the online furor that would arise if any actor today cast to play Lex Luthor refused to shave his head for the famously bald role — even if that actor was, like Hackman in the late Seventies, one of the biggest movie stars in the world. Superman director Richard Donner had to trick Hackman into shaving his mustache and cajole him into wearing a bald cap for his final scene in the movie, confirming that Lex had been wearing wigs the entire time out of vanity. And yet Hackman is so spectacularly funny, so charismatic, so unapologetically selfish and narcissistic — and thus a perfect foil for Christopher Reeve’s virtuous Man of Steel, even if they only share the screen briefly — that nobody much cared that this Luthor didn’t have his trademark lack-of-hairstyle. Hackman was similarly delightful in a more secondary role in Superman II, and his work as Lex is one of the few redeeming elements of the final Reeve film, Superman IV: The Quest for Peace. —Alan Sepinwall

‘Eureka’ (1983)

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You could call it the great lost Hackman performance: A prospector searching the snowy terrain of the Yukon for gold who then goes mad after he strikes the mother lode and becomes rich beyond his wildest dreams. Hackman truly plays the part like a man of grit possessed by greed and destroyed by his own good fortune; it’s like discovering the missing link between Humphrey Bogart in The Treasure of the Sierra Madre and Daniel Day-Lewis in There Will Be Blood. When the script came across his desk, the actor admitted he was intrigued by the challenge of playing a character over a 20-year period that covered him going from flinty outdoorsman to stuffed-shirt fat cat. But what really drew him in was the notion of the pitfalls in chasing your lifelong ambitions and what happens when you finally catch them. Hackman and director Nicolas Roeg famously clashed over different working methods — a recurring motif in stories about the actor’s reputation for being difficult on sets — and the movie regrettably sunk without a trace. Yet you couldn’t ask for a better example of Hackman’s commitment to playing deeply flawed, self-destructive men. The reassessment of this rough gem of an epic starts now. —D.F.

‘Hoosiers’ (1986)

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Danville, the small town in Illinois where Hackman had spent a good deal of his youth, is roughly 60 miles from the Indiana locale where he shot this classic sports movie. He’d even played a little basketball when he was in school — “I was not terrific,” he said, “but I was on the varsity team” — before he enlisted in the Marines at the age of 16. (Ironically, he told that same reporter that part of the reason he’d ducked into the USMC recruitment office was because he’d just had a row with his coach: “I liked that [military] uniform better than the one I was wearing.”) And from the minute you see his disgraced, former college-basketball coach Norman Dale step onto the court and start barking orders at his players, you get the sense that Hackman knew this world inside and out. Director David Anspaugh and screenwriter Angelo Pizzo’s ode to Midwestern high school hoops and the communities that live for the game gave the star the perfect tough-love mentor role, as well as an inspirational locker room speech for the ages: “Remember what got you here.” Hackman may have told co-star Dennis Hopper (who’d be nominated for a Best Supporting Actor Oscar and cement his comeback with his role as the town drunk) to save his money, because the movie would likely flop. It ended up becoming a huge hit, thanks in no small part to Hackman’s ability to give you someone who has to bring out the best in these boys in order to bring out the best in himself. —D.F.

‘No Way Out’ (1987)

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Don’t be fooled by the impressive job title of Hackman’s character in Roger Donaldson’s political thriller. His U.S. Defense Secretary David Brice is an enormously weak man, unable to control his emotions and powerless in the face of a mistress he covets (Sean Young) who’s also romantically engaged with someone else, a handsome young naval officer (Kevin Costner). Hackman brings Brice to pathetic life in this deft adaptation of Kenneth Fearing’s novel The Big Clock, which involves Costner investigating the death of the mistress — knowing full well that his superior killed her in a fit of jealous rage. The movie may have helped make Costner a star, but it was also a perfect vehicle for Hackman, who adroitly captured the duality (and tragedy) of Brice: He walks into any room with utter authority, only to crumble when his life starts to fall apart. —T.G.

‘The Firm’ (1988)

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Hackman was no stranger to conspiracy thrillers (see: The Conversation, Night Moves), and this adaptation of John Grisham’s bestseller about a hungry young lawyer (Tom Cruise) who discovers the depth of his firm’s corruption, aspired to be a page-turning 1990s equivalent to the subgenre’s 1970s high points. It’s a sleek, densely plotted star vehicle for Cruise, but The Firm’s soul comes from Hackman, who plays a would-be mentor to the young legal eagle. He’s definitely in on the dirty doings, but is also the one partner who seems emotionally affected by the blood on his hands. It’s a performance full of regret and loneliness — and proof that Hackman brought his fastball even on big-paycheck gigs. He simply couldn’t not plumb the depths of any role he signed up for. —T.G.

‘Mississippi Burning’ (1988)

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“I suppose I see myself as a serious artist, and it felt right to do something of historical import,” Hackman said when asked about why he felt compelled to take on the period drama about FBI agents investigating the disappearance of three activists in rural Mississippi. You can imagine a lot of other actors turning his character, a former sheriff from the Hospitality State, into a redneck caricature or an overly righteous white knight. Hackman somehow finds the exact right middle ground between those two extremes, as well as tapping into a personal reservoir of rage. His fed is certainly comfortable giving good ol’ boys a taste of their own rancid medicine, whether it’s a straight-razor shave that doubles as an interrogation of a deputy or grabbing a local bully by the balls (that touch was Hackman’s improvisational addition to the scene). Yet he also recognizes that, as someone who’s also a product of the South, he’s not immune to what Hackman called the “regional attitudes” that infected the mindset of so many fellow Mississippians — and that’s the anger that feels like a double-sided blade for this gentleman. Many critics at the time said that Hackman virtually stole the movie. Decades later, we’re more than inclined to agree. —D.F.

