From Unforgiven to The Firm: Guardian writers pick their favourite Gene Hackman movies

The Guardian

01-03-2025

Almost five minutes go by in The French Connection before we get a good look at Gene Hackman. Various other operators come and go in William Friedkin's gritty and unsettling procedural – based on a real heroin sting – before Hackman's Detective Jimmy 'Popeye' Doyle emerges from behind an ill-fitting undercover Santa Claus outfit, like a background player busting into his first lead role. It's as fitting an entrance as ever for Hackman, leveling up after his supporting work on TV and films like Bonnie and Clyde. And he gives a performance that sets the tone for his whole career, playing the brutal and racist cop, a morally murky figure who just doesn't sit right as the hero of the story. Many of the qualities that made Hackman so great in later villainous roles – the way he moves like a menace with a devilishly charming grin, slipping so easily from comforting to antagonizing – are in Doyle. That detective's infamous query, repeatedly grilling suspects about picking their feet in Poughkeepsie, is as mischievously disorienting as Hackman's onscreen presence. Radheyan Simonpillai
As an 11-year-old of a nervous disposition, The Poseidon Adventure was a sight to behold. Possibly the first disaster movie I saw, and certainly the first Gene Hackman film, it went straight to the heart of those pre-adolescent terrors: Would the cross-channel ferry stay upright? Was there a priest about who could save everyone's skins? Was there an Olympic swimming champion concealed inside someone's unlikely looking mum? Hackman would of course make much better films, both before (Bonnie and Clyde, Lilith, The French Connection) and after (take your pick), but for sheer messianic fervour there's nothing to match it. The amazing scene where he yells at the Almighty while trying to turn off a steam valve is one of the all time greats, Gene Hackman at his Gene Hackmanest. His character – a hip, muscular clergyman – was an outdated trope even then (and probably was when Karl Malden did one in On the Waterfront 20 years earlier) but I personally prefer it to sax-tootler Harry Caul, his generally lauded performance of a similar vintage. 'Keep going. Rogo!' Andrew Pulver
I was embarrassingly late to The Conversation, despite a youth in which Gene Hackman played an important part, and like many films one only consumes through references and iconography, I developed an impression of what I thought it would be. I was partly right (there is a great deal of both paranoia and the granular details of early 70s surveillance tech) but I was mostly wrong. I had assumed a grander tale of a more complex conspiracy but what I found was something smaller and sadder, a thriller second and a character study first, one of a low-key everyman wrecked by guilt and cursed by loneliness. Hackman's Harry Caul is a man whose greatest skill – the 'best bugger on the west coast' – is something that will never bring him peace, just permanent anxiety. He knows how unsafe the world can increasingly be – it's his job to further make it that way, and this distrust leads him away from potential relationships and toward an internal unravelling. Hackman plays this with poignance, carrying the visible, shoulder-crippling weight of what he's been forced to live with, avoiding the cheap, nervy mannerisms many others would lazily employ. The ending is one of dramatic combustion but there's also a calm in Harry realising that his overbearing control was just an illusion. It's not about giving up, it's more about accepting life's limitations and trying to find peace within them. Benjamin Lee
Gene Hackman's second collaboration with director Arthur Penn revolves around some convoluted business with illegally imported indigenous artifacts from the Yucatán peninsula, but the ne plus ultra of New Hollywood downers is really the story of a beaten-down man working his way to the end of his rope. Introduced in decline as past-his-prime former football player turned PI turned cuckold Harry Moseby, Hackman spends the film on defense, the substance of his performance resting in his efforts to stave off undesirable parts of himself: his physical deterioration following a recklessly spent youth, his bitterness toward women, his cynicism amplified by the cruelty and greed and statutory incest all around him. We leave him on a dour note, bleeding out and spinning in impotent circles, but Hackman shines in the asides of sardonic wit delivered with a hangdog almost-smirk, which now cement his legacy with a dozen classic soundbites. Of a night at the movies: 'I saw a Rohmer film once. It was kind of like watching paint dry.' When asked who's winning an anemic football game: 'Nobody. One side is just losing slower than the other.' Offering cold comfort to a wayward teen: 'I know it doesn't make much sense when you're 16. Don't worry. When you get to be 40, it isn't any better.' We could go on. Charles Bramesco
