(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.” 

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. 

In Memoriam: Gene Hackman

Gene Hackman, dead at 95, was described in some obituaries as a Movie Star and in some obituaries as an Everyman, two contradictions in type that go to show how he occupied a unique place in the firmament of cinema. He was a late bloomer who emerged during the era of so-called New Hollywood, when the idea of what constituted American movies was changing and the idea of what constituted American movie stars was changing too. That’s why despite resembling a truck driver, or a doorman, as Steven Hyden put it a decade ago, Hackman still became someone on par with Paul Newman and Robert Redford. He also brought his own notorious temperamental edginess to his roles, evocative of how a movie star’s personality tends to write over a scripted part, and yet, he vanished into those roles anyway, inhabiting his characters down to the bone so that you could hardly tell it was him, achieving the supreme state of naturalism, acting as being. Consider “The Firm.” Tom Cruise is acting so hard you can practically see the sweat stains while Hackman appears not to try at all, carving a quiet, nigh impossible sympathy for his villain out of thin air. 

That is not to say Hackman did nothing. Far from it. He considered his parts, he made choices. In a 2011 interview with Michael Hainey for GQ, he mentions a seemingly throwaway moment in “The French Connection” when his crude, dogged detective Popeye Doyle makes a pass at a woman and upon being brushed off, tosses a cruller over his shoulder as a key to unlocking his character. He could take the smallest of behaviors and then build a whole person from them. It’s that sort of attention to detail that made him a third thing: an actor’s actor, admired by his most venerable of peers for commitment and technique. Of course, cinema is generally defined as a director’s medium and as the myriad stories Hackman emotionally and vocally brawling with directors on set illuminate, he was not fond of them. “I don’t think he likes directors,” Maura Tierney told The AV Club in 2014 of her “Welcome to Mooseport” costar. “I mean, he did, I believe, tell the director at some point to, uh… [Starts to laugh.] “Will you just shut the fuck up and go over there and say ‘action’ or whatever it is you do?” 

That echoes experiences described with the actor by Wes Anderson during “The Royal Tenenbaums” and David Anspaugh during “Hoosiers,” among others. But by Anspaugh’s own admission, Hackman preferred working on sets with tension and would therefore seek to deliberately create an uncomfortable environment, even if, as Anspaugh noted, the actor would not exactly apologize for it. And whether that method was fair, and whether he took direction or not, he intuitively knew what a director needed, and what a movie needed too. He could fill up the screen and blow his stack with the best, as he did in “Crimson Tide.” In playing the commander of a nuclear submarine warring with his second-in-command (Denzel Washington) he seemed just as much to be playing what he really was, an actor who was king of the action-thriller, and who was now daring his co-star to take that crown, living the part in a way Washington answered. But Hackman also knew better than anyone the value of economy on the big screen; no one effused the ancient adage less is more with such precision. 

A shot from The Conversation that is the perfect symmetry of acting and directing.

When I saw “Hoosiers” at the Music Box Theatre in 2013, Chelcie Ross, a longtime actor who cut his teeth in Chicago and who played Hackman’s semi-nemesis in that movie, spoke, and said his co-star was always revising paragraphs to sentences and sentences to words and words to nothing at all. It was an apt description of the Hackman method. In that movie, he carried the weight of his character’s volatile past in his very air just as in “The Conversation” he seemed to dig a metaphorical moat between himself and the whole world just as in “Twice in a Lifetime” he needed no words beyond mere minor affirmations in the opening dinner table scene to convey a man at once happy in the presence of his family and dissatisfied with life. In the director’s commentary for his 1997 thriller “Breakdown”, Jonathan Mostow noted how his own leading man Kurt Russell would argue for certain lines of dialogue to be cut “because I can act it.” There was never an actor who could act it better than Gene Hackman.

