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Gene Hackman starred in no fewer than five movies in 2001, which raises the question: when is Gene Hackman not starring in movies? It seems that hardly a month goes by in which he's not barking at his underlings or pissing off his superiors in some movie trailer or other. Hackman's quintuple-play last year raised his career count to an impressive grand total of seventy-nine films -- or roughly one movie for every year that he's been on this earth. (He'll turn seventy-two this month.) When you consider that he was thirty-seven years old when he landed his first major role -- as Buck Barrow, Clyde's brother, in 1967's Bonnie & Clyde -- and a relatively ancient forty-one when his turn as Popeye Doyle in The French Connection won him an Oscar and made him a star, Hackman's prodigiousness seems all the more impressive.
What's really impressive, however, is that Hackman -- through talent, or luck, or a bit of both -- has managed to thwart the ecology of Hollywood. Generally speaking, there are two types of male movie actors: the stars and the stalwarts. Gene Hackman, perhaps alone among living actors, has made himself into both.
The star, of course, is the guy who gets his face on the poster and his name over the title. He is the movie's centre of gravity, and everything else -- danger, bad guys, the mysterious briefcase, the beautiful widow -- is pulled into his orbit. He gets the girl. He diffuses the bomb. He takes his shirt off, and the audience swoons.
The stalwart, on the other hand, is familiar but not famous -- the kind of actor that we, here at Fametracker, like to refer to as "Hey! It's That Guy!" (For about 426 examples of said actors, please refer to the "Hey! It's That Guy!" section.) This is the kind of actor whose face you know but whose name you can't place. He (or sometimes she) is the cop, the coach, the soldier, the senator, and sometimes even the president. He's the loyal partner who gets offed in the film's second act, spurring the star (who's already turned in his badge and been tossed off the force) to suit up and get serious about revenge. The stalwart never gets the girl; he never diffuses the bomb (he might take a stab at it, but he'll always end up fried); and he does little to make audiences swoon. Yet he's essential to Hollywood's ecosystem, working steadily and stealthfully, enjoying a kind of anonymous fame.
Most actors can be placed in one or the other of these two categories. The stars, for obvious reasons, hardly need to be identified -- they are the omnipresent personalities: the Pitts, the Cruises, the Gibsons, the Fords.
The stalwarts, on the other hand, are hard to identify, because it's by their faces, not their names, that we know them -- and even then, they're only vaguely familiar, like a cousin once met at a wedding. They are actors like Jeffrey Jones, Joe Don Baker, George Dzundza, the late, great J.T. Walsh, or Senator Fred Thompson, a former lawyer from Tennessee who spent several years playing lawyers, senators, and CIA bureaucrats in films such as No Way Out, The Hunt for Red October, and In the Line of Fire, before successfully running for the real-life Senate in 1994.
The advantage of being a star is clear -- you're a star. The disadvantage is that you have a limited shelf life, in that once you reach the age at which you can no longer plausibly get the girl -- who is now nearly young enough to be your granddaughter -- you must gracefully retire,
unless you are Michael Douglas. Your paycheques are large, but your earning years are limited, and you're unlikely to headline five movies a year unless you have really bad judgment or really large debts. (In the case of John Travolta, it's unclear what factor drives his ill-advised ubiquity, but the detrimental effects are there for all to see.)
The advantage of being a stalwart is that you work...a lot. Because stars can't exist on their own -- they need people to befriend, avenge, or foil the nefarious plots of -- there will always be a call for the stalwarts. Jeffrey Jones, a consummate stalwart who's perhaps best remembered as the bedeviled principal in Ferris Bueller's Day Off, also appeared in five movies last year, and has had forty-three film and TV roles since 1982.
The disadvantage of being a stalwart is that, while you no doubt live well, you'll earn neither the monetary nor adulatory benefits of true celebrity. As such, these actors -- and there are dozens of them, milling around crime scenes and unpacking attachés at CIA briefings -- are the Hollywood equivalent of session musicians. They play backup.
