Gene Hackman has been described as the great actor of the "everyman" and the "toughsubject " simultaneously. With nearly eighty films to his credit, he should also be remembered for his irresistible comic vision (The Tenenbaums), for his villainy contained to the disturbing limit of violence (Superman) or for his seismic energy unleashed without restraint, as we are reminded by the insane Clyde Barrow (Bonnie and Clyde) and the police dog Popeye Doyle (The French Connection).

But this portrait of the big guy with ordinary features would not be finished without bringing to the report another fertile vein of his degree program, perhaps a little less recognized but absolutely indispensable.

In the 1970s and 1980s, Hackman played a series of anti-heroic characters, seemingly skilled or even specialists, who became embroiled in conspiratorial or political plots from which they emerged tragically defeated.

This is very significant because one of the most frequent qualities of Hollywood cinema (assuming that a generalization of such magnitude can be proposed) is the active characterization of the protagonist, who acts in favor of just or, at least, logically motivated goals, achieving a usually positive effect on the world, on other characters or on himself.

However, the paranoid decade of American cinema called this axiom into question with several films of a pessimistic or disenchanted tone, such as. The Conversationby Francis Ford Coppola.

Harry Caul, the protagonist of this film, is an audio surveillance expert, permanently wrapped in a strange - eventually iconic - translucent raincoat. Filled with remorse for what he believes will be a murder facilitated by his work, Caul enters a network of false appearances of which he ends up the victim. Coppola himself apparently described Hackman during filming as totally collected in the loneliness and suspiciousness of his tormented spy, perhaps because the character was much closer to the person than the actor was willing to admit.

Along with a labyrinthine script and a deliberately unsettling editing, Hackman's muted performance -grayish, like almost everything else in the film- leads to total disorientation. Neither experience nor technical expertise nor intuition nor good intentions save the protagonist - nor the audience - from the trap.

Hackman also starred in The Night Movesan unexpectedly luminous neonoir only in the literal sense, because of its setting in Southern California and the Florida Keys. The film, in fact, moves in the most impenetrable moral darkness. Its protagonist, a hardened and increasingly disenchanted private detective, finds himself once again trapped in a network of deceit and personal failures, until a violent denouement reveals the futility of his efforts to make sense of and exert some semblance of control over the corrupt reality around him.

The inexplicably renowned From Prison to the Front Page (from the original The Domino Principle) took conspiracy theorizing to its paroxysm. Hackman plays an inmate mysteriously released from prison by an unnamed organization that recruits him to commit assassination. Hackman's role here acquired somewhat more heroic traits: motivated by the noble aspiration of recovering his wife and the life they had lost, the protagonist is armed with a certain moral autonomy, and even asserts his physical capacity against the anonymous agents who harass him. But the conspiracy's response is atrocious and implacable.

As one of the few visible faces of the antagonistic hydra - a haunting Richard Widmark - puts it, quoting directly from Kafka's The Trial: "K lived in a state of law; all laws remained in force... (laughing) You reminded me of him for a moment." In post-Watergate America, this is a portrait of the conspiracy as an almost divine power, omniscient and practically unlimited in its capabilities, a kind of absolute cause of history.

As entrance as the 1980s, Hackman co-starred with Nick Nolte and Joanna Cassidy in Under Firea political and journalistic thriller set during the Sandinista Revolution. In it, three reporters face impossible ethical choices, oscillating between compassion for the victims of oppression and abuse of the journalist's status.

The plot makes Hackman's character a scapegoat that the regime uses as a false test to gain the support of the U.S. government, in a direct criticism of its interventionist policies in Cold War South America. As the film's poster says, "the first casualty of war is the truth".

And in successive years, Hackman played supporting characters caught up in corrupt systems - the world of political consultancy service in Power or the corporate culture in The Cover-Up-. He also played political villains driven by a need to cover up their baser impulses, as in There's No Way Out y Absolute Power.

But this cycle of politically committed roles cannot be complete without the epilogue, or rather tribute, paid by Public Enemy to Hackman's own filmic persona.

In a sort of circular closure apart from his degree program, Hackman here plays Edward 'Brill' Lyle, a secondary character, almost purely instrumental but unforgettable, who becomes a reincarnation of Harry Caul but devoid of his tragic side.

An expert in surveillance, paranoid and isolated from the world, burdened by a dark past, Lyle ends up getting involved in the fight to thwart a political-technological plot that seeks to invade the privacy of citizens under the pretext of protecting national security. On the threshold of the new century -and therefore, of 9/11 and the war on terror-, the plot of Public Enemy would soon become prophetic.

The reclusive Harry Caul and Edward 'Brill' Lyle remind us of a Hollywood current that set out to critically explore the relationship between truth and power, and in which Gene Hackman played a leading role. As we bid farewell to the great "everyman," we can only hope that other extraordinary filmmakers and actors will come along to continue this noble cinematic tradition, which is also social, political and, in the last written request, human.