Gene Hackman's Imaginary Last Role

After hosting “an evening with Ana Gasteyer” at the Lensic Center for Performing Arts in Santa Fe, Seth Rudetsky shared a photo to social media of he and Gasteyer with one of the New Mexico capital’s more renowned residents – Gene Hackman. The two-time Oscar winner and star of the still reigning Middling Thriller champion “Runaway Jury” stepped away from acting in 2004. That meant his last movie was “Welcome to Mooseport.” And so even if he has admirably shunned the public eye ever since, there was something dispiriting in how he went out, like if Bob Dylan had called it quits after “Saved.” Still, intentional or not, Hackman left us wanting more, and each time he suddenly pops up in a photo, like the one with Rudetsky and Gasteyer or the one at a Santa Fe bike shop in 2018, it is hard not to dream of the 92-year old returning just one more time to the silver screen. Indeed, in interviewing Hackman for GQ eleven years ago, Michael Hainey did not so ask the retired actor if he would consider making another movie, but just flat-out said, desperate, practically begging, “You’ve got to make one more movie.” 

But what movie would it be? I imagine Marvel knocking on Hackman’s door and the redoubtable actor opening it, quizzically squinting at Kevin Feige’s sweaty pitch, and then shutting the door right back in Feige’s face without saying a word. Clint Eastwood, one year younger than Hackman and having just made a movie last year, could possibly be the only person in present-day Hollywood to coax Hackman back in front of the camera. After all, he convinced Hackman to do “Unforgiven” when the actor was reluctant and helped him get his second Oscar. It wouldn’t even have to be a true supporting turn. It could just be like Joe Pesci’s one scene walk-off in “The Good Shepherd.”

The key, though, I think to unlocking the possible next role of Hackman was proffered by Hackman himself in that same GQ interview. When Hainey begged him for another movie, Hackman replied “I don’t know. If I could it in my own house, maybe, without them disturbing anything and just one or two people.” Hmmmmmm. In his own house? With just one or two people? I recalled Jeremy Strong’s December profile in The New Yorker, the one where the “Succession” actor became the butt of all that day’s social media jokes, revealing his intense method (not The Method!) and feverish adoration of Daniel Day-Lewis. Apparently Strong worked as Day-Lewis’s assistant on “The Ballad of Jack and Rose” which he took as an opportunity to be “the sorcerer’s apprentice.” “He got so engrossed in his menial tasks,” Michael Schulman wrote of Strong, “that some of the crew cruelly nicknamed him Cletus, after the redneck character on ‘The Simpsons.’ ‘His whole brain was focused on Daniel Day-Lewis,’ one person recalled. ‘I never really saw him unless he was standing outside Daniel’s trailer.’” Hold the phone.   

Standing outside Daniel Day-Lewis’s trailer? What if we cast, say, Ryan Gosling, since he is equally adept at playing comedy and drama, and cast him as burgeoning, overly serious actor who worships Gene Hackman and starts standing outside Gene Hackman’s house? (Gosling has also always struck me as a gentleman, meaning he wouldn’t disturb anything at Hackman’s home). Take it wherever you want to go, boys.

But I don’t know. The further I get into this post, the more I realize my heart isn’t it. If there is something disappointing and a little strange in Gene Hackman’s final role being “Welcome to Mooseport,” there is something inspiring, even beautiful in it too, like the late Marvelous Marvin Hagler, my favorite boxer, who famously lost his last match to Sugar Ray Leonard (even though Hagler always claimed he won), retired, and then contrary to just about every boxer since the beginning of time eschewed a rematch with Leonard or even a comeback at all and simply, magnificently stayed retired, newly and joyfully indifferent to and done with boxing. If there is nobility in sports, I always thought it resided right there, in Hagler not consumed by fine-tuning his legacy but having the self assurance that his legacy was already secure. And if any actor would have emotional and mental brawn to know their legacy was already secure, regardless of any “Welcome to Mooseport” blotch, it’s Hackman. 

Wistfully '95: Crimson Tide

Since I could finally both drive and get into R-rated movies in 1995, it doubled as the year in which I fell head over heels in love for the experience of Going To The Movies. And so, here in the future in 2015, we will periodically re-visit a handful of the offerings to which I first paid homage in various multiplex cathedrals of Des Moines, Iowa.

