The Many Faces Of Gene Hackman

In the late sixties and early seventies, a couple of brash young directors – including Scorsese, Coppola and Friedkin – single-handedly overthrew the American studio system with their raw films. The directors of New Hollywood, as the movement is called, also needed new faces for their realistic new stories. Enter Gene Hackman, the actor whose charming yet everyday appearance would prove in everything the opposite of the manicured Hollywood stars of the past. “He has bags under his eyes, and his face has caved in a bit,” film critic Pauline Kael wrote about Hackman. “Maybe that’s why when he lights up, it really means something.”

In this retrospective of Hackman’s diverse career, Lumière is screening three of his most striking works. In Francis Ford Coppola’s The Conversation (1974), Hackman plays the uptight wiretapper Harry Caul. He won his second Oscar for his role as a sinister and corrupt sheriff in Clint Eastwood's Unforgiven (1992). Lastly, there’s Wes Anderson’s The Royal Tenenbaums, one of Hackman’s last acting jobs, in which he masterfully plays the remarkable patriarch of the Tenenbaum family. And of course, his masterpiece and breakthrough: The French Connection.