Hackman: A Capper for a Craftsman

By RICHARD CORLISS

Rumpled and lumbering, with a line of patter as weary as his smile, agent Rupert Anderson looks miscast as a male Mata Hari. Yet here he stands in Mrs. Pell's hallway, romancing the sad beautician in hopes of securing testimony against her husband. It seems a cruel bit of FBI sleuthing -- until Anderson steals a glance at her hair. The glance passes as quick as guilt and as long as longing. From it we learn that Anderson knows more about women than we thought, and feels more for this woman than he should.

This privileged moment from Mississippi Burning comes courtesy of Gene Hackman, the movies' modern Spencer Tracy. "Gene is a colossally subtle actor," says director Alan Parker. "He knows what not to do. Like Tracy, he doesn't talk about what he does; he just does it." Hackman, 57, has America's face, a body that has absorbed its share of life's shocks, a heart that has taken a licking and keeps on ticking. He can play the stern father or the doting uncle, a bad cop or a top sergeant, your best friend or the man you wouldn't wish on your worst enemy. As agent Anderson, Hackman plays what he is: the average Joe's best image of himself.

Hackman thinks of himself as a craftsman in an honored, perhaps vanishing tradition. "All of us," he says, "from ditchdiggers to bus drivers to shoe salesmen, have a need to create something. I'm blessed that I found a profession that lets me do so. Once in a while, a piece of artistry flows by me or through me, but it's a mistake to think of myself as 'artistic.' It looks relaxed, easy, but I work very hard."

No lie there: he must spend more time acting than Michael Caine put together. This fall, five Hackman films were released. "I'll take what's offered me," he says, "as long as it falls into certain parameters. I'm not going for the home run every time." Sometimes Hackman has hit bunt singles in a movie resume as long as a Chicago Cubs season. Yet he projects such solid authority that not even junk can embarrass him. "I actually think I've been lucky," says the star who can't say no. "Working constantly not only keeps me sharp, but relieves me of the responsibility of having to perform up to a certain level if I had been waiting for the 'right' role."

Hackman learned a lot, the hard way, before he ever stepped in front of the camera. His father, a newspaper pressman in Danville, Ill., beat young Gene. "Though he left town when I was 13," Hackman recalls, "he'd drift back periodically to disrupt things. I was so shy that I never dated in high school. Sexual frustration, plus my unwillingness to live up to my mother's expectations or to be a father to my younger brother, gave me more than enough reasons to get out of town and join the Marines." His lone consolations were a doting grandmother -- "a great gal, a storyteller, a sanctuary" -- and the movies. "When I'd walk out of the theater, I knew I was really Errol Flynn or James Cagney. And kids from disturbed environments visualize what they feel is the perfect life. Through acting they can realize their fantasies, recover their lost dreams."

They must have seemed pipe dreams at the Pasadena Playhouse, where Hackman took acting classes in the mid-'50s; the school voted him, and fellow student Dustin Hoffman, Least Likely to Succeed. A decade of small parts and menial jobs kept him going until 1964, when he scored in the Broadway comedy Any Wednesday. Three years later he made a screen impact in Bonnie and Clyde, and Hackman could finally support his wife Faye and three children from his actor's earnings. The couple were divorced in 1985, after 30 years of marriage. "Acting is a selfish profession," he says. "You have to be selfish with your time, your demeanor, your thoughts, and hope the people around you won't suffer too much."

Of his 50 pictures, Hackman rates six as really good: Bonnie and Clyde (Buck Barrow, Clyde's elder brother), The French Connection (an Oscar as New York cop Popeye Doyle), Scarecrow (on the road with Al Pacino), The Conversation (Francis Coppola's study of a lonely surveillance expert), Under Fire (as a TIME correspondent in Nicaragua) and Mississippi Burning. His FBI agent bears traces of early Hackmen. Anderson, like Buck Barrow, repeats favorite anecdotes and plays dumber than he is; like Popeye, he wears stumpy ties and catches bad guys on his own obsessive terms. And at the end of each sentence you hear the Hackman laugh: nervous, infectious, conspiratorial and, at bottom, lethal.

Hackman can laugh all the way to the bank; at almost $2 million a picture, $ the money adds up. But even a workaholic must hear the ticking of a gold watch in his future. "There's a big part of me that wants to quit," he says, "and I'm listening more and more to that voice. But I tried pulling back before, after Superman in 1978, and found out there wasn't much else I was suited for." That's O.K. Hackman's job -- and his capstone role as Anderson -- fits him as snugly as the gray suits on the firm body, as perfectly as the mantle of Spencer Tracy.

With reporting by Elaine Dutka/Los Angeles