Except, of course, for Gene Hackman. Hackman manages to straddle these worlds, reaping the advantages of both. Like a star, his name and face are famous and his paycheques formidable, but like a stalwart, he works, constantly and consistently, with no apparent dampening effect on the public's appetite for his presence. In fact, rather than shunning subsidiary roles, he's embraced the providence of the stalwart -- the soldier, the senator, the coach, the cop. Of course, it helps that he can play these parts better than anyone else out there; there are few thrills in modern cinema more satisfying than the sight of Gene Hackman losing his temper. Whether low and coiled or at a rolling boil, Hackman has more shades of anger than most actors have shades, period.
Armed with these skills, Hackman has settled into the comfortable rhythm of the stalwart character actor. The gruff but honourable general he plays in Behind Enemy Lines, for example, is strikingly similar to the sub captain he played in 1995's Crimson Tide, or the colonel be played in 1988's Bat 21. Similarly, the tough yet fair football coach he played in last year's The Replacements was a gridiron echo of the basketball coach he played in 1986's Hoosiers, and the charming but corrupt defense secretary he played in 1987's No Way Out was promoted, ten years later, to a charming but corrupt President in Absolute Power.
In fact, with a few exceptions, Hackman now plays essentially two different roles: menacing authoritarians who turn out to be softies, and menacing authoritarians who turn out to be even more loathsome than you originally suspected. He's equally adept at both, as evidenced by an Oscar nomination for his good-hearted FBI man in Mississippi Burning and an Oscar statue for his vile sheriff in 1992's Unforgiven. Both roles were variations on parts he's played, or would play, in other films; he did a lazy rehash of Unforgiven's satanic lawman three years later in The Quick and the Dead.
Onscreen, Hackman rarely expends more energy than is necessary -- in movies such as Absolute Power or Wyatt Earp, he gives the impression that he arrived on the set that morning, gave his lines a quick once-over, then polished off his scenes in one take, while his driver kept the motor running in the limo. But like a prize-fighter who dispatches bums and top contenders with equal efficiency, Hackman is never less than serviceable in even the most forgettable films -- yet still has enough in reserve to deliver a knockout performance when the opportunity presents itself, as it did in the recent The Royal Tenenbaums, for which he has just been awarded a Best Actor Golden Globe. (As Spy magazine's Walter Monheit might have said, "Gene's no hack, man! If he doesn't get the 'Royal' treatment from Oscar, there's no justice in Tinseltown! Oof!" ) And even when Hackman coasts through a film on autopilot, he reliably outshines everyone else in the cast, like a veteran fencer who promises to fight everyone one-handed, and does, and bests the whole lot.
As such, Hackman may seem like a star, but in fact he's a kind of super-stalwart -- the type of actor who, in a just universe, would be the rule and not a singular exception. Stars often gripe that they wish they could forego the publicity-related demands of their celebrity and focus on "the work" -- yet there they are, month after month, squinting out from magazine covers or embroiling us in their carefully orchestrated offscreen escapades. Hackman, on the other hand, doesn't talk wistfully about the work; he simply does it, and does it well, in role after role after role.
Of course, Hackman is plenty famous already -- and one of the best things about him is that he doesn't much seem to care either way. (Say what you will about the man, but you'll never catch him in the pages of People with Lara Flynn Boyle on his arm.) Still, we feel -- as you may now have intuited --that he deserves a bit of a top-up. Like when the waiter brings you a milkshake, then gives you the metal cylinder with that little extra in it, which you feel like you're getting for free. Hackman had a busy and productive year, and deserves a year-end bonus as much as anyone.
The Hollywood engine -- and the larger celebrity machine -- will always be fueled by star power, but it's the stalwarts who often give moviegoers their greatest satisfactions. (Even in a throwaway effort like Breakdown, a 1997 formula horror flick starring Kurt Russell, there is pleasure to be found in the great J.T. Walsh's slick and venomous villain.) In Gene Hackman, the star with the soul of a stalwart, these unsung actors have found their patron saint.
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