Postscript: Gene Hackman 1930 - 2025

Gene Hackman, in The French Connection

I see in the Times that Gene Hackman has died. He was 95. He’s one of my favorite actors. He appeared in at least three cinematic classics – Bonnie and Clyde (1967), The French Connection (1971), and Unforgiven (1992). I first saw him in Arthur Penn's Bonnie and Clyde, in which he played Clyde’s older brother Buck. It was only a supporting role, but Hackman was superb. Reviewing the movie, Pauline Kael said his performance was “beautifully controlled,” “the best in the movie.” Then four years later, he played the lowlife police detective Jimmy “Popeye” Doyle in William Friedkin’s The French Connection, for which he won an Academy Award for Best Actor. But perhaps his greatest role was as the sheriff Little Bill Daggett in Clint Eastwood’s magnificent Unforgiven for which he won another Academy Award – this time for Best Supporting Actor. What I loved about Hackman’s acting is its naturalness. He seemed not just to play his roles, but to live them.   

Arthur Penn (September 27, 1922 - September 28, 2010)

This is my tribute to Arthur Penn, director of the landmark movie “Bonnie and Clyde,” who died September 28, 2010. I first saw “Bonnie and Clyde” when I was fourteen. It was 1967; my father and I went to see it at the old Kent Theatre in Saint John, N.B. It was my first encounter with an art film, although I didn't think of it that way at the time. All I knew, leaving the theatre that night, was that I’d seen something astonishing – not just the violence, which is what everyone was talking about, but the slow-motion ending and the acting, yes, above all the acting, particularly the performances of the supporting cast: Gene Hackman, Estelle Parsons, Michael J. Pollard, and Gene Wilder. Going into that movie, if you’d asked me to name a movie director, any movie director, about the only one I might’ve come up with is Alfred Hitchcock. But leaving the Kent that long-ago evening (this is sounding more and more like nostalgia, I realize, but when you reach my age, what isn’t nostalgia?), I’d learned the name of another director, a name that I would never forget: Arthur Penn. For me the idea of a director’s movie begins with Penn’s “Bonnie and Clyde.” His later pictures don’t come close to achieving “Bonnie and Clyde” ’s impact; there’s a great dropping off. But that’s irrelevant. Penn lives in one work, “Bonnie and Clyde”, and it is, as Pauline Kael says, “a work of art.” My encounter with it initiated me into the world of movies; for the next twenty years, I was a movie obsessive. The New Yorker has published two wonderful pieces about “Bonnie and Clyde”: Kael’s magnificent defence of it, entitled “Bonnie and Clyde” (October 21, 1967; included in her collections “Kiss Kiss Bang Bang” and “For Keeps”) and Louis Menand’s excellent “Paris, Texas” (February 17 & 24, 2003), which traces the French New Wave sources of the movie. Rereading these two great essays provides the pleasure of recalling the excitement of seeing "Bonnie and Clyde" for the first time. They remind me, too, of the genius of the man who directed it.