In Christopher Nolan’s “The Prestige” there is a constant refrain that the fundamental object of magic, and thusly a magician - is to make the ordinary extraordinary, and then to make the extraordinary astonishing, that was what Hackman was to me, to us, to the craft. Intentional or not, like Nolan himself, Hackman understood on a near metaphysical level, that the power of this medium, this discipline, is in making a spectacle of the mundane. This brings me back to the second half of the aforementioned scene in “Unforgiven”, where after Hackman has made the tension disappear, he brings it back. Beauchamp is the instigator, of this event, but Bill is going to finish it. When Beauchamp asks what would happen were he to give the gun to English Bob, Hackman doesn't blink, literally or figuratively. “Give it to him” he clips. As Beauchamp slowly and carefully guides the gun towards Bob, and Bob cautiously moves towards it, Hackman now reveals the threat that lived under it all along. His eyes, face and neck finally move, and the implication is clear, Bob is a deadman if he so much as touches it. This is not the reveal of merely the threat, but the motivation that up until then had been somewhat mysterious. The buried lead? - This was not merely a demonstration of proof of philosophy, but of power. This is the big “tadah”. Like the sawed woman we know the impossible was not possible, the trick was to allow us to give in to fooling ourselves for just long enough to arrive at some joy, some sense of wonder, of astonishment. “You don't really want to know. You want to be fooled. But you wouldn't clap yet. Because making something disappear isn't enough; you have to bring it back.” explains Michael Caine's character John Cutter in The Prestige - this was an essential trait of Hackman’s magic, to being us back from the brink. To have us question, to interrogate, good and evil, to bring us back to ourselves. Hidden in every one of his mostly every-men, and his supposed simplicity, was the extraordinary in us. The way that he worked, the way he executed was vital to the creation of a career steeped in the magic of the everyday, and that was his legacy and that is his magic. RIP