Arthur Penn and Gene Hackman mellowed with age together
From Bonnie And Clyde forward, the iconoclastic filmmaker and his frequent star weathered three decades of change.
Photo: Warner Bros.
Gene Hackman was everywhere. He didn’t make it big in movies until he was nearly 40, and retired from acting a full 21 years before his death at the age of 95, yet during those roughly four decades on screen, he kept so busy that he must have seemed inescapable to any movie-watchers born between about 1930 (also Hackman’s year of birth) and sometime in the early 1980s. He was a workhorse, sometimes close to literally. The campus comedy PCU has a running joke about a thesis that attempts to prove that no matter what time of day, you can find a movie starring Hackman or Michael Caine playing on TV. Within a year of PCU‘s spring 1994 release date, Hackman appeared in three Westerns.
Westerns seemed to be a favorite of Hackman’s; he appeared in a lot them for an actor working primarily after 1970, though there were certain other genres he seemed to gravitate towards, like political thrillers, legal dramas (including three different John Grisham adaptations), and movies with some military connection, reflecting his own service in the Marines just after World War II. He worked with a few directors more than once, but Hackman often seemed more attracted to those certain types of material than particular filmmakers. But once a decade, Hackman made a movie with director Arthur Penn, each in a different genre: The crime picture Bonnie And Clyde (1967), the neo-noir Night Moves (1975), and the spy thriller Target (1985).
Like Hackman, Arthur Penn was ex-military, and worked in theater before moving into film as he approached middle age. Both had their attentions shift away from the stage thanks to the success of Bonnie And Clyde—though Penn was more established than Hackman in 1967, having received a Best Director Oscar nomination five years earlier for The Miracle Worker, the film version of the Helen Keller biographical play (for which Penn won a directing Tony a few years before that). The sturdy, unsurprising filmmaking of The Miracle Worker doesn’t exactly portend a future grappling with elements of counterculture, generation gaps, and Vietnam War-era disillusionment, but that very much became Penn’s bag as he followed the landmark Bonnie And Clyde with the draft-dodging shaggy-dog tale Alice’s Restaurant (adapted from the Arlo Guthrie song) and the revisionist western Little Big Man—movies that engaged with myths and realities of American history and its then-present.
Photo: Warner Bros. Pictures
Even in the context of Bonnie And Clyde as a galvanizing New Hollywood document, Hackman isn’t presented as a young buck riding a wave of change. Literally, he’s an older Buck: Seven and 11 years senior to stars Warren Beatty and Faye Dunaway, respectively, he plays Clyde’s big brother Buck Barrow, who joins up with the outlaw couple, much to the chagrin of his prim preacher’s-daughter wife Blanche (Estelle Parsons, even older than Hackman). Many of Hackman’s later movies would trade on his ability to project authority, which is not a characteristic Buck especially boasts; his reunion with Clyde is barely verbal, as the brothers raffishly embrace and grapple, seemingly papering over how little they actually have to say to each other.
It’s an odd part to lead to Hackman’s first Oscar nomination and, essentially, his entire subsequent Hollywood career. Buck Barrow doesn’t have the youthful bravado of his younger brother, nor the moral authority to shut down the criminal activity; despite his age, he’s like a kid brother eager for the good times to keep rolling. That in-between quality likely contributed to Hackman’s firing from The Graduate, where he was to play Mrs. Robinson’s husband. (Dustin Hoffman, it should be noted, is the same age as Beatty, and playing nearly a decade younger than his real age in The Graduate, so some of the mismatch was a simple math problem.) Eight years later, after The French Connection, Hackman had even more credibility as a tough, flinty crime-solver, which Penn’s Night Moves simultaneously uses to its advantage and grimly subverts.
Photo: Warner Bros. Pictures
Hackman’s Harry Moseby is an experienced private detective, by most appearances unflappable. He’s also, by the end of the movie, wholly incapable of resolving the central mystery to anyone’s satisfaction. As with Bonnie And Clyde, the crimes are resolved with multiple deaths, rather than the appearance of justice.
Arthur Penn (along with, of course, the screenplays) gives Bonnie And Clyde and Night Moves a self-awareness about the history of their genres. Bonnie And Clyde updates the classic Warner Bros. gangster picture for a new age, expanding the edges of the frame to accommodate both slapstick and gruesome violence, and emphasizing the images that its outlaws project into their Depression-wrecked world, perhaps as a way of disassociating from the more horrific effects of their actions. “We rob banks,” they say with cheeky pride, but they do also shoot some people in the face. Night Moves, meanwhile, takes place on the edge of the movie business, with Harry hired to locate the daughter of Arlene Iverson, a minor actress now retired. At one point, audio background notes robotically trace the arc of Arlene’s career, from contract player to handful of starring roles for her producer husband to retirement, child-bearing, and divorce, bridging the gap between classic Hollywood noir of the 1940s (which Arlene clearly has in mind when she discusses her case with Harry) and the movie’s present of the mid-’70s. Later, Harry watches playback of an on-set stunt gone wrong, and his stunt coordinator pal locates the disaster that unfolded while doing what he calls a “Keystone Kops”-style car gag, a style that also inspired some of the mishaps in Bonnie And Clyde, as when the pair’s getaway driver mistakenly parks the car rather than leaving it running. In both cases, the antics turn bloody by the end.
