Word: hackmans
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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...
...Scheider, 39, got an Oscar nomination for playing Gene Hackman's buddy in The French Connection. The role in Jaws gave him a shot at shaking the sidekick image that had attached itself since then. A solid, working New York actor who did time with Joseph Papp's New York Shakespeare Festival and the Lincoln Center Repertory, Scheider keeps his roots firmly in the East. He has a farm in upstate New York and a part interest in Joe Allen's, an actors' hangout near Broadway...
FRENCH CONNECTION II. John Frankenheimer's jolting, street-tough companion piece to William Friedkin's original, this tune featuring Popeye Doyle (Gene Hackman) prowling Marseille, looking for the Frenchman who got away...
NIGHT MOVES. Gene Hackman again, this time as a former football player turned private eye trying to graft the pieces of his own past onto a missing person's case. Arthur Perm's sometimes sober, sometimes pyrotechnic film is a rather too eager attempt to lift the genre into the realm of metaphysics...