Gene Hackman has sadly died at 95, alongside his wife, Betsy Arakawa, 63, and their dog.
The tragic circumstances of their deaths shouldn’t eclipse Hackman’s great achievements as an actor, particularly in his Oscar-winning roles in The French Connection (1971) and Unforgiven (1992). Only last year, his terrific performance in The Conversation (1974) was available in cinemas on the 50th anniversary of the film. Harry Mount reviews the film
If I wanted to show a curious Martian what America was like in the 1970s, I would point him in the direction of Gene Hackman in The Conversation. The film, made in 1974, has been restored for its 50th anniversary.
Hackman, who has just died at 95, is run down in a ’70s way: double chin; flappy, grey, see-through plastic mac; $50 suit with a tacky tie-pin.
He’s playing Harry Caul – ‘The best bugger on the West Coast’. A surveillance expert in San Francisco, he records the conversation of an unfaithful wife and her lover, both apparently worried that the betrayed husband – a disagreeable, paunchy Robert Duvall – is going to bump them off.
The film’s lurid yet washed-out colours are gloriously seventies, too: orange bedspreads; dark beige curtains; a blue plastic suitcase.
Hackman was only in his early forties but the movie’s director-writer, Francis Ford Coppola, told him he wanted Harry to be an over-the-hill nudnik – a boring, lifeless nerd.
It all makes for a thoroughly convincing look at mid-ranking 1970s professional life – particularly in the office-party scene, where Harry and his colleagues get loaded on six-packs of Miller High Life and Ancient Age Kentucky Bourbon in their wonderfully disgusting office.
Their girlfriends, too, are ropy, over-made-up and a bit pudgy or scrawny and undernourished. Everyone looks just a little bit ill – as people did in the ’70s.
Harry turns out to be a heroic nudnik, as he fine-tunes the long-distance recording of the unfaithful couple to work out when and where the murder will take place – only, spoiler alert, it’s not the murder he’d predicted.
The film has its longueurs when Harry plays back the recording of the couple again and again. But Hackman’s low-key, softly-spoken delivery magically builds tension into these repetitions. And when the action speeds up at the denoument, the thrill is all the greater for the slow build-up. The Conversation, Coppola’s favourite of his films, seemed astonishingly prescient because it was released at the same time as the Watergate scandal, which serendipitously depended on the same surveillance equipment Harry Caul uses.
In fact, Coppola had been trying to make the film since the mid-1960s – long before Watergate broke – but it was a little too recherché for Hollywood. Only with the huge success of The Godfather, in 1972, did Coppola get the film green-lit. It was nominated for three Oscars and won the Palme d’Or for Best Film at the 1974 Cannes Film Festival.
Still, the film remains prescient of what followed – the modern surveillance society, where we all have tiny recording devices on our phones with a thousand times more power than the long-distance shotgun microphones with telescopic sights that Harry constructs.
It also features early performances by some greats. Harrison Ford plays a pleasingly grumpy, preppy-looking Martin Stett, who commissions Harry’s surveillance work.
And John Cazale is his customary, convincing, nervy, wise-cracking self as Stan, Harry’s colleague.
Cazale was starting his golden run of five extraordinary films in six years: The Godfather (1972), The Conversation (1974), The Godfather Part II (1974), Dog Day Afternoon (1975) and The Deer Hunter (1978). He died of lung cancer in 1978, aged only 42.
How consoling, though, that Harrison Ford (82), Robert Duvall (94) and Francis Ford Coppola (85) are still with us. What a fertile generation it was for making convincing films about the real America.
