Why Gene Hackman’s greatest performance was blocked by the studio

Posted On February 11, 2025February 11, 2025

Gene Hackman is the kind of actor who pretty much everyone can agree is excellent at his job. He might not have the blinding charisma of Paul Newman or the chameleon method skills of Daniel Day-Lewis, but he is, without question, one of the greatest actors of his generation. He began his career on the stage, getting his big break in Hollywood at the age of 37 in Bonnie and Clyde. By the time he starred in William Friedkin’s The French Connection in 1971, he was one of Hollywood’s most unlikely stars.

Throughout his career, Hackman was known for playing complicated, often morally dubious men. In The French Connection, for example, he plays an undercover narcotics officer who goes to extreme lengths to apprehend his targets. His dark, obsessive, often unlawful approach to his work makes him difficult to like or sympathise with, but all of that makes him a fascinating protagonist. Without the dreamboat looks of Robert Redford or Warren Beatty, Hackman could convincingly play the downtrodden everyman, the nondescript government bureaucrat, and the physically and morally ugly lawman better than just about any other star.

By the time he retired in 2004, the actor had earned two Oscars, one for The French Connection and the other for his role as a merciless sheriff in Clint Eastwood’s 1992 western Unforgiven. His filmography is full of classic movies and a handful of duds, but one film that few people know about and even fewer have seen contains one of his greatest performances.

1983’s Eureka stars the actor as Jack McCann, an ageing billionaire who earned his wealth as a gold prospector in the 1920s. Now living on his own island in the Caribbean, Jack is facing the worst ramifications of wealth and greed, including from those closest to him and the outside world.

On the face of it, Eureka should have been a shoo-in for Oscars, even if it wasn’t a sure thing at the box office. Directed by Don’t Look Now auteur Nicolas Roeg and co-starring Mickey Rourke, Joe Pesci, and Theresa Russell, it had all the ingredients to be a critical darling, but it hardly saw the light of day. Off of a budget of $11million, it didn’t even make back $200,000 at the box office.

The main issue was that MGM/United Artists baulked at the X-rating that the MPAA slapped on the film for its extreme violence. The company dragged its feet about releasing it, unsure of how to market it. Two years after it was finished, Eureka was quietly released under the United Artists Classics wing of the company and promptly bombed.

It’s strange that the studio would be so reluctant to let the film speak for itself. After all, movies about a ‘Great Man’ laid low by the poison of his own wealth tend to do well; just look at Citizen Kane and There Will Be Blood. But the company fumbled the opportunity, and as a result, Eureka is hardly known today. It might not be Roeg’s most artistically successful film, but even its failures are interesting. As for Hackman, he is more electrifying than ever. 

Roeg chalked it all up to a bad timing, which also happened to be the title of his previous film. “Financial considerations within the industry have taken entertainment, which means something that is emotional, cerebral, amusing, exhilarating, and made it mean simply distracting,” he told The Los Angeles Times while waiting for the studio to take the film out of distribution limbo. “But perhaps in five years, this will all be different, in that nothing lasts forever.” Four decades later, however, things do not seem to have changed in that regard.

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