I guess everyone has heard that Gene Hackman and his wife were found dead in their home under what the police are calling \u201csuspicious\u201d circumstances.\u00a0 The 95-year-old retired actor and his 66-year-old wife were found in different parts of the house deceased and in reportedly advanced decomposition.\u00a0 The news sources hint it may have been a multiple suicide or some other unfortunate situation.\u00a0 Well, we\u2019ll probably get the gruesome and sad details soon enough.<\/p>\n
I guess I wish I had written a post on Hackman\u2019s career under happier circumstances.\u00a0 But better late than never.\u00a0 I had a chance to review his career over at IMDB and made a list of the movies that I had seen and either liked or at least considered good.<\/p>\n
| 1969<\/td>\n | Marooned<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n |
| 1971<\/td>\n | The French Connection<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n |
| 1974<\/td>\n | The Conversation<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n |
| 1974<\/td>\n | Young Frankenstein<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n |
| 1978<\/td>\n | Superman<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n |
| 1886<\/td>\n | Hoosiers<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n |
| 1992<\/td>\n | Unforgiven<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n |
| 1994<\/td>\n | Wyatt Earp<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n |
| 1995<\/td>\n | Get Shorty<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n |
| 1998<\/td>\n | Enemy of the State<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n |
| 2001<\/td>\n | The Royal Tenenbaums<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n<\/tbody>\n<\/table>\n <\/p>\n It\u2019s a surprisingly broad cross-section of genres.\u00a0 He was equally skilled as a comic actor, an action\/adventure star and even a few dramatic roles.\u00a0 What I would say about his talent as an actor was that he would use his considerable acting abilities to take whatever part he was given, no matter how threadbare and make it memorable.\u00a0 You could see this in Young Frankenstein and Get Shorty where he\u2019s playing minor parts and yet he owns the movie while he\u2019s on the screen.<\/p>\n My favorite of his films was \u201cThe French Connection.\u201d\u00a0 I was a freshman in high school and my homeroom picked the movie as our class trip.\u00a0 We went into Manhattan and saw it on a big screen on Broadway and riding there on the subway it was surreal just how close to reality the scenes on the subway resembled reality.\u00a0 Graffiti and drunks passed out on the trains were the perfect intro for the movie.\u00a0 And Hackman was the perfect Popeye Doyle.\u00a0 Brutalizing his drug suspects, antagonizing his chain of command and chasing a runaway subway train in a muscle car down the wrong side of the street under the 86th<\/sup> St elevated subway line through my old neighborhood in Brooklyn.\u00a0 It didn\u2019t get better than that.\u00a0 I used to walk past the housing project where Popeye supposedly lived.\u00a0 If he had, he would\u2019ve been the only white man living there at the time.\u00a0 It was a very tough place.<\/p>\n |