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It’s movie obsessive common knowledge that Tony Scott’s “True Romance” co-conspirator Quentin Tarantino did uncredited rewrites to Scott’s 1995 submarine epic “Crimson Tide”, named for a football team that then was not quite as overbearing as it is now. Mr. Tarantino’s re-writes pertained not to sonar and periscopes, because that's not Q.T.'s wheelhouse, but rather to additions of pop culture, marking it a tad more accessible and a bit more humorous. One of those additions appears near the start when a couple submarine officers earnestly discuss commanders in submarine movies. They mention “The Enemy Below”, which pit Robert Mitchum as an American sub captain locked in deep sea battle with Curd Jurgens as a German sub captain. They mention “Run Silent Run Deep” in which Clark Gable and Spencer Tracy are both Americans aboard the same sub who must find a way to work together. And while both these movies inform “Crimson Tide”, rest assured, Tony Scott, the maverick who gave birth to Maverick, goes his own way.

“A maximalist,” Manohla Dargis wrote in her New York Times obituary of Tony Scott, “(he) used a lot of everything in his movies: smoke, cuts, camera moves, color.” Truth. Mr. Scott never met a formal trick he wouldn’t subsequently pile like so much coleslaw on top of a cinematic sandwich that already had two pounds of meat and fries. “Busy” never really captured his aesthetic; his camera was a day trader high on whatever you’d like and everything else. Still, what often got lost amidst his impressive deployments of frenzied style were the epic confrontations between characters. Tony Scott loved confrontations. We remember “Top Gun” for its flash and dash and Ray Bans, of course, but we remember it just as fondly for Maverick vs. Ice and Maverick vs. Jester and Maverick vs. Viper and Maverick vs. Himself. We remember Christopher Walken squaring off with Dennis Hopper in an incredible verbal tete a tete. Then there’s “Crimson Tide.”

In theory, “Crimson Tide” is a showdown between the United States and a Russian ultra-nationalist, between opposing submarines lurking in the depths of the sea. Of course, it’s not really about any of those Cliff Notes. What it’s really about is the two primary officers aboard the U.S. Naval nuclear sub, the USS Alabama (“Go ‘bama! Roll tide!”), Captain Frank Ramsey and his brand new handpicked Executive Officer Ron Hunter. It’s about slowly escalating confrontation between these two men born of an order rendered incomplete on account of a technical glitch that causes mutinies and reams and reams of splendid shouting matches. More than that, though, it’s about a confrontation between two actors, Gene Hackman raising hell as Ramsey and Denzel Washington maintaining impassioned fastidiousness as Hunter.

To be sure, Scott gussies up his films with plenty of bells and whistles, not to mention lathering it up with a prototypical booming Hans Zimmer score. There are depth charges and catastrophic leaks and missiles fired and all sorts of other traditional action-packed entrees served. Yet it never comes across as more than Simpson/Bruckheimer contracted scaffolding to provide a place where two all-world thespians can unleash verbal torrents, both loudly or quietly. It’s a friendly, hella good reminder that so often the only energy source a film requires to power it to ascendant heights is a couple acting titans. And this is why the film ends not with more missiles fired and not with WWIII, but with Hackman and Washington seated across from one another discussing Lipizzan Stallions.

It also ends with Ramsey recommending to a Naval Tribunal that Hunter be given command of his own boat, and it’s not difficult to read this conclusion as Hackman passing the baton of his own role on to his co-star. “When threatened, Hackman retreats to his glasses and clipboard,” Steven Hyden wrote in his January retrospective of the actor, “the accoutrements of command. And how does Denzel respond? I DO NOT RECOGNIZE YOUR AUTHORITY. Like that, Denzel Washington becomes Gene Hackman right before your eyes. And Denzel held on to that role in subsequent movies. Flash forward 20 years and it’s Denzel playing daddy to Mark Wahlberg in 2 Guns.”

Eh, yes and no. I'd agree with the first part, not the second. Yes, Washington has often assumed the Ramsey-ish role of charismatic elder, dealing with or imparting wisdom to or screaming at a co-star, but Wahlberg vs. Washington is assuredly not Washington vs. Hackman. Nor was Ethan Hawke in “Training Day”, a part working away from Washington’s King Kong postulating and a performance that didn't win even if its character did. Angelia Jolie took a turn as Washington's protégé in “The Bone Collector” and though she won an Academy Award a year later this was still before Angie had cracked the Jolie Movie Star Code. Ryan Reynolds in “Safe House” is like watching a Biloxi Shucker flail away against a Major League pitcher.

