“Aw, hell, I’ll just take anything”: Gene Hackman’s best performance almost set him on the road to ruin
For someone who had provided so much entertainment to so many millions over the course of several decades, the death of Gene Hackman last year was incredibly undignified and tawdry, no matter that he had reached a grand age of 95 or that he had built a reputation for being difficult to deal with over the years.
Hackman was without doubt one of the best to ever do it, a New Hollywood legend who continued to dominate films into the early 2000s and showed with directors like Wes Anderson that he had incredible range, far from playing just the hard-nosed detective he had perfected in movies like The French Connection.
During the 1970s, Hackman was one of the most in-demand actors on the planet, with three Academy Award nominations under his belt by 1972, including a win for that classic New York-set thriller, and he followed it up by showing he could lead not just a big budget blockbuster with The Poseidon Adventure, but also a character who could sum up the depths of paranoia of the American era with Francis Ford Coppola’s peerless The Conversation in 1974.
Nowadays, the internet loves to describe things as underrated, but Hackman’s legacy certainly fits that category, despite all the accolades he picked up, and perhaps it’s fitting that his own favourite performance from over 100 movies was one that didn’t perform even at the time of its release in 1973, when he was at his most bookable.
The movie was Scarecrow, a two-man road trip through small-town America to reach the big city, Hackman’s hitchhiking former convict linking up, with some suspicion, with Al Pacino’s innocent ex-sailor, and it produced two performances from its leads that were as good as anything seen for some time. Both Hackman and Pacino were at their peak in those years, and the Palme D’Or-winning Scarecrow was a vehicle for them to show off their talents to devastating effect.
And yet, despite that critical acclaim, it simply didn’t land with audiences, as Hackman recalled back in 2001, “I felt we had done good work in that film, and it didn’t work out commercially, big time. I thought, ‘Aw, hell, I’ll just take anything that’s offered’. So, I did that for a while. I ended up doing some things like [1977 British war drama] March or Die in Africa, and maybe other things one shouldn’t do. You get disappointed that your message maybe isn’t getting across. I don’t mean that to sound highfalutin. Actors generally know if they’ve done good work.”
While Hackman is dismissive of his initial years following Scarecrow, he did actually continue to make some fine films, not least the brilliant Night Moves in 1975, which saw him play a troubled private investigator dragged into a twisted, murderous family falling out.
He also showed that aforementioned range with a part in Mel Brooks’ comedy Young Frankenstein the previous year, and lined up in one of the most star-packed casts ever assembled for the Richard Attenborough war epic, A Bridge Too Far, in 1977.
The actor would continue his commercial and critical success for the entirety of the following two decades, winning another Oscar nomination in the ‘80s for Mississippi Burning and then going one better and landing the top prize for his searing portrayal of Sheriff ‘Little Bill’ Daggett in Clint Eastwood’s 1992 western, Unforgiven.
