Bad Men Out West

In the days following the macabre discovery of Gene and Betsy Hackman decomposing in their Santa Fe home, I, like millions of others, watched some of his movies. I’ve done nothing but watch Gene Hackman movies since his body was discovered on February 26. With a few exceptions—Raoul Walsh’s Klondike Annie and Peyton Reed’s Down With Love—the only movies I’ve watched at home in the last few weeks have featured Hackman, and these are all movies that I had not seen before. With most actors, even those with decades-long careers like Hackman, I would’ve run out by now. Before he died, I’d seen nearly all of his top-line obituary roles (The French Connection, The Poseidon Adventure, Hoosiers, The Royal Tenenbaums), and many of his cult curios like Cisco Pike, Prime Cut, and Downhill Racer.

I have probably two dozen left. Hackman was remarkably prolific throughout his four-decade career, beginning in 1964 with Lilith (his actual 1961 screen debut, Mad Dog Coll, was not rated by the actor, but it is one of the films I have yet to see) all the way to 2004’s Welcome to Mooseport. In 2001, he made five films: Heist, Heartbreakers, The Mexican, Behind Enemy Lines, and The Royal Tenenbaums. Hackman may have been an icon of New Hollywood and American 1970s cinema, but he was a major presence in my childhood, with the name “HACKMAN” regularly appearing on buses, billboards, and subway stops above his glowering eyes and, usually, some kind of ship or tank.

Hackman won his second Oscar, for Clint Eastwood’s Unforgiven, less than six months after I was born; until his retirement in 2004, he was our country’s preeminent film actor, a man who studios and producers paired up with younger, rising stars to see how they came out in the wash. Tom Cruise, Denzel Washington, Owen Wilson, Will Smith, Chris O’Donnell—most of them made it. But even dead fish O’Donnell doesn’t diminish Hackman’s phlegmatic performance as a former Klan member on death row in 1996’s The Chamber. Hackman so often “played himself”—no accents, no costumes, none of the elaborate bullshit that someone like Gary Oldman needs in order to act and be bad. Whether a “good” or “bad” guy, he was always true, mellifluous, as advanced a technical actor as a genuine movie star, someone with presence that can’t be bought or learned, just nurtured.

You’ve read all of that by now. On the other hand, I haven’t seen any mention of 1974’s Zandy’s Bride or 1985’s Twice in a Lifetime since Hackman and his wife were found dead last month. (I found out about Zandy’s Bride from Hackman’s obituary in The Hollywood Reporter.) The same year that he played Harry Caul in The Conversation, Hackman starred alongside Liv Ullmann in Jan Troell’s English language debut; Zandy’s Bride isn’t a far cry from the noble epics The Emigrants and The New Land, but it’s certainly an abrupt and much more blunt film than either of Troell’s most noted movies. Hackman plays a bastard even for the 1800s: he buys Ullmann, a mail-order bride, and is immediately disappointed: too old, too dumpy, not the right attitude, is not down with being treated like a piece of property. Hackman doesn’t let up, raping his wife, beating the shit out of her, forcing a miscarriage, and, after coming back from gathering horses, he destroys his wife’s garden purely out of spite, though of course he says the horses need room.

Zandy’s Bride plays like an exploitation film, with Ullmann despondent over the prospect of raising a “rape child,” one who’s dim, demented, and doomed from the beginning. Hackman never lets up, never really apologizes, and in the end, Ullmann gives him twins. They end the movie smiling. Like Fassbinder’s Martha, you know this “happy ending” is false and, if the children even survive, they’ll surely grow up to be bastards like their father, not their martyr mother.

Hackman’s just as bad in the 1980s in Bud Yorkin’s Twice in a Lifetime, where he plays a Seattle steelworker married to Ellen Burstyn but head over heels for Ann-Margret, hilariously chic and glam working as a bartender in a Deer Hunter sort of town where the bar is where “everything happens.” They begin an affair, and Hackman never really looks back, telling his depressed wife that “this is separate,” and for most of the movie Burstyn just takes it—all she can do is cry and mope, with good reason. Daughter Amy Madigan holds the line, never forgiving her father, while the other kids (Ally Sheedy and Darrell Larson) basically get it: at 50, both Hackman and Burstyn are decades past love, let alone any real affection, and perhaps a separation would make both of them happier, especially now that their kids are grown up.

But we’re not robots, and Hackman is a TOTAL FUCKING ASSHOLE to his poor wife, too dumb and too “tough” to really say anything meaningful to his suffering kids, or even his girlfriend, who’s completely blindsided one day by the whole family coming into her bar to yell at her and Hackman. He nearly burns all of his bridges, but in the end, he attends Sheedy’s wedding; he and Burstyn agree, separately, that his presence at the reception would make both of them uncomfortable. Hackman picks some flowers outside the church, the camera cranes up, and the credits roll over Paul McCartney’s title song, thoroughly 1980s in its chintzy synthesizer heavy production, but nevertheless a gem, what would be the crown jewel of most songwriters’ body of work.

It’s not quite a “happy ending,” but it’s more honest and perhaps realistic than the reversal at the end of Zandy’s Bride, which really just sticks the knife in—Ullmann will never escape this beast. In Twice in a Lifetime, Hackman’s more brutish and simpleminded than usual, and it might be the more disturbing performance because his milieu is recognizable, still ours, basically—there may not be many steel towns left, but one imagines this is how many divorces play out in real life. No wonder Yorkin couldn’t get a single studio or outside investor to finance the movie; he ended up doing it himself. Forgotten today, Twice in a Lifetime received Golden Globe nominations for Hackman and Burstyn, and an Oscar nomination for Madigan. Zandy’s Bride faded into obscurity as well, and I’m confident that that Hollywood Reporter obituary is the most prominent mention of the film since it was released 51 years ago.

If, like me, you can’t stop watching Hackman, find these films.