“For more than 30 years,” Hyden wrote, “people bought movie tickets to watch Hackman take charge.” In “Crimson Tide”, Hackman took charge and Washington had the cojones to wrestle that charge away. And now, twenty years later, Washington continues roaming Hollywood evermore intent to take overblown thrillers like “The Equalizer” in an increasingly woebegone effort to find someone willing and able to wrest charge away from him. I fear in twenty years, he'll still be searching.

Friday's Old Fashioned: Cisco Pike (1972)

Although “Cisco Pike” was Kris Kristofferson’s first film role it doesn’t quite show. Yes, Kristofferson’s character, concocted by writer/director Bill L. Norton, is a singer-songwriter and, yes, Kristofferson’s songs fill the film’s soundtrack, suggesting a laziness in characterization, but all this adds definable texture that specifically gives this otherwise shaggy dog story something resembling a point. Cisco is kind of a California precursor to Rocky Balboa, a one-time music star who’s slowly seen that star fade. We catch up with him shortly after he’s been busted a second time for dealing drugs, the racket he apparently turned to when his time at the top of the charts concluded. He’s determined to go straight at the behest of the feisty woman (Karen Black) he loves, the woman who’s disappointingly given no inner life aside from standing by her man, though Black ragefully trembles with the best of ‘em. It’s a tough road to hoe, though. He visits a friend at a recording studio but doesn’t get asked to sit in on the sessions; he’s only asked if he’s got pot for sale. He’s a guy trying to figure out, to quote one of his tunes, “If the going up is worth the coming down” because that’s precisely where “Cisco Pike” finds Cisco Pike – in the midst of coming down.

His suspect situation worsens when Sgt. Leo Holland (Gene Hackman), the narcotics cop who’s busted Cisco twice goads him into helping unload god-only-knows how many kilos of top-grade ganja because Hollands need $10,000 in forty-eight hours or else. Or else what? Well, he never really says. He hints. He alludes. He says things like “fifty-four percent of the population dies of heart disease” as if it’s supposed to tie back to the bigger picture. The performance by Hackman, which only receives scant screen time, is coated in stressed out desperation, a delightful trove of tics, like crazy calisthenics that he suddenly busts out as if it’s the only thing that will keep his head screwed on straight. He’s not simply a loose cannon, he’s a glorious eccentric, the sort of supporting character with a whole movie of his own stashed off screen where I like to imagine him taking aerobics classics while still wearing his short-sleeve dress shirts and ties.

Cisco seems to have a choice as to whether or not he wants to go along with Holland’s scheme, and though he exercises that choice now and again, he mostly willingly lets himself get strung along, maybe because it’s easier than trying to write a hit song. It’s tough to know for certain. “Cisco Pike” has the bare minimum of psychological insight, favoring endless shots of Cisco stalking the streets, taking endless drags on cigarettes, his guitar case in hand like a “Desperado” dope dealer. Kristofferson, his windswept hair and his youthful face evoking Kurt Russell more than the formidable stone-faced growler he now emits in his twilight years, has a winning presence in the part, the perfect actor to hold down the center of the film that is all over the place. He gets worked up when things go wrong, but he never sweats. He doesn’t seem to know where he’s going or what he wants to be doing, and so Kristofferson makes it clear that the character is in no hurry.

That consistent lackadaisical vibe amidst what’s supposed to be such an urgent quest stands in stark contrast to a conclusion that just seems to drop in out of the air like the helicopter that shows up to start taking shots at an increasingly agitated Holland. If it doesn’t exactly fit in tone, it more than fits in narrative, a head-scratch, not so much a deus ex machine as a Throw Your Hands Up In The Air. “You do things and one day wonder why you’re doing things. Ya know?” Holland asks with an ambiguity that’s positively hilarious. Then he shrugs, “I don’t know.”

