Word: hackman
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Still, The Seven-Ups is by far the best of the current blotter of cop movies. It deals more directly than any, including Serpico (TIME, Dec. 31), with the criminal pathology of some police men. Roy Scheider, the leader of the Seven-Ups (and Gene Hackman's part ner in The French Connection), has just the right grave, anonymous face for the part, the right quality of eruptive violence. There are no heroes here. The movie has been made with the dogged intensity that cops can bring to their work, which explains why you have a feeling of having...
Lion (Al Pacino) is an innocent, and Max (Gene Hackman) a combative cynic of the open road. Like George and Lenny in Of Mice and Men−rather too much like them, in fact−Lion and Max fall in with each other while hitchhiking on a lonely country road. Max has spent six years in stir at San Quentin; Lion has been at sea in the merchant marine for five, fleeing the strangulating responsibilities of family and a 9-to-5 job. Lion is on his way to Detroit to see his wife and the child she was about...
...Hackman is fine as the snarling Max. Scruffy and bespectacled, he has a good time hunkering down into his characterization. But he gets in so far that no other actor can reach him. Pacino's characterization of Lion therefore remains unresolved. Hackman and Pacino never really react off one another because Hackman remains too selfabsorbed. The tension between the two actors is tangible and arresting, at least initially, but it eventually hobbles what small humanity the movie might have...
...Creative Management Associates, Sue Mengers is, in the rueful words of one of her ex-clients, "more powerful than the stars she handles." An overestimation, perhaps, but Mengers' list of personal clients is largely above-the-title: Barbra Streisand, Ryan O'Neal, Ali McGraw, Candice Bergen, Gene Hackman, Tony Perkins, Tuesday Weld, Directors Herb Ross, Peter Bogdanovich, Bob Fosse and Writer Gore Vidal, to name...
...particularly vicious to women, who are portrayed as woefully helpless, weepy creatures who would surely perish without men to pull them through. The actors generally do better by the script than it deserves. Stella Stevens, looking well used but winning, is genuinely touching, Shelley Winters engagingly hammy. Gene Hackman, who seems to have the lion's share of the bad lines, nevertheless acquits himself very nicely indeed. There is one scene in which he is required to pray to God, pleading with him and admonishing him, that Hackman, against all odds, manages to make believable...