(One of) Gene Hackman's Greatest Feat(s)

It’s the weird reality of our current movie landscape that the brightest movie star moment of the 97th Academy Awards did not, in fact, happen during the Academy Awards themselves but during a commercial break. I’m talking, of course, about the latest Penélope Cruz commercial for Emirates. I have written before about how despite being among the most luxurious airlines in the world, this Emirates ad campaign breathlessly succeeds via minimalism by essentially rendering their airline and Cruz’s own magnificent aura as one. Yet, Emirates is not the only airline to utilize the majesty of a movie star. 

In the 1980s, when United Airlines wanted to state its intentions in the newly deregulated industry, they shelled out $300,000 to use “Rhapsody in Blue” to become, as the ads themselves occasionally said, their song. It’s hard to imagine a better choice. George Gershwin’s 1924 tune was not just transformative in melding classical and jazz, it was transcendent, just the sort of piece of music to make a person feel as if they are soaring high above the clouds. The Gershwin heirs seemed ok in signing off on it, as Tom Shales’s contemporary article for The Washington Post suggests, but Shales wasn’t, deeming the sale Rhapsody in bucks. Crass, or not, or somewhere in-between, it was potent. The first televised commercial of the campaign used no words, spoken or imprinted on the screen, just “Rhapsody in Blue” laid over images of a United jetliner, effectively linking the two just as Emirates did its own brand with Cruz’s innate luminosity. 

That also might have led to a significant problem. Because when United did finally want to verbally deploy its familiar slogan “Come fly the friendly skies” in one of these Gershwin-enhanced spots, who could possibly deliver it in such a way as to not be dwarfed by “Rhapsody in Blue?” Whether that is what led them to enlist Gene Hackman, who knows, not least because I can’t seem to find any old articles explaining why the late acting titan was offered the gig. But it’s also hard to imagine another actor flourishing in the role. Hackman had a coarseness to his voice, one that was frequently utilized to great effect in villainous, or anti-heroic roles, like “The French Connection,” or “Prime Cut.” Yet, consider the moment in “Crimson Tide” when as captain of a nuclear submarine, just as his vessel is about to submerge, he says, “This is my favorite part – right here, right now.” There is a distinct grandeur to Hackman’s voice in this moment that only certain movies occasionally found the desire to tap. The kind of grandeur he invested in United. 

 

You not only hear grandeur in those lines, however, but a warmth, as if you can practically see his lips curl into a smile as he says them. More than that, you can practically see him, Hackman, in a pilot’s cap and uniform, beckoning you aboard a jetliner hearkening back to the golden age of air travel. In Hackman’s voice, the friendly skies are elevated from mystical marketing verbiage to a real place at 35,000 feet. It’s not real, of course, not these days in which United treats us all less like friends than entrapped customers who are always wrong. And maybe that was Hackman’s ultimate trick. You might recall that after the turn of the century, he was replaced as voice actor during another United reboot by Robert Redford, a skilled if solemn actor who always believes in his own myth. With Hackman, on the other hand, you could envision him saying the line in the recording studio, taking off the headphones, chuckling his unforgettable Hackman chuckle, and muttering under his breath, “What a crock of shit.” 

Friday's Old Fashioned: Such a Pretty Little Beach (1949)

The eponymous strip of sand in “Such a Pretty Little Beach,” or “Une si jolie petite plage” in French, in some offseason beachside French town is cold, windy, gloomy, and rain-ridden and it’s why when Pierre (Gérard Philipe) shows up at the one hotel still open looking for a little rest and relaxation, you know he is not there for rest and relaxation at all. There are elements of a mystery in director Yves Allégret’s poetic realist noir, what with the murdered Parisian nightclub singer filling the newspapers that Pierre pointedly does not want to read and various hints that this town is a place where Pierre has been before, but more than that, “Such a Pretty Little Beach” is about atmosphere and aesthetic or what in 2025 parlance you might call vibes. The omnipresent rain is a virtual supporting character just as the Parisian nightclub singer frequently heard lamenting by way of crooning via record is an unseen supporting character too. In one indelible frame, Pierre and a few other hotel guests are momentarily frozen in the face of the phonograph, bringing to life the idea of music as an avenue to memory. (I snapped the screenshot below, but you gotta see this is a moving picture because it underlines how they are truly frozen.) 