Friday's Old Fashioned: I Never Sang For My Father (1970)

“I Never Sang For My Father” believes in the myth of fingerprints. Gil Cates’ cinematic interpretation of Robert Anderson’s play has seen them all (people, that is) and, man, it knows they’re all the same. It plumbs the tricky psychological depths of fathers & sons, well-wrought territory that nonetheless transcends that familiarity with a story that knows every man is his father’s son, whether he wants to admit it or not. It centers on Gene Garrison (Gene Hackman), a fortysomething widowed playwright who no doubt crafts each of his stage productions around some sort of paterfamilias concept. His father, Tom (Melvyn Douglas), is a very accomplished, well-respected man of the community, but less accomplished, not-as-respected man within the walls of his own house. He’s the sort of man who gets a look at a copy of his son’s new play and immediately criticizes the author photo, wondering why his son is looking away when a real man looks you in the eye.

Well, Gene rarely looks his father in the eye. He harbors resentment toward an unhappy childhood, one that resulted in his father sending his sister (Estelle Parsons) away. He harbors fear of his father, illustrated in how he struggles to admit his plans to re-marry and move across the country to California. He harbors regret, about not forging common ground with his father, and about not feeling affection for his father. It’s like he’s a moon caught in the orbit of a patriarchal planet, spinning around and around against his will.

His father, meanwhile, pushes Gene away even as he manipulates him into always being around. These conflicting ideas are traced directly to his dad, a drinker, an irascible man whose affection Tom never earned, and now he has consequently thrown away the affection of Gene by being irascible in his own way. That’s the film’s remarkable through line – three men who could not be more different are somehow all the same, and none of them have ever found the means to square with it.

“I Never Sang For My Father” is obligated, of course, to bring this unadmitted standoff between The Old Man & His Son to the brink, and it does so through the death of Gene’s mother and Tom’s wife, Margaret (Dorothy Stickney). That piece of plot advancement might seem obvious, even a little insulting, what when considering it brings her onstage just so it can kick her right back off. But the script knows that Tom’s greatest fear and has him externalize when he admits to Gene he always thought he’d first. He thought that because that’s what he wanted. If he died first, he was off the hook, spared the agony of confronting the friction between him and his son, and the friction within himself. You half suspect that Margaret, that sly old fox, knew this too and decided to expire simply as a means to effectuate their inevitable showdown.

Confronting all this means confrontations, of course, and frankly, the direction of Cates works best when he simply embraces the theatricality of these confrontations and sets a couple shots and lets his actors have it. His occasional zoom-ins and zoom-outs feel like “uh, we need to do SOMETHING” artifice and a late game sequence in which Gene visits a nursing home as a possible place to move his father is composed like a horror film, an aesthetic device that feels like its intruding on something much more solemn. The dialogue, meanwhile, often recited in extended monologues or prickly back-and-forths occasionally gets too on-the-nose. “I hate him,” Gene says of his old man, “and I hate to hate him.” That type of explication permeates the film, lines already made evident in the performances, and so half the time you feel like you’re watching this film from the perch of a second couch in a therapist’s office. But, what a damn therapy session!

Hackman was nominated for a Best Supporting Actor Oscar (Douglas was nominated for Best Actor) which is basically absurd, like an evocation of the roles themselves. This is Hackman’s film, through and through, and for no greater reason than his essentially playing two roles. With his father, he’s a passive pushover, mumbling, shuffling, looking down, around, here, there, anywhere but at his old man. Away from his father, steam practically billows from his ears as he says and does everything he can’t bring himself to do around his old man. The duality is depressing, and only made worse when, in the climactic scene, both roles are forced to run right into one another. It’s only taken four decades for Gene to finally call out his old man, and when he does, it’s all for naught, the film’s impressively dire admittance that making peace is not necessarily the same as having peace-of-mind.

Friday's Old Fashioned: Scarecrow (1973)

Although Jerry Schatzberg’s “Scarecrow” is firmly in the tradition of 70’s road movies, it often feels apart from its era, as if its pair of hobos could have existed just as easily during The Great Depression as Vietnam. That is underscored by the film’s astounding introductory shot, one that may as well be John Cox’s glorious Grey & Gold, a painting dated to 1942, come to life, heavy storm clouds assembling on the horizon as a few trees cower in the foreground. It’s Anytime, USA, and Max (Gene Hackman) wanders out of the frame, out of whimsical Americana and into the real world, two places that have long shared an uneasy alliance.

