Scarecrow (Jerry Schatzberg, 1973)

Al Pacino and Gene Hackman in Scarecrow

Cast: Gene Hackman, Al Pacino, Dorothy Tristan, Ann Wedgeworth, Richard Lynch, Eileen Brennan, Penelope Allen, Richard Hackman, Al Cingolani, Rutanya Alda. Screenplay: Gerry Michael White. Cinematography: Vilmos Zsigmond. Production design: Albert Brenner. Film editing: Evan A. Lottman. Music: Fred Myrow.

Jerry Schatzberg's Scarecrow is the quintessential '70s film: a road movie featuring two actors on the verge of becoming legendary. It's long on character development and short on plot. Essentially, the narrative is there to provide reciprocal character arcs: The tough guy (Gene Hackman) softens and the soft guy (Al Pacino) toughens. Hackman and Pacino play drifters with unlikely dreams: Hackman's Max wants to open a car wash and enlists Pacino's Lion in his scheme, though Lion wants to make a stop along the way to reconnect with his ex, whom he left pregnant, and meet the child he has never seen. We know that they'll never fulfill these dreams, so the only suspense in the film is over how badly it will end for them. So mostly it's about performance, which Scarecrow adequately supplies. Scarecrow is something of a forgotten film, overshadowed by more celebrated ones in the two actors' oeuvre, and even a historian of the era in which it was made, Peter Biskind, dismissed it as a "secondary" work. But it deserves to be rediscovered, not just for the performances but also as a reminder of how significant the decade in which it was made is to film history.

Night Moves (Arthur Penn, 1975)

 Cast: Gene Hackman, Jennifer Warren, Susan Clark, Edward Binns, Harris Yulin, Kenneth Mars, Melanie Griffith, James Woods, Janet Ward, John Crawford. Screenplay: Alan Sharp. Cinematography: Bruce Surtees. Production design: George Jenkins. Film editing: Dede Allen. Music: Michael Small. 

In the twisty, satisfying noir Night Moves Gene Hackman shows once again what a terrific actor he was, even though he seems to me a little miscast as a retired professional football player. He brings it off anyway, even managing to be sexy despite a pornstache and one of those '70s hairstyles that looked like a toupee even when they weren't. 

The Quick and the Dead (Sam Raimi, 1995)

Gene Hackman in The Quick and the Dead

Cast: Sharon Stone, Gene Hackman, Russell Crowe, Leonardo DiCaprio, Tobin Bell, Roberts Blossom, Kevin Conway, Keith David, Lance Henriksen, Pat Hingle, Gary Sinise. Screenplay: Simon Moore. Cinematography: Dante Spinotti. Production design: Patrizia von Brandenstein. Film editing: Pietro Scalia. Music: Alan Silvestri. 

I miss Gene Hackman. When he retired in 2004, it had seemed for a while that he was in every other movie being made: In 2001, for example, he made five, including one of his best comic performances in Wes Anderson's The Royal Tenenbaums. In the year he made The Quick and the Dead he was also in Tony Scott's Crimson Tide and Barry Sonnenfeld's Get Shorty. He's certainly the best thing about Sam Raimi's mock-spaghetti Western, in a role that echoes his Oscar-winning one in Unforgiven (Clint Eastwood, 1992). He brings the same infuriating self-satisfied smirk to his performance as John Herod, the ruthless boss of the town of Redemption as he did in the role of the ruthless sheriff "Little" Bill Daggett in Eastwood's movie. Hackman's great gift was the ability to give memorably watchable performances without overwhelming a film's ensemble, and the ensemble for The Quick and the Dead is a good one, even if they're playing slightly skewed versions of Western stereotypes. Sharon Stone, who was one of the producers of the movie, plays the stranger who rides into town; Russell Crowe is the outlaw who wants to give up killing; and Leonardo DiCaprio is the gun-happy kid. The setup is that Herod is staging a tournament, pairing off gunslingers in one-on-one shootouts until only one is left standing. You can guess immediately who the final four will be. It's by no means a landmark film, but Raimi's direction gives it the right pace, and the actors, including good character turns by Pat Hingle, Lance Henriksen, and Keith David, make it watchable, as does Dante Spinotti's cinematography.  

