Crimson Tide: The message is authentic

The post-Cold War sub thriller may be more relevant today than it was 30 years ago. PLUS: My Top 10 Gene Hackman films!

Time has been on my mind of late, its relentless passage. Weeks now whip by so quickly that it always somehow feels like Saturday night becoming Sunday morning, the rapid turnover of days, that feeling of something being lost and starting anew. Over and over. It all makes me feel like lunging for an overhead grip, so better to hold on for my sheer life.

Time steamrolls over everyone. Ultimately in its dispassion it reduces us, no matter our lot. I am thinking of Gene Hackman, perhaps the greatest actor of his generation, stumbling about his New Mexico home, near death, his brain addled by disease. What an ignominious ending for a man whose work was always so tightly controlled, who strode through almost every film with a clear sense of purpose. Whose craft demanded you take notice of him. Not only to be Gene Hackman trapped in that circumstance but to not realize you are Gene Hackman. That from the late 60s to the early aughts, few could claim to be better than you and few gave audiences so much or worked as hard.

“I don’t deserve this,” Hackman’s Little Bill famously tells Clint Eastwood in Unforgiven.

“Deserve’s got nothing to do with it,” Eastwood’s character replies, bringing down the hammer.

Unforgiven came amid Hackman’s busy body of work in the 90s, a final hot streak in a career filled with them. That run included Crimson Tide, the 1995 techno-thriller that has aged better than it likely had a right to and, unfortunately, appears to be more relevant than ever given Russia’s newly aggressive global posture.

The movie, from the famed producers Jerry Bruckheimer and Don Simpson and the director, Tony Scott, who brought you gleaming cinematic machines such as Top Gun and Days of Thunder concerns a dispute aboard a U.S. nuclear submarine over whether to fire its missiles as part of an escalating crisis involving conservative rebels attempting to take power in the former Soviet Union.

Hackman is the no-nonsense, seen-it-all captain, a Cold War vet. Denzel Washington is his new executive officer. A few months ago with Spy Game, we discussed the “hand-off” movie, where an established star passes the torch to a younger generation, Crimson Tide is more a “face-off” film, which features of a test of wills between two stars of different ages and appeals. You go, in part, to see if the younger can hold his own against the older. (Spoiler: Yes, Denzel can hold his own. But you knew that.)

Its post-Soviet setting gives Crimson Tide a different context than dramas of its kind, but it’s basically a story that easily could have been set 10 years earlier. The plot still pushes the world to brink of a nuclear conflagration. The difference is that the trigger here is are more born of terrorism and instability than ideology — which has been an everpresent worry since the Wall fell. ¹

Even so, the 1995 timeframe gives the movie a welcome wrinkle. Hackman’s Captain Ramsey is a vestige of an earlier time, when nuclear subs prowled the seas to act as a deterrent. A combat-hardened commander, he is of the old world order, the one that was vaporized along with the Soviet threat. (“We’re here to protect democracy,” he says at one point, “not practice it.”) Washington’s Lt. Commander Hunter, on the other hand, is the epitome of the modern naval officer, down to his Harvard pedigree and his declaration, to a skeptical Ramsey, that the true enemy of war is “war itself.”

If you squint hard enough, you can see echoes of Bill Clinton in Hunter, the young upstart who displaced the steely Cold War veteran George H.W. Bush once the Soviet threat eroded. Hackman’s Ramsey has been ready to fire his payload for so long in defense of America that he never even considers whether he might be the aggressor in the situation.

RAMSEY: You do qualify your remarks. If someone asked me if we should bomb Japan, a simple "Yes." By all means sir, drop that fucker, twice! I don't mean to suggest that you're indecisive, Mr Hunter. Not at all. Just, uh... complicated. 'course, that's the way the Navy wants you. Me, they wanted simple.

HUNTER: Well, you certainly fooled them, sir.

RAMSEY: [chuckles] Be careful there, Mr Hunter. It's all I've got to rely on, being a simple-minded son of a bitch. Rickover gave me my command, a checklist, a target and a button to push. All I gotta know is how to push it, they tell me when. They seem to want you to know why.

HUNTER: I would hope they'd want us all to know why, sir.

More than anything, the movie just plays tremendously well. The tension between the two men is evident from the start, with the confident, even cocky, Hackman trying to dominate the wary and measured Washington. By that time in his career, Hackman had a deep bag of tricks as an actor, but I always come back to that soft chuckle of his, the one he utters when he thinks he has figured everything out. He believes he’s one step ahead, which amuses him.

And for Denzel, hey, if you want to tell me that he’s the greatest actor of his generation, you won’t get much of an argument from me. He’s certainly the most reliable movie star of his time, someone always watchable on screen, always delivering. His choices of material haven’t always been great, but that’s the movies for you.

But watch in Crimson Tide as he slowly turns from the affable officer just trying to get along to an uncompromising leader who has realized that he alone must make the biggest command decision any captain has ever faced. When he’s challenged, he tightens his jaw and glares, the spine turns titanium. It’s the Full Denzel.

The film takes an unfortunate turn near its end when it’s suggested Ramsey is (somewhat out of nowhere) a racist of some kind when he needles Hunter about prize Portuguese stallions that are “all white.” Until that point, it was easy to sympathize with the two leads, both of whom were trying to do what they believed was right – and if Washington’s race meant anything, it was a sign that the modern Navy had indeed become more inclusive. But that exchange pushes Hackman’s character unnecessarily into the stock villain category.²

That was, apparently, the doing of Quentin Tarantino, who was brought in to do some script doctoring. His work led to a longtime small-scale feud between him and Washington, although Denzel has never made clear what it what exactly it was about Tarantino’s additions that bothered him.