As with any road movie, the destination is both completely the point and not the point at all. The mythical journey’s end is Pittsburgh, the Steel City as Emerald City, where our principal duo intends to open a carwash, a venture Max has got figured down to the penny in a little Moleskin notebook that he waves around with the authority of any cocky CEO. “For every car, there’s dirt,” he proclaims in a platitude that is awe-inspiring for its utter worthlessness. He says this to Francis (Al Pacino), a polite, semi-knucklehead whom he ropes into being his business partner. Francis buys Max’s pitch not exactly hook, line and sinker but because, well, what else has he got going on? He says he’s been at sea the last few years, an explanation that might suggest a Naval stint, but just as easily suggests an itinerant. His only other aim is to deliver a lamp to the child he’s never seen in Detroit, the child of the mom he ran out on five years ago, and he clutches that gift like the hopeless chunk of symbolism it is.

You half-wonder how Francis has survived this long and you can tell Max half-wonders the same thing. Consider the mid-movie vignette inside a working prison where the duo gets sentenced for thirty days on account of some churlish behavior. Convinced it’s all the fault of Francis, which it isn’t, Max decrees that he doesn’t want to speak to his ally for the whole month. Francis obliges, more or less left to his own devices, becoming friendly with a fellow inmate who seems like a good guy until he isn’t, physically assaulting Francis. When Max finds about this, he sets the record straight with his fists, as he’s prone to do, demonstrating himself as a kind of self-imposed volatile guardian angel of Francis.

This entire sequence also speaks to the film’s vibe, one that routinely stops being what it’s “about” to be “about” something else for awhile instead. It also speaks to the characters and their supposed intentions, for as much as Max goes on and on about his foolproof scheme to clean cars, to get where he wants to be and do what he wants to do, all he really wants to do is prattle on about his own perceived genius and get in fights. It’s a film set on the road but it’s not about two people not really getting anywhere. It’s about two people, as we come to realize with each delay and each impulsive setback, that don’t want to get anywhere, that would rather be left to wandering.

And that’s why it’s so awful when they do get somewhere, back to Detroit to deliver the lamp, that absurd totem. And with a life’s worth of aimlessness brought to bear, Francis goes bonkers and then catatonic, a moment played perfectly by Pacino with escalating tension and then what’s less a release than a rapid deterioration. It speaks to Now as much as Then, and probably even Before, probably even For All Time. It’s the moment when the yellow brick road ends not in the promised land but pretty much where you knew it was going to end up the whole time.

The closing scenes are emotionally linked to the remarkable shot in Schatzberg’s previous film, the stunning “Panic in Needle Park”, that finds Kitty Wynn’s character strung out, all alone, on a park bench. Sometimes filling yourself with heroin doesn’t look any different from sweetly wrapping up a lamp and going out to find the American Dream.

Friday's Old Fashioned: Night Moves (1975)

Throughout “Night Moves” Harry Moseby (Gene Hackman), private eye, is told by others of his almost pathological need to “solve” the case. The case involves a young girl, Delly (Melanie Griffith), who has gone missing. Harry is hired by Arlene (Janet Ward), her mother, a fading (faded) Hollywood starlet to find the gone girl. He does a little digging and, in not much time at all, tracks her to a fairly foregone location – that is, her stepfather’s Oceanside ramshackle stead in the Florida Keys. It’s such a simple job that there can only be twists and turns and looming turmoil, and there is, of course, just as there is also the marriage of Harry’s that is on the rocks. “The movie,” wrote the late great Roger Ebert, “is about the process of a criminal investigation, not its results.” That was referring to “The Big Sleep” which was about Bogey’s Philip Marlowe, not Bogey’s Sam Spade, which is the P.I. to whom Harry Moseby is jokingly compared, but the sentiment half-describes “Night Moves”. It is overly concerned with the investigational process as much as the results, but it is concerned with results too; it’s simply that the “results” have nothing to do with anything being “solved”.

This film, directed by Arthur Penn, is one that gets and appreciates a classic film reference. Early on Harry visits his wife at her office and she wonders if he might like to join her and her boss that evening for a showing of an Eric Rohmer film. “I saw Rohmer once.” Harry replies. “It was kind of like watching paint dry.” Buuuuuuurn. And that’s because he sees himself as a Sam Spade, a tough-talking, no-nonsense-taking hard-boiled gumshoe in a black & white noir made on the cheap, where issues are resolved not with philosophical discussions but with brawls and guns.