It’s an image that conjures a doomed romanticism, as does a lengthy existentialist conversation with hotel maid Marthe (Madeleine Robinson). That walk and talk sequence ends with them sitting side by side, Pierre laying his head in her lap, and closing his eyes. That’s a recurring motif, him putting his head down and going to sleep, evoking a character who has essentially checked out on his own existence. You can hardly blame him given the backstory that emerges in bits and pieces. And though an orphaned hotel drudge (Christian Ferry) paralleling Pierre’s past is ultimately meant to suggest a kind of karmic breaking of the cycle, well, the bell still tolls, literally and metaphorically, for Pierre come movie’s end. Indeed, “Such a Pretty Little Beach” culminates in a title drop so wickedly bleak that if you started the movie nature is the proof of God, you’ll end it thinking nature is nothing more than evidence of a barren, Godless eternity. I laughed to keep from crying. Would recommend!

My All First Weekend of the 2025 NCAA Tournament Team

The baseline is excellence for the first two rounds of the NCAA Men’s Basketball Tournament. That’s what makes the rare duds, or semi-duds, stand out. And though given America’s present state, I was hoping the universe might grant us a great opening weekend of the tourney, rather than an A, A-, or even just a nice B, we got, like, a D+, C-, maybe shaded up to a C by virtue of not just an entertaining but dramatic Maryland / Colorado State game that concluded on a thirst-quenching buzzer beater. (The buzzer beater was in all likelihood preceded by an uncalled travel, and Jordan pushed off on Russell, and Kenny Anderson didn’t get his shot off before the buzzer against Michigan State, and it’s always been burning since the world’s been turning.) Maybe that means the regionals will be more exciting, and maybe that means the Final Four matchups will be more compelling, but I learned a long, long time ago that I will always take a joyfully chaotic, upset-laden first four days of the NCAA Tournament over a scintillating, chalk-heavy Final Four. Still. The players and their performances took me away for 96 hours. I needed it. Some notes by way of a team. 

Were you not entertained? Eh, sometimes. 

My All First Weekend of the 2025 NCAA Tournament Team

Josh Hubbard, Mississippi State. Of all the great men’s college basketball archetypes, perhaps none are greater than the chesty, undersized point guard who looks for his own shot as much as everyone else’s. In leading all scorers in the Bulldogs’ 75-72 first round defeat to Baylor with 26 points by blowing past defenders time and again and seeming to launch himself into the sky for three-point shots over the taller opposition with an invisible pogo stick, he was a joy to watch. The only downside was that, in a terribly ironic twist, rather than find a way to take the possible game-tying shot at the end, he passed off and they were sent packing. Ah, and so it is.   

John Tonje, Wisconsin. A 2nd team AP All American, it turns out, John Tonje’s 37-point 2nd round performance against BYU was likely not a surprise to anyone paying close attention to college basketball all season but he was a surprise to me. I confess that I thought Wisconsin was an offense designed to average 52.3 ppg in perpetuity but it seems coach Greg Gard saw some semblance of the light and handed over the keys to graduate transfer Tonje. That 37 came on a mere 18 shots, and by hitting 14 of 16 from the charity stripe, at once embodying and transcending the longstanding Badger ethos in so much as he was efficiently electrifying (electrifyingly efficient). And though he could not quite bring his team all the way back against BYU, succumbing 91-89 when his game-tying attempt went awry, like his counterpart Hubbard, he nevertheless won the weekend in defeat. Vaya con dios. 

