Gene Hackman wasn’t bigger than life; he was exactly life-sized and his death at the age of 95 reminds us of his unbilled co-star in his greatest film, “The French Connection”: New York City.
“Life-sized” nicely explains the city we love and live in. It’s the most populous metropolis in these United States, true, a place with lots of landmarks and its share of grandeur, but the appeal of this place as a character in countless great movies and TV shows and books isn’t the tall buildings or bridge vistas; it’s the endlessly diverse and dynamic parade of people who walk its streets and the common spaces they inhabit every day.
Hackman’s “The French Connection,” made in 1971, knits such spaces into the fabric of the story: the streets of Bushwick and Ridgewood, the Marlboro Houses in Gravesend, the Triborough Bridge, Wards Island, and of course the underside of the Bensonhurst elevated subway where Hackman’s NYPD Detective Popeye Doyle in a civilian’s commandeered Pontiac chased the French hitman on the train (we won’t give away the ending).
That electrifying pursuit was filmed on busy Brooklyn streets without the proper city permits, and it was damned dangerous.
There are a couple of superficial parallels to the present day. One is police car chases: Once wild and fast, they largely went away before surging back in recent years. Another is drugs: The movie was based on a massive real-life 1961 heroin bust. Fentanyl and other opioids once again today have their deadly hooks in millions of lives.
But we’re a better city now: New York, with all its flaws, is much cleaner, more orderly, better governed than back then. And safer. In 1971 there were 1,466 people killed in the city of 7.9 million; 2024’s total was 377.
The most important constant over the decades is that all walks of people call this place home, and they bump into one another on the streets and in the subways. Then as now, this functions as a human particle accelerator, facilitating collisions with unpredictable outcomes.
That’s the inimitable New York that makes it a backdrop and a character in the best movies, from “Rosemary’s Baby” to “The Taking of Pelham One Two Three” to “Manhattan” to “The Apartment” to “Do the Right Thing” to “Taxi Driver to “When Harry Met Sally” to “Dog Day Afternoon” to “On the Waterfront” to “The Godfather.” And don’t get us started on TV.
Leading men don’t usually look like Gene Hackman. It’s not that he wasn’t handsome and charismatic and talented. He was all that, but there was simultaneously something wonderfully ordinary about his face, the way he spoke and the way he held himself.
New York projects itself so beautifully on screens big and small because, like Hackman, it has a real human face. When people around the world see our likeness, warts and all, they aim to plug their own rhythms and energy into the rhythms and energy that no place else can match.
RIP, Gene Hackman. Long live his co-star and the co-star of countless great works of art yesterday, today and tomorrow, the one and only City of New York. Take a bow.