Crimson Tide (Tony Scott, 1995)

Denzel Washington and Gene Hackman in Crimson Tide

Lt. Commander Ron Hunter: Denzel Washington
Capt. Frank Ramsey: Gene Hackman
COB Walters: George Dzundza
Lt. Roy Zimmer: Matt Craven
Lt. Peter Ince: Viggo Mortensen
Lt. Bobby Dougherty: James Gandolfini
Lt. Darik Westerguard: Rocky Carroll
Petty Officer Danny Rivetti: Danny Nucci
Petty Officer Third Class Russell Vossler: Lillo Brancato Jr.
Officer of the Deck Mahoney: Jaime P. Gomez
Chief of the Watch Hunsicker: Michael Milhoan
Tactical Supervising Officer Billy Linkletter: Scott Burkholder
Lt. Paul Hellerman: Ricky Schroeder
Seaman William Barnes: Steve Zahn
Rear Admiral Anderson: Jason Robards

Director: Tony Scott
Screenplay: Michael Schiffer, Richard P. Henrick
Cinematography: Dariusz Wolski
Production design: Michael White
Film editing: Chris Lebenzon
Music: Hans Zimmer

I miss Gene Hackman. That is, I miss new movies with Gene Hackman in them. Lord knows he made enough movies before he up and decided to retire in 2004; IMDb credits him with 100 titles, including some TV series he appeared in before Bonnie and Clyde (Arthur Penn, 1967) gave his career the boost it needed. There was a time when he seemed to be vying with Michael Caine to be in every movie made. Which is as it should be: I don't know many actors who could bring such nuance to roles like the submarine captain in Tony Scott's Crimson Tide, carefully cutting his new XO, Hunter, down to size before his fellow officers. Notice the way he says "Harvard" in reading from Hunter's résumé, trying to suggest that Hunter is overqualified for the position and that he, Ramsey, makes up for lack of intellectual achievement with experience. Hackman and Denzel Washington are beautifully matched performers in this battle, Washington riding with the punches. Both play with the racial tension between the two characters, with Hackman making it clear that Ramsey regards Hunter as "uppity." He constantly calls Hunter "son" in a way that makers it sound like he's saying "boy."  Even when Ramsey gratuitously brings up the fact that that the Lipizzaner stallions are white and Hunter retorts that they were born black, there's a delicate restraint in the exchange in which Hackman makes Ramsey's insecurity and Washington makes Hunter's toughness manifest. All of this is bolstered by a gallery of fine supporting performances, clever dialogue in which Quentin Tarantino reportedly had a hand, and a stirring score by Hans Zimmer that makes effective use of the naval hymn "Eternal Father, Strong to Save." Crimson Tide rises well above the level of most action movies, so much so that we almost regret that the film has to fall back on suspense clichés in which the world is saved from destruction at the last second.

Unforgiven (Clint Eastwood, 1992)

Morgan Freeman and Clint Eastwood in Unforgiven

William Munny: Clint Eastwood
Little Bill Daggett: Gene Hackman
Ned Logan: Morgan Freeman
English Bob: Richard Harris
The Schofield Kid: Jaimz Woolvett
W.W. Beauchamp: Saul Rubinek
Strawberry Alice: Frances Fisher
Delilah Fitzgerald: Anna Levine

Director: Clint Eastwood
Screenplay: David Webb Peoples
Cinematography: Jack N. Green
Production design: Henry Bumstead
Film editing: Joel Cox
Music: Lennie Niehaus

Clint Eastwood's Unforgiven is the one "real" Western to win a best picture Oscar. Cimarron (Wesley Ruggles, 1931) is more about a fractured marriage, politics and land development in the Oklahoma Territory than about gunfire; Dances With Wolves (Kevin Costner, 1990) is preoccupied with revising our views of the American Indian; and No Country for Old Men (Joel Coen and Ethan Coen, 2007), though it doesn't lack for gunfire, is set in our times, not in the days of gunslingers and dance-hall girls. Unforgiven also a very good movie, though not a classic on the order of Westerns the Academy mostly cold-shouldered, like Red River (Howard Hawks, 1948) or The Wild Bunch (1969). It placed Eastwood among the pantheon of contemporary directors, though Eastwood had the grace to dedicate the film to John Ford and the less-celebrated directors Sergio Leone and Don Siegel; the latter two had made him a star and taught him the trade. Eastwood is a good director by virtue of not overreaching: He reportedly stuck closely to David Webb Peoples's screenplay, which provided him with characters of considerable depth. Gene Hackman's Little Bill Daggett is a nasty villain, but Peoples gives him a human side with his obsessive work on his house and a porch he can sit on and watch the sunset. What Peoples doesn't give Eastwood is a wholly satisfactory ending: The movie builds to the concluding shootout, even after we have been led to think that there's more to Eastwood's William Munny than just an old gunfighter in retirement. Earlier, we have seen evidence that Munny has lost his shooting skills, but suddenly at the end he's able to gun down a roomful of armed men with complete ease. Others object to the rather inessential stuff like the episode involving English Bob, and Saul Rubinek's writer in search of a subject for pulp-magazine hagiography is an overworked caricature. Still, for most of the picture Eastwood skates over the clichés and conceals vague motives -- like the swiftness with which Munny decides to leave his two children to fend for themselves while he follows the young would-be gunfighter on a foolish mission -- so that we don't have time to be bothered by them too much.