Bennett Stirtz, Drake. Drake’s strategy of bleeding the shot clock nearly every possession in their opening round upset of Missouri and second round defeat to Texas Tech sounds boring, it not agitating (play some basketball, already!), but it wasn’t, not once you understood and surrendered to Stirtz’s rhythm. An improbable mix of the Hick from French Lick and Pearl Washington, Stirtz had every possession on a string, and just when you’d think Drake was going to have to force a bad shot, they’d get a good one instead, as if Stirtz had foreseen it all along. As a native Iowan, it’s one of the ultra-rare times that a team from Iowa flaming out has not left me despondent, just thankful to have had the experience at all.

Rúben Prey, St. John’s. Like the 1990s New York Knicks crossed with The Gang That Couldn’t Shoot Straight, St. John’s was so much more eccentric and fun than a team bankrolled by some loudmouthed businessman has any right to be. And though the starting five got the pub, it was this Portuguese freshman whom I found most compelling. It was Prey’s look, one part Robin Lopez, one part Julius Michalik, the Slovakian who starred at Iowa State in the 90s and already had a receding hairline as a freshman, but it was also the way Prey played. He defended, he screened, he crashed the glass, he would just come in for two, three minutes at a time and work his ass off and then go back to the bench. 

Julian Reese, Maryland. To paraphrase Pendant Publishing editor and J. Peterman catalogue copy writer Elaine Benes, I didn’t know Angel Reese’s little brother played basketball. 

6th Man: Bowen Born, Colorado State. A native of the small town just south of Des Moines where I briefly lived at the turn of the century, Born transferred from Northern Iowa to Colorado State which, I confess, I did not even realize until he subbed into his team’s opening round win against Memphis. Though he is the same height as Hubbard, 5'11", he looked even smaller out there, maybe because he is more wiry, less chesty, complete with one of those semi-tragic college kid moustaches, and yet. He refused to just hang around the three-point line, eating dudes alive off the dribble and attacking those tall trees in the paint with an array of deft maneuvers that always allowed him to get his shot off over and around defenders who seemed to be asking themselves in mid-air: How on earth did he do that? I think I laughed every time he scored. I would have taken another 15 minutes of this dude over another four games of Cooper Flagg in a heartbeat. 

Friday's Old Fashioned: Port of Shadows (1938)

“Port of Shadows,” or “The Dock of Mists” in French, was initially banned by the French government, as an opening title explains, for being “immoral, depressing and detrimental to young people.” That’s the antithesis of art, of course, and I’d like to think everybody here knows that, but you can also see why some unscrupulous philistine might have thought that way. “With every sunrise,” says Nelly (Michèle Morgan), “we think something new is going to happen, something fresh. Then the sun goes to bed and so do we.” Funny thing is, as the title suggests, the sun never rises in director Marcel Carné’s poetically realist film; there is just an omnipresent fog enveloping the French port city of Le Havre. That’s where French soldier Jean (Jean Gabin) arrives as “Port of Shadows” begins, having just saved a stray dog from being run over. It’s a hopeful and kind prologue belying a conclusion that is the opposite. This is a movie, after all, that doesn’t see swimmers as people splashing around in the water, as one character puts it, but people waiting to drown. Befitting the genre, that is just about the most poetically realist variation of glass half empty philosophy I’ve ever heard. Bravo.

Though it is never explicitly stated that Jean has gone AWOL, it is implied, nevertheless, in his search for a ship to take him out of Le Havre posthaste. If he is a deserter, Nelly is a runaway, having the fled the home where she lives with her godfather Zabel (Michel Simon) while also trying to evade the pursuit of gangster Lucien (Pierre Brasseur) who, in turn, is seeking her ex-boyfriend Maurice. Zabel is a real piece of work, masquerading as a worldly member of the community even as a self-pitying monster lurks just beneath. “It’s horrible to love like Romeo when you look like Bluebeard,” he says at one point which Simon turns into a comically horrifying whine of desperation. His demise is shocking, not for it happening but how it happens, filmed in canted angles, and scored to the church music the character prefers, a juxtaposition evoking the absence of God, as if we are all left to fend for ourselves. The only thing scarier than his death Lucien’s unnamed lady friend (Jenny Burnay, I think, based on the IMDb credits and accompanying photo which I note because I really want to give the actor credit for this) laughing at him after he is slapped in an amusement park by Jean that is so coldly mocking you can’t help but see why that paper gangster might finally be moved to the movie’s culminating act. 