Hackman’s work here is so assured, so natural that when he loses his temper, it’s genuinely shocking. (“I’ve made the decision. I’m captain of this boat. Now shut the fuck up!”) It’s clear that something about Washington’s Hunter has, to use the modern parlance, triggered him and perhaps made him feel obsolete. At the end of the film, with Ramsey now disgraced, it’s amazing how Hackman seems to age precipitously, transformed instantly into the old soldier past his days.

This being a Paramount blockbuster from the 90s, the film is filled with actors who were about to break through. Chief among was James Gandolfini, playing one of the officers loyal to Ramsey. But along for the (boat) ride are Viggo Mortensen, Steve Zahn, even a young Ryan Phillippe.

I don’t really need to go on about this film. If you’ve gotten this far, you’ve probably fallen asleep to it on a Sunday afternoon more than once. But this time around was special and, at the end, I stayed focused on the final shot of Hackman walking out of the movie, his small terrier at his side.

For Gene Hackman, that’s the exit I would rather remember.

WHERE CAN I WATCH IT: Crimson Tide is rentable on all major platforms.

HEY ISN’T THAT: Yes, Jason Robards plays the admiral that brow-beats both officers at the end of the film. He went uncredited. Also, Daniel Von Bargan plays the Russian rebel leader, but unfortunately, I can only see him as George Constanza’s lazy boss in in the final season of “Seinfeld.”

ARMAGEDDON INDEX (7/10) Things get pretty on-the-brink.

DUST CLOUDS: Once the U.S. Navy discovered that the film’s story involved a mutiny about a nuclear submarine, it refused to cooperate with the project. That’s why the late TV reporter Richard Valeriani appears in scenes atop a French aircraft carrier, not an American one. (I assume the French Navy insisted on its ship being identified as part of the deal.)

WHAT ELSE I’M WATCHING: TV: The White Lotus (S3, MAX), Rake (S4, TUBI), Daredevil: Born Again (S1, Disney). Movies: A Complete Unknown (Mangold, 2024), Inside Llewyn Davis (Coens, 2013), Bite the Bullet (Brooks, 1975)

TOP OF THE POPS: The number-one song, according to Billboard, when Crimson Tide was released in 1995 was “This is How We Do It,” by Montell Jordan. (Which would apply to Hackman’s lectures to Washington.)

BONUS: My top 10 Gene Hackman films (don’t hold me to the order)

10) The Birdcage (1996): Hackman turns in a slow-burn but hilarious performance as a straight-laced conservative politician who becomes ensnared in Robin Williams’ scheme to hide his gay lifestyle. He takes a character who could have been a cartoon and makes him sympathetic.

9) Get Shorty (1995): Hackman’s gift for comedy has always been underappreciated. (Young Frankenstein, anyone?) As low-budget director Harry Zimm, he steals this endlessly watchable film.

8) Bonnie and Clyde (1967): The early supporting role that launched Hackman’s career. He was 36 when the movie was released and was in danger of never making it big at all.

7) Hoosiers (1986): You can debate whether it’s a “great” movie, but there’s no arguing how it has stood the test of time—even if its optics (the plucky white team beating the powerful urban black team) haven’t particularly aged well. You can sense Coach Dale’s desperation to prove himself again in almost every scene. (This film was the number-one pick for my law school roommate and me after a night out at the bars; I’ve seen the first 30 minutes maybe 100 times.)

6) Mississippi Burning (1988): Hackman picked up an Oscar nomination for this as a dedicated FBI agent who can turn on the good-old boy act when he needs it.

5) The Conversation (1974): Francis Ford Coppola’s paranoid thriller that was way ahead of its time.

4) Night Moves (1975): This movie has sometimes been hard to find — a sun-bleached 70s noir that like many films of that era offers questions that find no answers. Hackman’s exhausted, cynical performance as a burned out private eye is a revelation.

3) Unforgiven (1992): As noted above, just an iconic performance with Hackman dominating every seen he’s in, even with Eastwood.

2) The Royal Tenenbaums (2001): As I noted in my piece on Asteroid City, Wes Anderson’s films work better when there’s a sly operator who can add a little bit to his candy-coated confections. Hackman is nothing short of brilliant as the weasily but charismatic Tenenbaum patriarch.

1) The French Connection (1971): Could it be anything else? A masterclass in creating a compelling, driven and almost immoral and unlikeable protoganist. Few actors have ever matched Hackman’s intensity in the role. (Also, try to find French Connection II, which sets Popeye Doyle in Marseille and is much better and stranger than it had a right to be.) In my list, his two top roles are separated by 30 years.

HONORABLE MENTION: Downhill Racer (1969), Prime Cut (1972), Scarecrow (1973), Superman (1978), Under Fire (1983), No Way Out (1987), Twilight (1998), Enemy of the State (1998), Heist (2001). (Man, what a career.)

LAST ENTRY: Asteroid City (2023)

NEXT ENTRY: The Lives of Others (2006)

1. The demise of the U.S.S.R. was a great boon for Hollywood. Russians and other Eastern Europeans could now be repurposed from spy movies into all kinds of other dramas. Film and TV in the 90s made use of them as terrorists, drug kingpins, gangsters, etc. “He’s ex-KGB” became as much of a trope as whether Rachel loved Ross.

2. The cynic in me wondered as I watched the film whether the Trump White House would fire Hunter as a “DEI hire” or Hackman because of his experience. I decided Hackman’s red hat (for the U.S.S. Alabama) would probably have spared him.