The Royal Tenenbaums (Wes Anderson, 2001)

Royal Tenenbaum: Gene Hackman
Etheline Tenenbaum: Anjelica Huston
Chas Tenenbaum: Ben Stiller
Margot Tenenbaum: Gwyneth Paltrow
Richie Tenenbaum: Luke Wilson
Eli Cash: Owen Wilson
Raleigh St. Clair: Bill Murray
Henry Sherman: Danny Glover
Dusty: Seymour Cassel
Pagoda: Kumar Pallana
Ari Tenenbaum: Grant Rosenmeyer
Uzi Tenenbaum: Jonah Meyerson
Narrator (voice): Alec Baldwin

Director: Wes Anderson
Screenplay: Wes Anderson, Owen Wilson
Cinematography: Robert D. Yeoman
Production design: David Wasco
Film editing: Dylan Tichenor
Music: Mark Mothersbaugh

It's hard to be droll for an hour and a half, and The Royal Tenenbaums, which runs about 20 minutes longer than that, shows the strain. Still, I don't have the feeling with it that I sometimes have with Wes Anderson's  first two films, Bottle Rocket (1996) and Rushmore (1998), of not being completely in on the joke. This time it's the wacky family joke, familiar from George S. Kaufman and Moss Hart's You Can't Take It With You and numerous sitcoms. It works in large part because the cast plays it with such beautifully straight faces. And especially because it's such a magnificent cast: Gene Hackman, Anjelica Huston, Ben Stiller, Gwyneth Paltrow, Luke Wilson, Owen Wilson (who co-wrote the screenplay with Anderson), Bill Murray, and Danny Glover. It's also beautifully designed by David Wasco and filmed by Robert D. Yeoman, with Anderson's characteristically meticulous, almost theatrical framing. Hackman, as the paterfamilias in absentia Royal Tenenbaum, is the cast standout, in large part because he gets to play loose while everyone else maintains a morose deadpan, but also because he's an actor who has always been cast as the loose cannon. Even in films in which he's supposed to be reserved and repressed, such as The Conversation (Francis Ford Coppola, 1974), he keeps you waiting for the inevitable moment when he snaps. Here he's loose from the beginning, but he doesn't tire you out with his volatility because he knows how much of it to keep in check at any given moment.

Young Frankenstein (Mel Brooks, 1974)

No telling how many times I've seen this blissful comedy, but I always find something new in it. This time, I was struck by Mel Brooks's musicality. There's the great "Puttin' on the Ritz" number, obviously, and Madeline Kahn bursting into an orgasm-induced rendition of "Ah, Sweet Mystery of Life" as Jeanette MacDonald never sang it. But the score by John Morris is wonderful on its own, as in the serenade to the monster on violin and horn played by Frederick (Gene Wilder) and Igor (Marty Feldman). And even the gag references sing: Frederick's appropriation of Mack Gordon's lyrics to "Chattanooga Choo Choo" when he arrives at the Transylvania (get it?) Station, or the supposedly virginal Elizabeth (Kahn) singing "The Battle Hymn of the Republic." It's also surprising how little really smutty humor Brooks indulges in this time. There's Inga's (Teri Garr) appreciation of the monster's "enormous schwanzstucker," to be sure, but this is PG humor at worst. So many of the gags are just wittily anti-climactic, like Frau Blucher (Cloris Leachman) proclaiming that Victor Frankenstein "vas my ... boyfriend!" Or the Blind Man (Gene Hackman) wistfully calling out to the fleeing monster, "I was gonna make espresso." (Hackman ad-libbed this line, and many other gags in the film, such as Igor's movable hump, were improvised by the actors.) And has a spoof ever been so beautifully staged? The production design is by Dale Hennesy, who had the wit to track down and borrow the original sparking and buzzing laboratory equipment that Kenneth Strickfaden created for the first Frankenstein (James Whale, 1931). The equally evocative black-and-white cinematography is by Gerald Hirschfeld.

