I’m a fan of his, too. Even in outright tripe like Armageddon he delivers real acting and believable moments. And I absolutely love him in Bandits!
…“Beavers ‘n’ Ducks!”
To be completly honest, I may not have attached much significance to Wilder until later, but after I saw him in Blazing Saddles and perhaps another role or two, when I saw B&C again after some time, it was easy to spot Wilder.
In fact, it is continually amazing to spot now-famous actors in bit parts (even as extras in some cases) of older movies. Cool Hand Luke has quite a few such pre-fame roles. Dennis Hopper for one, before his return by way of Hoosiers and Blue Velvet, and I will concur with BlinkingDuck that Hopper and Walken produced the best scene ever in True Romance (which also helped establish Gandolfini as a thug in the pre-Sopranos days).
I just last night saw the Netflix new release Lonely Hearts where Gandolfini and Travolta meet again since Get Shorty. Salma Hayek! Decent movie, but weird.
I’m just now seeing that you may mean Hackman instead of Wilder. I saw an interview with Arthur Penn where he said that Beatty knew Hackman from Broadway or New York groveling days and insisted that Hackman play Buck.
I just watched The Conversation for the first time this weekend, too! It was beyond awesome. It’s better than The Godfather, IMHO. Hackman is amazing in that role, even though he never really shows much emotion until the end.
I meant Wilder. He did some TV before Bonnie & Clyde, but that was first appearance in a feature film.
Cool! I think his tendency to under-emote is key to his effectiveness. Every bit of blank emotional space he leaves on screen gets filled in by my imagination, which makes the experience richer for me than watching someone chew the scenery. Now that I think about it, most of my favorite screen actors are that way.
Gene Hackman is very like Spencer Tracy to me. Both are … real. They perform roles by making every cell and fiber of the part their own, never showy, never a false moment. When watching them, you can pretty much believe that they walked on the set already existing as the movie character and a camera happened to be filming them. It’s exciting to watch them even when they’re not the focus of a scene – indeed, they’re as captivating as listeners as they are when speaking. That’s acting, baby.
Hackman’s performance in Mississippi Burning really ought to be mentioned as well.
Some years back, I was leading a school/parent conference on the redevelopment of our front oval. We were looking at an airal picture and marking things in it. One of our parents started to draw a new feature on, but decided against it, leaving an odd mark on the map (trust me, this is Hackman related).
When the Master Planner was coming around later, looking at the designs, he questione dthis odd little symbol on out map. I explained to him it was where we wanted the 60 foot high statue of Gene Hackman to go.
Thereafter, every project we designed at the school featured some small, very casual reference to a “60 foot statue of Gene Hackman”
'cause he’s sooooooo cool.
mm
I forgot to tell you…seeing that line quoted in a Hackman thread made me think of *him * delivering it instead of Faye Dunaway…just standing there in a pair of panties.
::shudder::
I love the film The Conversation, but watching it again a few months ago I was struck by the scene where Hackman and a bunch of people go back to his listening-lair to party. They keep trying to draw him into the shennanigans and he tries to go off by himself. The whole scene is odd. The drunken fooling around seems sort of false, and I kept expeting the Hackman character to get mad, but he doesn’t (I don’t think? Maybe he does.)
Anyway, it seemed to me either a weird product of the times, or a skewed perception of how people partying at someone’s office after hours would actually behave.
I thought it was an odd scene, too, but perhaps deliberately odd, since
the rival surveillance specialist (and possibly Caul’s old employee, too) was trying to pry secrets out of him under the guise of “partying” and was possibly even involved in the plot to steal his tapes, so he was playing up the joviality
and
the woman Hackman’s character ended up pairing off with had been sent there deliberately to steal his work, so her presence needed to feel a bit “off” to make the scene believable. Perhaps they were playing on Caul’s social naiveté…
Then again, as soon as they got to his workshp, I had the same thought you did: “did people really act like that in the '60s and '70s?”
~fig
Er, he throws them all out (after Moran reveals that he’s “bugged” Harry with the pen) so I’d say he wasn’t too pleased. It’s stilted, certainly, but so is every contact Harry has with anybody. The only scenes in the film where he ever appears at ease is when he’s playing his saxaphone to a recording.
Stranger