Jean and Nelly fall in love, of course, but it never feels quite real. That’s a compliment, not a criticism. It is also Carné’s intention, illustrated in Jean’s literal observation that theirs is “Like the movies…love at first sight.” And that’s why in eschewing shipping out to parts unknown to track down Nelly instead, he surrenders to the fantasy even as he opens himself up to Lucien’s revenge. That temptation to deny reality must have been alluring in 1938 France, what with the fall of the Popular Front and a looming World War. Between memory holing the COVID-19 pandemic and rewriting the January 6th insurrection as Not That Bad, America has lately been demonstrating a willingness to deny reality too. And as much as anything while watching “Port of Shadows,” I found myself wishing American movies would stop shrinking from this confusing, terrifying moment with so much of the SOS (same old streaming) and meet it with a whole new genre a la poetic realism to call our own.  

A Post for the Michael Clayton Hive Only

Congratulations to one of St. John’s University’s most distinguished alums, Michael Clayton, class of 1980 and current special counsel specializing in wills and trusts at the law firm of Kenner, Bach & Ledeen, on the basketball team’s first Big East Conference Tournament championship in a quarter-century and first outright Big East Conference championship in 40 years.

Friday's Old Fashioned: A Time for Burning (1966)

How many times have you heard that the best remedy for bridging our great American divide is conversation, sitting down with someone of an opposing viewpoint and talking it through? This proposed solution, however, is nothing new, as “A Time for Burning,” currently streaming on the Criterion Channel, demonstrates. In 1965 at the height of the Civil Rights Movement, a Lutheran minister in Omaha, L. William Youngdahl, sought to have his parishioners engage with black members of the community in conversation to help bridge their divide and perhaps begin the road to integrating their church. But Barbara Connell and Bill Jersey’s ensuing 1966 documentary is not about those conversations. No, it is about the conversations to have those conversations, none of which (spoiler alert) come to pass, as Youngdahl finds a flock laying claim to an open mind while cycling through a litany of close-minded excuses of it being too big a first step, too soon, etc., prompting Youngdahl to wonder aloud, “How many years do I need to prepare myself in order to talk with another human being? What am I waiting for?” The black barber that Youngdahl visits in the documentary’s most searing scene would probably tell him that they’re all waiting out the end of the world.

That black barber turns out to be Ernie Chambers who would go on to become Nebraska’s longest serving state senator. And Youngdahl’s congregation is not juxtaposed against Chambers so much as it is described by Chambers in the exact religiously hypocritical terms that they are shown to embody. Indeed, the two men are not really even having a discussion at all; rather Chambers is telling Youngdahl exactly like it is and in terms as likely to infuriate white liberals as white conservatives. (White Supremacy in one minute explains someone who uploaded this scene to YouTube.) And though “A Time for Burning” might classify itself as cinéma vérité, suggesting it is free from aesthetic embellishment, the severe close-ups of the two men in these moments are incredible. The palpable perspiration on Youngdahl’s face and his agonized eyes encapsulate hearing something so difficult while these intimate glimpses of Chambers capture him just as he is described later: “He talked hate, hate, hate, but his eyes were full of love.” Youngdahl leaves this conversation in distress, and though he professes a genuine desire in wanting to listen, Chambers’s prediction that by merely trying to listen, by trying to do something, Youngdahl will be relieved of his ministerial duty, proves prophetic.

Yet, there is one figurative, even semi-literal, ray of light in the form of Ray Christensen. One of Youngdahl’s parishioners, he begins “A Time for Burning” like all the others, not skeptical, exactly, of the intention but hesitant, worried it will fracture the church, only to experience something like a conversion in meeting with several leaders of the black community in Omaha, including Chambers. Christensen’s very air changes, no longer equivocating but speaking with the forceful clarity of someone who has seen the light, only to be stymied as Youngdahl was by fellow congregants who have not. That includes Christensen’s own wife. She yearns for a return to normalcy, you might say, for the church to remain a place where people can gather in peace. “This isn’t the peace that Christ was talking about,” Christensen says in referring to the organ, the hymns, the stained-glass windows. “It’s the wrapping paper.” “A Time for Burning” brings that wrapping paper to life as it ends with scenes from a church service and a hymn laid over it on the soundtrack that given what we have seen does not feel like an affirmation but an open-ended question. “There is a power in me somewhere / I know it’s there.” 

