Word: hackman
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1970-1979
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Harry Moseby (Gene Hackman) is almost indistinguishable from Novelist Macdonald's Lew Archer. Both are wearily honest Los Angeles private eyes, suffering the aftereffects of maimed childhoods but determined to remain loners in a corporate society. Archer's marriage, of course, went on the rocks before we met him, but Harry's is surely heading in that direction. Harry believes his wife (Susan Clark) may be fooling around. He shadows her like a suspect, confronts her like a criminal, and they make an uneasy peace. The main case Harry takes up, however, could have come straight from...
Which is fitting, because Gene Hackman paces through this film like a rush hour shadow, mustached and anonymous, sitting in his car playing magnetic chess, inconspicuous in a plain coat and tie. Hackman works wonders with a part like this: when he isn't cast as the big blustering shove-around of Popeye Doyle or Scarecrow, or squandered in a mistake like The Poseidon Adventure, he's our best interpreter of the middle-class presence: not the hero, or the anti-hero, but the unhero, making his own blind...
...Hackman is perfect at presenting the peripheral man, an identityless form floating around on the edge of things, affecting nothing. His character is nondescript enough to make way for tragedy--elements more powerful than himself can take over without a fight because he's doomed from the start. In Coppola's The Conversation. Hackman is totally subservient to the technology of his work: the bugging devices he plays with as vicarious life turn on him. They erase his sense of self so much that he begins to convince himself that he's being bugged. Finally, he doesn't have enough...
...Night Moves, Gene Hackman is Harry Moseby, also an observer. But the theme here is no private drama or study in paranoia; Moseby's problem is knowing where he's headed. A pro-football player turned private investigator in L.A., he's a failure to his wife, who when she can't reach him cheats on him, almost in frustration. He disrespects himself for hiring himself out on divorce cases, but he can't help it--the step-by-step of the process fascinates him, as though by compartmentalizing experience and solving things he's getting at the root...
Sharp's idea of transmitting this hard-to-pin-down moral environment is to write in punchlines that don't follow: and while Hackman's Moseby is asking incessant questions in his quest his subjects usually answer in strange, unhelpful ways. Sharp has rigged it, inevitably, so the women in the story are the most mysteriously evasive--when there are three or four of these mermaids tossing their hair the technique becomes sexist and tiresome. Worse yet are the strivings for novelistic originality. "Where were you when Kennedy was shot?" asks a character out of the blue. "Why?" queries Hackman...