Mosbey’s backstory involves his position as a one-time NFL player with the Oakland Raiders (which means that because the film is set in 1975 he must have played at least a season or two with the rough & tumble 70’s incarnation of that swashbuckling franchise which no doubt indicates why he’s so darn good in fight), and I think that’s crucial. The character on paper and in the demeanor crafted so ably by Hackman comes across very much like an ex-professional athlete forced to the sideline and, consequently, his own version of twiddling his thumbs. He’s often seen playing chess by himself. It’s tossing cards in a hat as a one man private investigating firm. He needs a way to matter.

His marriage apparently stopped mattering at some point, or at least being a way to actively engage in life. He only seems enlivened by the thought of his wife (Susan Clark) when he can tail her, discover the man with whom she’s been cheating, and knock on the man’s door, not really even to confront him, since he doesn’t seem that angry, but have a conversation. The man tries to get him to have that conversation with, you know, his wife, but Harry is nonplussed. She’s basically trying to goad him into a reaction, like Justine did with Vincent in “Heat”, yet Harry’s reaction is just to bury himself in his case and take off for Florida. In another film, a lesser film, when Harry starts flirting with Paula (Jennifer Warren) down in the Sunshine State, and eventually sleeping with her, we might assume the marital problems were merely an excuse to forgive his adulterous transgressions. Except we already kind of think he’s a (what-have-ya). He and Susan have already crossed the rubicon.

All this marks “Night Moves” less as a traditional thriller than a character study – “My Night At Maud’s” as an American thriller. After all, Rohmer’s film, the one Harry dismisses, revolves around the idea of making choices that apply meaning to life, for if you don’t make the proper choices to apply that meaning then life is merely an existential wasteland. He chooses to get involved in this case of the missing girl and to push that case to and then past its limits to apply meaning to the life he feels himself incrementally drifting away from. Alas, by the conclusion of “Night Moves” he’s more or less wound up in one of those art films he so despises, utterly adrift, all alone, forced into an answerless predicament, a barren, Godless eternity like a tiny flame flickering in an immense void with nothing. He’ll probably spend the rest of his life watching paint dry.

Friday's Old Fashioned: Hoosiers (1986)

On Sunday night I indulged in the latest ESPN 30 for 30 documentary chronicling perhaps the greatest “Cinderella” NCAA Basketball Tournament run of all time, the unheralded North Carolina State Wolfpack (“The Cardiac Pack”) of 1983 downing the vaunted “Phi Slamma Jamma” Houston outfit and their two future NBA hall of famers. What struck me most, though, were two lines near the very beginning spoken by star guard Dereck Whittenburg, the man who would loft the infamous last second airball that transformed into the dunk that slayed the dragon. "There's a saying, as athletes get older their accomplishments get greater and greater as the years pass by,” he said in voiceover. “But the truth is they just get further and further away.”

As chance would have it, the following night I attended a special event at the Music Box theater here in my Chicago neighborhood featuring a big screen showing of “Hoosiers” (1986) hosted by the Chicago Tribune film critic Michael Phillips and sports columnist David Haugh. Chelcie Ross, the great character actor whose face you know even if you don’t recognize the name, who played Gene Hackman’s antagonist in the film, also attended and was probably the best part. (Did you know that Buddy, the gum-chewing defensive ace, was meant to be Ross’s character’s son? I didn’t either. And don’t fret because Ross confessed he also had no idea when or why Buddy re-joins the team after being kicked off in an early scene. Some mysteries are meant to remain mysterious.) I thought of “Hoosiers” when I heard Whittenburg’s line.

More specifically, I thought of Gene Hackman. A few years back the notoriously private and individualistic Gene Hackman was interviewed in GQ and when asked for his thoughts on “Hoosiers” he said simply: “Passed me by.” When asked to elaborate he said this: “I took the film at a time that I was desperate for money. I took it for all the wrong reasons, and it turned out to be one of those films that stick around. … I never expected the film to have the kind of legs it's had.”

