ジーン・ハックマン：ベスト20映画

Gene Hackman: 20 Best Movies × × Skip to main content By Rolling Stone Rolling Stone View all posts by Rolling Stone February 27, 2025 Left to right: 'The Royal Tenenbaums,' 'The French Connection,' 'Superman' Buena Vista Pictures/Everett Collection; 20th Century Fox Film/Everett Collection; Warner Bros./Everett Collection He played cocky cops, doomed detectives, corporate fat cats, kindly coaches, and any number of Grade-A All-American assholes — both the sheer range and the overall reliability of the gentleman’s work over four decades is astounding. Yet the one thing the late Gene Hackman , who was found dead in his home in Santa Fe, New Mexico, on Feb. 26, never did was phone it in. He was an actor’s actor, the sort of performer who cut his teeth in theater and TV in the 1960s, alongside fellow future legends like Dustin Hoffman and Robert Duvall, fit in perfectly with the moody-antihero vibes of the 1970s, and excelled at playing powerful and flawed men in the Reagan era of the 1980s. There was something so natural about whatever Hackman did onscreen, whether he was screaming in fury or shyly giving an “aw, shucks” smile. Sometimes he even managed to do both at the same time. But his body of work attests to someone who was committed to not only perfecting the craft but also pushing himself forward in the name of always locating what made these people tick. The question was never whether Hackman belongs on the Mount Rushmore of Screen Legends. It was, to borrow the headline of Rob Sheffield’s appreciation : Was Gene Hackman a Great American Actor, or the Greatest American Actor? These 20 roles represent Hackman at his finest — from his breakthrough as part of the Barrow Gang to an aging patriarch conning his way back into his family. There will never be another star like him. ‘Bonnie and Clyde’ (1967) Image Credit: Everett Collection Hackman was just another working actor, alternating between theater gigs and TV series one-offs when he was cast in a small part opposite Warren Beatty in Lilith (1964); Beatty was so blown away by their scene together that he reportedly told director Robert Rossen, “I gotta not lose this guy.” Years later, when director Arthur Penn was looking to cast Clyde’s older brother, Buck, Beatty remembered Hackman — and the 37-year-old actor suddenly found himself co-starring in one of the defining films of the 1960s. From the second he shows up, affectionately mock fighting with his younger sibling, you get an incredible sense of the way that Hackman fills up the space onscreen. (He long credited Penn as teaching him to act to the camera.) His Buck virtually leaps over the teller’s window during their first robbery. And when it came time to film his death scene, Hackman rehearsed the moment by running around his motel room “on all fours, trying to emulate the movements of a bull that had been wounded in the back of the neck and is dying.” The result earned him his first of five Oscar nominations. A movie star was born. —David Fear ‘The French Connection’ (1971) Image Credit: ©20thCentFox/Everett Collection Before the 1970s officially become the decade of the antihero — and long before the “difficult men” of the Prestige TV era — there was Jimmy “Popeye” Doyle, a New York City cop willing to do whatever it takes to bust up the source of a transcontinental heroin-smuggling ring. Hackman knew the role would be dynamite, yet he was wary of glorifying someone so odious and outright racist. And director William Friedkin had planned on pushing Doyle to the outer limits of acceptability; the filmmaker later said that despite the fact Hackman had gone on ride-alongs with Eddie Egan, a.k.a. the real-life Popeye, his lead was so put off by the ugly places he had to go to that Hackman allegedly quit on the second day of production. He was eventually coaxed back, and struggled to find a way in to playing Egan until one day, he noticed the cop “dipping a cruller into a cup of coffee and then pitching it over his head. There was something in his attitude that made everything very clear: This guy doesn’t give a shit about anything except his work.” Bingo! The role won Hackman his first Academy Award. Everyone remembers the famous chase scene — the actor later joked that maybe the car should have won the Oscar — but Hackman is the engine that drives the whole movie. —D.F. ‘The Poseidon Adventure’ (1972) Image Credit: ©20thCentFox/Everett Collection This torrid tale of a capsized cruise liner is arguably the best of producer Irwin Allen’s 1970s disaster movies, which is a low bar to clear. (Though the movie did earn Shelly Winters a Best Supporting Actress nomination.) Hackman is an unorthodox priest who’s among the passengers aboard, and the de facto leader of survivors when the ship goes upside down. His main responsibilities include calming the more hysterical folks, counseling common sense, and engaging in screaming matches with Ernest Borgnine. More important, however, Hackman also gives us the perfect example of how a great actor can add depth and feeling to even the cheesiest of blockbusters. Late in the movie, his group comes across an entryway buffeted by steam; if he can shut the pipe down, everyone can get to safety. So the priest leaps, grabs a wheel that hangs above a fiery pit hundreds of feet below, and begins slowly turning it through brute strength. But all the while, Hackman is raging against the Almighty that would allow this to happen: “We didn’t ask you to fight for us, but dammit, don’t fight against us!