Gene Hackman

Downhill Racer

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Chappellet in helmet and goggles

Roman Polanski was meant to direct Downhill Racer but producer Robert Evans diverted him on to Rosemary’s Baby instead. So here’s Michael Ritchie’s pass at the same material. The former TV director does a good job, and let’s face it Rosemary’s Baby needed Polanski. Good jobs are done all round in fact. Mostly by Robert Redford, actually acting against type for once rather than just smiling and looking handsome, playing a skier who is part of the US effort to bust apart European dominance of winter sports. The thing about Redford’s Dave Chappellet, though, is that he’s not a team player. Nor, depending on how you look at it, is downhill skiing really … Read more

Night Moves

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Gene Hackman as Harry

Arthur Penn’s 1975 movie Night Moves sits snugly alongside two other films made about the same time – Polanski’s Chinatown (which went into production in the same month in 1973) and Altman’s The Long Goodbye, which had opened earlier that year. All three are neo-noirs recalling the era of Raymond Chandler, Sam Spade and Humphrey Bogart. Of the bunch only Chinatown was a proper box office and critical hit, and even then some critics were a bit sniffy (the New York Times didn’t go a bundle). Since then, The Long Goodbye has been rerated upwards to join Chinatown in the pantheon, and now it looks like Night Moves is also in the process … Read more

The Poseidon Adventure

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Gene Hackman and the cast of The Poseidon Adventure

A movie for every day of the year – a good one 23 April Ronald Neame born, 1911 On this day in 1911, a remarkable figure in cinema was born. Ronald Elwin Neame lived until 2010 and in his time was a cinematographer, a producer, writer and director. There are probably plenty of people who could line up a similar list of credits. But Neame was a cinematographer on Powell and Pressburger’s One of Our Aircraft Is Missing, a producer of Oliver Lean’s Oliver Twist, the writer of Lean’s Great Expectations and the director of The Poseidon Adventure, each one of them an important film, for different reasons. He also directed Judy Garland … Read more