Word: hackman
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...moviegoer can tell you, it's even harder to find much evidence of homosexuals on the Hollywood screen. The Birdcage, opening this week, is the rare exception. This gently supportive comedy about gays, a sweet parable of family values, has Robin Williams and Gene Hackman for star quality, writer Elaine May and director Mike Nichols to provide 80 years of comedy know-how, and a famous property for box-office insurance--the hit French play and film La Cage aux Folles. In short, this new version is no more threatening to mainstream American sensibilities than the pro-Indian Pocahontas...
...world's most gifted comics, Lane and Williams, as the drag queen and his slightly more butch companion. Lane is wildly endearing: a tempestuous wife, a doting mother and every inch the great lady. The film gets less comic mileage, but more political kick, from the right-wing politician (Hackman) who is the butt of the film's genial jokes. He might be Pat Robertson or Pat Buchanan on a bad day. In the mistaken-identity dinner party that serves as the film's third act, it is his function to be enlightened--not to forgive the gay couple...
DIED. EDDIE EGAN, 65, police officer/actor; of cancer; in Miami. As a New York City detective in 1962, Egan oversaw the famed "French Connection" heroin bust, which inspired the 1971 movie. In it Egan, portraying his boss, was cast opposite Gene Hackman, who won an Oscar for playing Egan. The real cop went on to play a platoon's worth of the Hollywood sort...
...collect some overdue debts. His pursuit of one deadbeat provides him with a pitchable story idea, while the pursuit of another one brings him into the presence of a producer and a star who, in his naivete, he thinks may be able to help him. Harry Zimm (Gene Hackman) may be a schlockmeister down on his luck, and Karen Flores (Rene Russo) may be famous mainly for the authentic terror with which she invests her screams, but Chili is still impressed; he knows their work...
...white world. Perhaps the actor has learned too well; he simmers handsomely but rarely displays the informed rage he showed in A Soldier's Story and Glory. In his box-office hits (Philadelphia, The Pelican Brief), Washington cedes the fiercer emotions to his co-stars. No surprise, then, that Hackman, as a sociopath, gets all the high notes and good lines ("We're here to preserve democracy, not practice it"). If the performance consists largely of Hackman briskly massaging his scalp every few minutes, that's his way of suggesting that Ramsey is trying to soothe or stir the demons...