The Conversation (Francis Ford Coppola, 1974)

The technology used in it may have dated, but The Conversation seems more relevant than ever. When it was made, the film was very much of the moment: the Watergate moment, which was long before email and cell phones. Julian Assange was only 3 years old. What has kept Coppola's film alive is that he had the good sense to make it a thriller about the consequences of knowledge. The real victim of Harry Caul's snooping is Harry Caul himself, the professional whose delight in what he can do with his microphones and tape recorders begins to fade when he realizes that technology is not an end in itself. It is one of the great Gene Hackman performances from a career crowded with great and varied performances. Ironically, the film that The Conversation most reminds me of today is The Lives of Others, Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck's 2006 film about eavesdropping by the Stasi in East Germany, which was praised by conservatives like John Podhoretz and William F. Buckley and called one of "the best conservative movies of the last 25 years" by the National Review for its account of surveillance by a communist regime. But Harry Caul is a devout Roman Catholic and an entrepreneur, making his living with the same technology and the same techniques as the Stasi spy of Donnersmarck's film -- capitalism alive and well. The film is something of a technological marvel itself: The great sound designer and editor Walter Murch was responsible for completing it after Coppola was called away to work on The Godfather, Part II, and the texture of the film depends heavily on the way Murch was able to manipulate the complexities of sound that form the key scenes, especially the opening sequence in which Caul is conducting his surveillance of a couple in San Francisco's crowded and busy Union Square. It's true that Murch cheats a little at the ending, when the line, "He'd kill us if he got the chance," is repeated. Caul had extracted it from a distorted recording, and took it to mean that the couple (Cindy Williams and Frederic Forrest) were in danger from the man who commissioned the surveillance. But at the end, the line is heard again as "He'd kill us if he got the chance," an emphasis that reveals to Caul, too late, that they are the killers, not the victims. It's unfortunate that so much depends on the discrepancy between the way we originally hear the line and the later delivery of it. Still, I don't think it's a fatal flaw in a still vital and gripping movie.

Bonnie and Clyde (Arthur Penn, 1967)

Calling a film a landmark, as Bonnie and Clyde so often has been called, does it a disservice in that it prioritizes historical significance over the aesthetic ones. It makes it difficult to appreciate or criticize the movie without recalling what it was like to see and to talk about the first time you saw it -- if, like me, you saw it in a theater when it was first released. It's a landmark because its success showed the Hollywood studios, which were mere surviving remnants of the old movie factories of the '30s and '40s, that there was an audience for something other than the big musicals and epics that had dominated American movies during the 1960s. There was a young audience out there that had grown up with the French New Wave and the great Italian and Japanese films of that decade, and was resistant to piety and platitudes. Along with The Graduate (Mike Nichols, 1967), Bonnie and Clyde gave this audience something they were looking for, and fed the revolution in filmmaking that made the 1970s one of the most adventurous decades in film history. It's no surprise that the screenwriters, Robert Benton and David Newman, were so familiar with the New Wave that they wanted François Truffaut or Jean-Luc Godard to direct their movie. And even today Warren Beatty, in the opening scenes of Bonnie and Clyde, is bound to remind one of Jean-Paul Belmondo in Breathless (Godard, 1960). It was a movie that launched the careers of Faye Dunaway and Gene Hackman, not to mention giving Beatty a boost into superstardom. It also put an end to some careers, most notably that of Bosley Crowther, who had been the New York Times's film critic since 1940 but was undone by his vitriolic attack on  Bonnie and Clyde, which he denounced not only in his initial review but also, after protests from the movie's admirers, in two subsequent articles. Crowther was replaced as the Times critic in 1968. On the other hand, Newsweek's critic, Joe Morgenstern, initially panned the film but, after being urged by readers to reconsider, recanted his original critique. So the question persists: Historical significance aside, is Bonnie and Clyde really any good? I'd have to say, after seeing it again for the first time in many years, that it holds up as entertainment. The acting is superb, and Burnett Guffey's cinematography, Dean Tavoularis's art direction, and Theadora van Runkle's costuming all provide a fine 1960s interpretation of 1930s style. Where it falls down for me is in substance: The screenplay, which was worked over by Robert Towne, is too preoccupied with Bonnie and Clyde as lovers with (especially Clyde) some psychosexual hangups. It only feints at demonstrating why the pair became cult figures in the Great Depression, most notably in a scene when Clyde refuses to take the money of a farmer who is in the bank they're robbing, and in a scene in which the wounded couple and C.W. Moss (endearingly played by Michael J. Pollard) stop for help at a bleak migrant camp. Only in scenes like these do we get a sense of the deep background of Depression-era misery, a fuller treatment of which might have elevated the film into greatness, the way Francis Ford Coppola's first two Godfather films  (1972, 1974) turned Mario Puzo's popular novel into an American myth. Otherwise, the criticism that it glamorizes the outlaws by turning them into fashion-model beauties still has some merit.