‘Unforgiven’ (1992)

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Hackman deservedly won his second Oscar for playing Little Bill Daggett, a corrupt sheriff in a compromised frontier town, in Clint Eastwood’s peerless epitaph for a genre he helped shape. The lawman rules over his roost with a deceivingly welcome smile and an iron fist; the man does not take kindly to strangers like Will Munny (Clint Eastwood), a former outlaw who’s been hired, along with his old partner-in-crime Ned Logan (Morgan Freeman), to kill some offending cowpokes in his jurisdiction. Daggett believes he can handle a couple of old-timers who have the audacity to come into his world and dole out justice. Spoiler alert: He hadn’t reckoned on the power of friendship and vengeance. It’s not just the joy of watching Hackman share the screen with Eastwood, Freeman, and Richard Harris, playing off his fellow screen veterans so beautifully, that makes his scenes so rich. What sticks with you is how Hackman shows you how Daggett truly believes he’s the righteous hero of this story. Everyone remembers Eastwood saying “Deserve’s got nothin’ to do with it” right before he executes his nemesis, but what guts you is how Hackman delivers the line that sets it up: “I was building a house!” The sheer disbelief in his voice sells it. He was supposed to get a happy ending, goddamit. Then Eastwood pulls the trigger. —D.F.

‘Crimson Tide’ (1995)

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Hackman served in the Marine Corps (he was only 16 when he enlisted, lying about his age to get in), so depicting military men hardly felt like a stretch for him. And he arguably never put that experience to better use than in this peak-Clinton-era action-thriller, where he plays submarine commander Captain Frank Ramsey. He and his brilliant Lieutenant Commander Ron Hunter (Denzel Washington) get locked in an epic face-off once Ramsey is convinced that they’ve been ordered to launch missiles against the Russians — and Hunter fears that their communication system has been impaired. Hackman is all bullheaded intimidation as the trigger-happy commander, squaring off with Washington in a series of mano-a-mano showdowns that are a masterclass in capital-A acting between two top-flight movie stars. Crimson Tide was one of Hackman’s biggest hits of the 1990s — he synthesized post-Cold War paranoia into a riveting, utterly entertaining performance. —T.G.

‘Get Shorty’ (1995)

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Hackman said he based his Grade-Z movie director Harry Zimm on an agent he once claimed was the phoniest man he ever met in Hollywood — and that’s saying something. He was also reluctant to take on the role, despite the fact he was a fan of Elmore Leonard’s book about a wiseguy who ends up making a killing in the moviemaking racket, because he was afraid he wouldn’t be funny. The legend shouldn’t have worried: He puts such a great spin on lines like “The guy’s been in town for two days and already he thinks he’s David O. Fucking Selznick” that you wish he’d made a prequel about Zimm’s heyday as an exploitation-movie auteur. It was Hackman’s idea to dress his character like he was still living in the 1960s, as if he never outgrew the era when he first started making quality motion pictures (“No TV!”) like the Slime Creatures trilogy. (The fake teeth weren’t his idea, which he disliked, but they’re a nice touch — it makes Zimm look that much more insincere.) His affectionate rib on Hollywood has-beens and never-weres adds a kind of warmth to a classic showbiz sleazebag. —D.F.

‘Heist’ (2001)

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“I’ve always liked David [Mamet]’s writing,” Hackman said. “How he can create a character where you never quite knew who he was. The idea that he’s a bit of a mystery, with a nice switch at the end.” Indeed, the master thief at the center of the Mamet thriller is the kind of man who holds his cards pressed flush against his chest, yet can still toss off the sort of pulp-poetic patter that is the playwright turned filmmaker’s stock-in-trade. Hackman’s Joe Moore is a criminal who’s “so cool, when he goes to bed, sheep count him.” But after getting burned on a jewelry-store robbery, this veteran crook wants out of the game. His prime benefactor (Danny DeVito), however, needs him to do one last job. Hackman deftly navigates his character through a plot filled with switchbacks, fake-outs and double- and triple-crosses — the only thing simple about the film is its title. And though Hackman gives Moore a sense of weariness, he’s never less than a consummate professional when it comes to the long con. It’s the kind of well-executed genre gem that makes you wish Hackman hadn’t retired, because this could have been the beginning of a beautiful working relationship. —D.F.

‘The Royal Tennenbaums’ (2001)

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Make no mistake: Royal Tenenbaum is a rat bastard. How else would you describe someone who stole from his son, virtually abandons his kids after a divorce, lies about having stomach cancer to get back in their good graces after going broke, and calls a romantic rival who’s Black “Coltrane”? Hackman never downplays the less-than-stellar aspects of the Tenenbaum patriarch in Wes Anderson’s early masterpiece. But he locates the humanity within the blackened heart of this cantankerous old man, and that makes all the difference. The young director said he convinced a wary Hackman to take the role after nearly a year and a half of wearing him down; Anderson noted that once he got him, everyone was beating down his door to be in the film because they wanted to act against the legend. This would not be Hackman’s last movie — he’d do a few more before finally retiring in 2004 — but The Royal Tenenbaums would be his last great movie. Its epilogue was always poignant enough to make even a crusty old salt like Pops Tenenbaum teary-eyed — “It was agreed among them that Royal would have found the event to be most satisfactory” — but it plays especially moving today. R.I.P. —D.F.

From Rolling Stone US.