My Favorite Gene Hackman Line Readings

I know, I know. My eulogy for Gene Hackman argued that he was such a quality actor, he did not even need lines to impart character and feeling. And that’s still true. But movies haven’t been silent since 1927, baby, and though I feel like modern movies would benefit not so much from wordlessness as more attention to visual storytelling, there is also so much character and feeling that can be imparted through line readings. Even more than that, some actors can take certain lines that are dead on arrival and then revive them. Hackman could do both. See below.

“I heard that one myself, Bob. Hell, I even thought I was dead ‘til I found out it was just that I was in Nebraska.” – “Unforgiven” (1992). It’s everything, but it’s chiefly the way he says “Nebraska.” He emphasizes the second syllable by stretching it out, bringing the vast, desolate prairie of the state to life in his elocution and in doing so, improbably, incredibly inverting the neighboring state’s “Is this heaven?” “No, it’s Iowa.” 

“It was just a bunch of N*zi goons.” – “The Package” (1989). As a green beret who finds himself trying to prevent an assassination, the way Hackman says this line, dismissively, with both a literal and figurative shrug, is not making light of their abhorrent ideology, not at all, but rightly reducing it to gum on his shoe.

“Trials are too important to be left up to juries.” – “Runaway Jury” (2003). It’s a trailer line, meaning a line that effectively describes the entire movie, one in which Hackman’s diabolical jury consultant works to swing a trial in favor of his wealthy clients. Yet, Hackman sells it by saying it in such a way to convey how his character is selling something, a service, the little leading chuckle at the end and the fiendish winkle in his eye deftly conveying not so much that the actor is on the joke but that the character is in on the joke, a well-heeled huckster giving you his signature pitch.

“Well, keep your strength in the dribble, alright.” – “Hoosiers” (1986). There’s the moment during the regional finals when the god-fearing bench player Strap is unexpectedly thrust into action and answers the bell and when Hackman’s Coach Norman Dale asks what’s gotten into him, Strap replies, matter-of-factly, “The Lord. I can feel his strength.” And Dale’s reply, gleaned from the two critical baskets Strap scores coming without bouncing the ball even a single time, is a line that Hackman does not render mean-spirited like a non-believer telling a believer he’s full of crap, but more akin to a semi-bemused matter-of-fact strict believer of his own in basketball fundamentals.

“Are you listening to me?” “Yes, I am!” – “The Royal Tenenbaums” (2001). True, few lines have ever made me LLOL (literally laugh out loud) in a movie theater louder than Hackman in this same movie saying, “This is my adopted daughter Margot Tennenbaum,” giving it a real ring of familiar formality, an asshole who does not quite know he’s an asshole, but it’s this line, “Yes, I am” that I think of most. It happens when his son Chas (Ben Stiller) is ordering his father Royal (Hackman) to stay from his sons, Royal’s grandsons, but he’s not sure his dad seems to be hearing. “Are you listening?” Chas demands and the parenthetical instruction in West Anderson and Owen Wilson’s screenplay is “screams” which is exactly how Stiller reads it. Royal’s response in the screenplay, however, contains no such parenthetical and the line “Yes, I am” concludes with a period rather than an exclamation. But Hackman does not just say it; he screams it right back; as he does the following line, “I think you’re having a nervous breakdown!”

Wes Anderson often likes to employ symmetrical frames with his actors looking directly into the camera, essentially opening a portal between them and us. This scene is symmetrically framed, too, though the actors are not looking at us, and yet, Hackman opens that portal, nonetheless. He opens it by seeming to respond to Stiller in the moment, an actor utterly alive to his character, to his scene, to the camera.