Word: hackman
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...Conversation. Gene Hackman turns in a masterful portrayal of a plodding, quiet and eerily suspicious bugging expert who is hired by he's not sure whom to spy on a couple that might be the victims (or the perpretrators) of who knows what hideous crime of romantic vengeance. This Francis Ford Coppolla movie--made back when he still had money troubles--works hauntingly on at least three levels. Metaphorically, it serves to highlight the pathologically paranoid mood of the last years of the Nixon administration and the Watergate coverup. Intellectually it goes deeper than this; Hackman pain-stakingly and convincingly...
...because Warner Brothers has the money to shove dolls, shirts, lunchboxes and ball-point pens into an already garish, mindless popular culture? John Williams has composed his worst and most blatantly derivative score, and among the actors, Brando is inexcusably wasted as Superman's father-saint, and Gene Hackman is embarrassing as the campy villain--is it possible that this once-gripping character actor has lost every drop of style he ever possessed, or was he just miscast in a role that cried out for a polished ham (a Brando, an Olivier, a George C. Scott)? Only Christopher Reeve radiates...
...Donner after The Omen, but it'll be good to have Brando back on the screen even if he's a bit blubbery and only on for a few minutes. I hear the approach is a little campy in places, and I'm not too eager to see Gene Hackman again after his Polish general (read with a hard 'g') in A Bridge Too Far. Margot Kidder looks like a cute Lois Lane, and they say Christopher Reeve really flies well, and the producers have spent more money so far on this film and its sequel (Variety says 60 million...
Just when he is getting Metropolis in shape, a real villain emerges in the person of Luthor (Gene Hackman), who lives in splendor 200 feet below Metropolis' railroad station. Luthor, who has a moronic aide (Ned Beatty) and a voluptuous moll (Valerie Perrine), is played strictly for laughs. He plots to set off an atomic device on the San Andreas Fault and thereby dump the California coast into the Pacific (he owns the land that will remain). "You've got your faults," he tells Superman, "and I've got mine...
...movie trudges toward Hackman's climactic stand against the Arabs, its few substantial themes are left behind in the dunes like exhausted Legionnaires. Hackman is pitted in an early sequence against a scholar from the Louvre (Max von Sydow), who believes that the recovery of a few life-enriching shards of history and art is well worth the loss of hundreds of Legion and Arab lives. "We're both in the grave business," sneers Hackman. "You dig them up and I fill them in." Later, Von Sydow seems to lose the thread of the argument and takes...