Anyone familiar with Hackman will likely find him “cool” in Night Moves; his no-nonsense, plainspoken, and utterly believable acting style makes him a potentially ideal movie gumshoe. (It’s similar to why he made a great David Mamet lead a quarter-century later.) Yet Moseby—going by Hackman’s real age, a Silent Generation type, rather than a still-youthful Boomer—is less a Bogart throwback than a man slightly out of step with his time. Again movies serve as a signpost; invited to go see a new Éric Rohmer movie with his wife, Moseby says that he’s seen another Rohmer film, and it’s “kinda like watching paint dry.” Hackman delivers the line with such warmth and charm that it almost sounds self-effacing, a neat trick that downplays, rather than highlights, Harry’s relative squareness. This isn’t Elliot Gould’s hipster riff on Philip Marlowe in The Long Goodbye; Hackman doesn’t exactly play Harry as a stick in the mud, but he’s living on borrowed time nonetheless.
In large part because of Hackman’s snap in the face of long odds, Night Moves works fine as noir, even as the mystery develops at a more languid, Me Decade pace. (There are few 1940s noirs where the detective hangs out in a Florida bungalow for several days.) On paper, its bleak ending, which sees a critically injured Harry on a boat literally moving in circles after learning the identity but not the precise motivations of the guilty parties, isn’t so far off from its 1940s ancestors. But as that boat circles, the movie’s lingering, unsettled sense of post-Watergate malaise creeps to the fore. It’s not as grabby an ending as Bonnie and Clyde getting brutally shot up on the side of the road, but it’s a more fitting one for an actor like Hackman, who didn’t need to embody the fecklessness of youth to comment on the changing times.
Arthur Penn more directly addressed the social turbulence of the ’60s and ’70s in his little-seen drama Four Friends, and while it’s hard to say it suffers from a lack of Hackman—he was, in 1981, decades too old for any of the principal roles who age from teenage to twentysomething, while still not quite right for the immigrant-dad of Craig Wasson’s character—it sure doesn’t benefit from an excess of Wasson, or anyone else in the slightly hazy cast. A few years later, Hackman was ready to parent his way onto the older side of a generation gap in his final film with Penn: Target, which doesn’t precisely do for the spy thriller what the previous Penn-Hackman movies did for their respective genres. The movie starts off resembling a domestic drama, with Walter Lloyd (Hackman) struggling to connect with his college-aged son Chris (Matt Dillon), much less dissuade him from his plan of lackadaisically pursuing stock-car racing in place of higher education. Then Walter’s wife and Chris’ mother disappears on a trip to Paris, and when father and son head overseas to find her, Walter (eventually) reveals that he’s an ex-CIA operative, and he suspects that his wife has been nabbed for revenge. He and Chris team up to track and rescue her.
Photo: Warner Bros. Pictures
Target anticipates a number of contemporary movie tropes, most commonly employed these days for starry caper comedies where it turns out mom and/or dad are highly trained spies/assassins/whatever (see Back In Action, Role Play, etc., but really, don’t). Though Target doesn’t aim for comic irreverence and clearly takes its characters seriously, it’s very much a semi-preposterous thriller first and a generational-divide drama a distant second, maybe third. On a technical level, it has little of the forward-thinking, French New Wave-influenced editing that made Bonnie And Clyde so visually arresting in 1967, nor does the cinematography match the shadowy intrigue or California shimmer of Night Moves, which so often catches characters through glass or in mirrored reflection. Much of Target, by contrast, looks overlit and a little drab (another way that it’s of a piece with contemporary cinema). It’s as if Arthur Penn is adjusting to the kind of movie Hackman might have been expected to make in 1985, well into the post-blockbuster era, rather than using his directorial presence to shape some kind of commentary on the genre or the American mood. Halfway through the Reagan years, and nearly at the end of Penn’s movie career, maybe the director was simply getting with the program, sending a good-guy CIA retiree into Europe to make things right. Certainly the movie feels vastly less cynical about Walter than Night Moves ultimately does about, well, everyone.
Despite the flimsiness of Target itself, Hackman’s performance is detailed and believable in a typically unfussy way. It would be easy enough for him to play a stern authoritarian, barking orders at his slack son during a ridiculously tense situation. (Chris’ decision to embark on a romantic affair in the midst of his mother’s kidnapping case probably warrants a Crimson Tide-style dressing-down.) Yet this is probably the warmest of Hackman’s three performances for Penn, refusing to take his natural authority for granted even in a slightly dopey spy movie. Strictly speaking, the movie probably doesn’t need the scene where Walter and Chris lightly squabble while on a fishing trip, ending with Walter attempting to reel in Chris’ tricky fish only to have the line snap on him. But it’s the kind of moment that might have fit into any number of Penn’s earlier movies, so why not?
Still, it’s easy enough to read Target as Penn going through the motions and occasionally deepening his movie’s central relationship, no longer up for the task of steering something genuinely iconoclastic. Penn’s movie-directing career finished up two films and four years after Target with a poorly regarded Penn & Teller movie—an ignominious enough end that Quentin Tarantino made him a go-to example of why he has to make sure to curate his final film so carefully. Hackman continued for another decade-plus, and if Welcome To Mooseport is a similar shrug of a final film, he had several fitting swan songs earlier, with Heist and The Royal Tenenbaums coming out in close proximity in 2001. That old in-between, Silent Generation sensibility—neither Greatest Generation war hero nor Boomer-style hero of his own story—kept serving him well as he weathered several more generations of change. His most frequent director, however, despite his earnest interest in the redefinition of classic American stories like Bonnie And Clyde, wound up feeling more like Harry Moseby: smart enough to figure it out, but ultimately unsure of how to do anything else, except survive.