No film has done more to shape American sportswriting than Hoosiers. Scribes of my generation in particular proudly boast of wearing out VHS copies of the film in adolescence, and how those ad infinitum replays destined them to a future of sweating out press deadlines from some of the best seats in the house. But Hickory High's unlikely march to the Indiana state basketball championship doesn't become the too-good-to-be-true story that sportswriters look for in every gym without Hackman bringing it home as Normal Dale, the disgraced college coach tasked with turning around the team. When sportswriters take note of actual coaches sermonizing about playing the game 'the right way', it's because we can't help quoting Coach Brown when we hear him. And though the character may take inspiration from flesh-and-blood Hoosier state personalities – Indiana coach Bobby Knight, not least – it was Hackman who ultimately made Coach Dale complex, compassionate and imminently worth rooting for. Coach Dale's disciplined, team-first approach may have gone out of style decades ago ('There's more to the game than shooting!' he famously groaned), but Hackman at the top of this acting game lives for all time. Andrew Lawrence
Hackman's shady sheriff is the lawman in the small town of Big Whiskey, where the ladies of the saloon demand justice after one of them is assaulted by a passing cowpoke. He's entirely the low-key psychopath Eastwood's antiheroic western deserves, a man capable of plausible affability but then, with a sudden darkening of his mood, callous rough justice. First he outrages the sex workers by attempting to appease them with horse-trading, then he applies his boots to the faces of elderly mercenaries like Richard Harris's English Bob who come to collect the bounty. In one chilling scene, Bill sneers as he forces Eastwood's feverish Will Munny to slither out of the saloon on his belly into the mud. Disarmingly, he's often quite likable. He's an inept amateur housebuilder, ham-handedly manufacturing himself a porch where he can pass his retirement admiring the sunset, or a vivid raconteur, impressing a hack writer with by factchecking some overcooked yarns of the good old days. Similarly, Hackman resists the temptation to overplay this double-sided character, and this Oscar-winning performance is all the more unsettling for it. Pamela Hutchinson
As Avery Tolar, a senior partner at a sinister Memphis law practice in The Firm, Hackman haunts Mitch McDeere, the idealistic young recruit played by Tom Cruise, like the ghost of his own corrupt future, when boozing and womanizing will be his only means of muting his guilty conscience. In order to survive at the firm – quite literally, Mitch will learn – he must embrace its rogue culture of mobbed-up criminality and Avery is Mitch's mentor through the process, walking him through the legal shortcuts he'll need to master in order to serve his wealthy clients. He also has an eye on Mitch's wife (Jeanne Tripplehorn), despite their age difference, which speaks to a life where he's constantly rewarded for his ethical compromise. Yet Hackman plays Avery with an unmistakable world-weariness that's fully revealed in a moment when he seems to remember the man he used to be and willingly pays the toll for his sins. Scott Tobias
It's become a bit of a naysayer cliche to claim that Gene Hackman was the last actor to really bring a Wes Anderson character to life within the writer-director's hermetically sealed, tightly controlled environment. But while I don't agree with all that, there is inarguably something special about Hackman's performance in The Royal Tenenbaums as the shifty, irascible patriarch of a genius family he doesn't seem to understand (at least not at first). As Royal Tenenbaum, a deeply flawed man who is nonetheless – unlike his depressive adult children – unburdened by faded memories of prodigious achievement, Hackman's unfussy, straight-ahead acting style perfectly cuts through the movie's deadpan melancholy and enhances it at every turn. Though he was great in plenty of comedies, Hackman was rarely pitched this many comic fastballs, every one of which he knocks out of the park with a crisp crack, helping to make Tenenbaums Anderson's most quotable film. ('I'm very sorry for your loss. Your mother was a terribly attractive woman.' 'It's still frowned upon, but then, what isn't these days, right?' 'That's the last time you put a knife in me!' – and so on.) And though Royal is more two-bit conman than precocious prodigy, he's still a deeply Andersonian creation: a man so fixated on his vision that he will self-consciously engineer his own redemption arc, even if it means faking a cancer diagnosis. When Hackman shows that shamelessness giving way to tenderness at the end of the film, demonstrating gentle empathy to his distraught son Chas (Ben Stiller), The Royal Tenenbaums becomes not just Anderson's funniest film, but one of his most moving, too. Jesse Hassenger