That line always seemed to have such a brutal honesty. And, in fact, at the screening Ross confirmed that not only Hackman but co-stars Dennis Hopper and Barbara Hershey seemed to have no inkling of how beloved the movie they were making would turn out to be. Phillips recalled the tale of Hopper, expecting a 1986 Oscar nomination for his terrifying work in “Blue Velvet”, being flabbergasted when his Oscar nod came via “Hoosiers” instead. (Hopper played Shooter, the down-on-his luck alcoholic assistant, a stock character he gives a real pulse. His work in "Velvet" is fantastic, too, but was probably tougher to digest for the Academy.)

Phillips also made sure to single out the performance of Hackman. This seems like such an obvious detail and yet, surprisingly, it’s not. When “Hoosiers” acolytes recollect the film, they think of Jimmy Chitwood and Ollie and running the picket fence and measuring the court at Hinkle Fieldhouse (which makes me tear up just thinking about it) and Jerry Goldsmith’s gorgeously rousing score and Coach Norman Dale playing with four instead of five (“My team is on the floor”). You think of Coach Norman Dale – the character – but not necessarily of Hackman, which is a good thing. Did you know that Jack Nicholson was the original choice to play the Coach? Well, that would have been a garish disaster – it would have been Jack coaching the Hickory Huskers, not Norman Dale, and the tone would have been more Hollywood and less Norman Rockwell.

Hackman, as he so often does (did – is he retired?) vanishes into the film’s fiber, fusing with the character, calibrating his own personality (he is famously temperamental), to perfectly mesh with Norman Dale’s. It’s riveting but also, on appearance, effortless, even if we know it required scads of effort – Ross explained during the Q&A that Hackman kept editing his own dialogue from paragraphs to sentences, again and again.

Gradually, quietly Coach Dale’s backstory is revealed to show that he has come to Hickory many years after his successful run as a collegiate coach in upstate New York came to an end for hitting a player. Barbara Hershey’s character, Myra Fleener, a teacher at the high school, uncovers this but never really presses the matter. It is pointed out, but she leaves it alone. Hackman himself easily could have portrayed his character as either being consumed with the guilt of this action but, gracefully, he forges something else. The memory clearly lingers – how could it not? – but we also sense that as the years have passed the further he has gotten away from it.

If “Hoosiers” was made today the likelihood is high that we would have been forced to endure some sort of insipid flashback to this incident. But director David Anspaugh never shows it to us. We receive a few words, an admittance, Norman Dale says a little about it but not much more. It’s always there and, yet, somehow, it’s not. He remembers, he does not forget, but the more years pass, the more it fades into the background. This is what Hackman conveys with his restraint – how perhaps we cannot always make peace with our sins only to have time grant us some semblance of sanity.

During the Q&A Haugh pointed out that in the modern day media feeding frenzy there is no possibility of a coach running anywhere, regardless of how remote, to escape his past transgressions. There would probably be a GIF of Coach Norman Dale slugging his player. At the same time, in discussing the real life 1954 basketball team on which “Hoosiers” was very loosely based, he noted how 60 years ago the story would have remained regional whereas today it would likely explode into something national. We have reached a point where technology is so prevalent and, in a way, so out of control that nothing is ever past (evidence always exists in the iPhone age) even though everything passes so quickly. With turnover on, well, everything life has to offer at an all-time high it is more and more difficult to latch onto the good memories as they happen and then cultivate them.

It’s why I was so saddened to read Gene Hackman admit that the filming of “Hoosiers” had passed him by. Presumably, though, this is how it is for the making of all movies, a notion Phillips underscored when he rhetorically asked Ross of the film’s eventual success, “You never really know, do you?” No. You don’t. How could you? We bumble through life, trying desperately to glom onto anything that might last.

With each passing year the more poignant the end of “Hoosiers” becomes to me. Jimmy Chitwood has made the shot and Hickory has won the state championship (spoiler alert!) and we see an Indiana field awash in an orangey dusky light and then return to the interior of Hickory’s gymnasium, a young boy shooting hoops, the bouncing ball echoing to the rafters, and then the camera drifts……up and to the left. Up and up and up, and we find a large framed photo of the Hickory team whose triumph we have just witnessed, posing and smiling with their championship trophy. That’s all it is now – a framed picture over an exit sign, a memory, voices of the past heard in a ghostly whisper.

Memories - they feel like yesterday, but they only get further and further away.