… You want another life? Then take me!” And for one brief moment, you don’t feel like you’re watching a giant slice of B-list-celebrity cinematic Velveeta, but the story of a holy man raging against an uncaring God. —D.F. ‘Prime Cut’ (1972) Image Credit: Everett Collection “You eat guts.” “Yeah … I like ’em!” It takes a lot to go head to head with Lee Marvin in a tough-guy showdown, but damned if Hackman does not hold his own against the flintiest actor alive in Michael Ritchie’s highly underrated 1970s crime thriller. That above exchange happens early, when Marvin’s Chicago Mob enforcer decides to pay Hackman’s Kansas City, Missouri, slaughterhouse owner, inexplicably named “Mary Ann,” a visit — it seems a made man showed up dead in one of his processing plants, and the wiseguy wants answers. Things get rough, to say the least. Once again paired with the Downhill Racer director, Hackman was happy to take on the smaller, more villainous role because, according to Ritchie, he was more of a character actor at heart. Yes, he’d played the lead in some “New York street picture” that had not yet come out while Prime Cut was being shot, but that was likely a lark. It was called The French Connection and, well, you know the rest. Yet his turn in this pulpy crime flick is a perfect example of the way Hackman could turn even throwaway bits of business into showstoppers. Watch the way he winks at Marvin when he replies to that “guts” line. You understand just how powerful and sleazy this horrible man is in a single exchange. —D.F. ‘Scarecrow’ (1973) Image Credit: Courtesy Everett Collection “It was probably my favorite film to work on,” Hackman said in 1986 of this melancholy buddy comedy he made with Al Pacino. “It didn’t work too well at the box office.” No matter: Scarecrow captured the two acting icons back when they were still establishing themselves, fresh off their respective triumphs in The French Connection and The Godfather. But here, they’re scrappy and lived-in as two regular guys who meet in California as they’re both making their way cross-country, their futures hopefully brighter than their pasts. Hackman has rarely been lovelier than as Max, a volatile former convict who wants nothing more than to start a car wash in Pittsburgh. This is a minor-key movie that goes for big emotional moments, studying male friendship as a kind of oddball romance, and in the early 1970s one could have hardly asked for two better performers to portray the drifting, insecure tensions within modern young men. —Tim Grierson ‘The Conversation’ (1974) Image Credit: Everett Collection Harry Caul listens for a living. In the insular world of security and surveillance, the man is a living legend. But he’s an extremely private person, obsessive about keeping secrets and covering his tracks — he knows what happens when your private information goes public. Harry’s also guilt-ridden over what he does, because once upon a time, he took a job that cost folks their lives. And he thinks he’s about to make that same mistake once again. Made in the middle of Francis Ford Coppola’s 1970s hot streak, this portrait in Watergate-era paranoia presented Hackman with a huge challenge: How do you show a person slowly deteriorating when he spends his every waking moment meticulously hiding his thoughts and feelings? It’s one of the great interior performances of the decade — the 180-degree opposite of Popeye Doyle — with Hackman using that signature sunny smile as a shield and bristling ever so slightly whenever some tiny biographical fact is mentioned in casual conversation. Coppola said that he wanted the actor for the part because “he’s so ordinary, so unexceptional in appearance.” But this character study works because Hackman knows exactly when to blend into the background and when to let the cracks in this expert “everyman” snoop’s facade crumble before your eyes. —D.F. ‘Young Frankenstein’ (1974) Image Credit: ©20thCentFox/Everett Collection Having threatened Gene Wilder in the back of a getaway car in Bonnie and Clyde, Hackman and the comic actor became friends. One day, the two were playing tennis when Wilder happened to mention he was making another movie with Mel Brooks. Hackman excitedly asked if there was a small part he could play — which is how Brooks ended up casting the Oscar winner in an uncredited role as a blind hermit who takes in Peter Boyle’s bolt-necked creature. You don’t even have to know that th