Victor Davis Hanson

speaker

2,022 appearances 16 recordings 5 series first heard Dec 2024 last heard 23 Mar

Victor Davis Hanson’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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recordings per month · last 12 months

Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 4 in all, peaking in Mar 2026 with 2.

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The Victor Davis Hanson Show · History of Income Tax Amendment 16 and News of the Week · 1 Mar 2025 podcast

I like Gene Hackman a lot. He came to notice, and I'm just doing this because I didn't know what you were going to ask me. Bonnie and Clyde, that's when he really, he was... Wonderful in Bonnie and Clyde, but he came very famous with the drug movie, two of them, The French Connection and French Connection 2. He was Popeye Doyle and he was every man.

He was always, I think people have and the obituaries have called him believable. He did, I think it was with Al Pacino called Scarecrow. It was a really good movie. and he was kind of a protector of... There were two inmates, and he was kind of the rugged big guy that made sure that Pacino wasn't molested or taken advantage of, and he was really good in that.

He had a very sinister role in Unforgiven as the local sheriff that was a bully, and he was kind of a psychopath. He was building his retirement house, and Clint Eastwood comes in with Morgan Freeman, and they kill Morgan Freeman, and they whipped him, and then He was a psychopath. He had that great scene, kind of morbid scene, morbid. When he comes in, he thinks everybody shoot him.

And the character, once he gets alcohol, he reverts back to his natural proclivities as an accomplished killer. He's incompetent unless he drinks, but once he's, he doesn't care. So he's, Basically, nobody wants to shoot him. If they all shoot him, they're free. But somebody's going to die. And then they shoot him. I mean, they being Clint Eastwood shoots him. And he's on the ground.

And after he's killed everybody, he sees him twitch and he walks over. And he says, this isn't fair. I was Billy Niles. And he goes, whoever said anything about fair? And he finishes him off. And that was kind of weird. Remember Richard Harris had come in as, I think, Bob. What was it? Something Bob. He was a killer. And he was coming in.

The prostitutes had hired somebody to get even with a person who had disfigured one of the prostitutes. And then Gene Hackman kind of baited him as if they were friends. And then he just beat the crap out of him and almost killed him. So he was a bully, but he played it in a brilliant fashion. Everything he did was great. He was...

And then about, oh, I think Unforgiven was this last movie about 20 years ago in his early 70s. He just said, I can't do it anymore. And I think his point was, I'm forgetting lines now or something. I don't want to be remembered. So then he had a big estate in New Mexico. And he had a younger wife, as you said, 30 years.

So it's kind of odd because when I read this this morning and I'm speaking on a Thursday morning. they said there was no foul play. So he was obviously in very poor health from the pictures, at least of the last year.

So either he fell or maybe she fell, and that seems hard in the early 60s, but maybe she was injured and he didn't know what was, he was by himself or he didn't, or he fell and then she was trying to revive him. Who knows? But it's hard. I guess to anybody who reads a story, they can't make sense of it.

By the time you're listening to this, you will have the answers because they said there were blunt trauma. Well, nobody can commit suicide by blunt trauma to your head.

But they were in separate bedrooms, weren't they?

Yeah. You can see that he fell and then maybe trying to pick him up, she might have fallen. And that's the scenario where he fell in the bathroom. She tried to pick him up and hit her head and then was dizzy and went to lay down and then got a hematoma or something. But it's very tragic. It's very... Odd. So, well, and the dog was dead. Maybe he starved it. The dog wasn't fed or something.

But if you just ask the average person and say, you're 94 and your wife is 63 and you have a dog and you're all three going to be found dead in a week with blunt trauma. It's going to be, I think it has to be someone had an accident if it wasn't foul play. And it's apparently it wasn't. And then the other person tried to react to it and got incapacitated.

And then they weren't able to call somebody or feed themselves. And they got, I don't know. And then the dog was not fed or neglected. But it's really sad, but it shouldn't overshadow what was a great career.

He was from a very working class family. I think his father left him when he was 13, just got up one day and drove out, waved to him. See ya. So he was. Wow, that's sad. He was a self-made person.

He was kind of a crooked.

lawyer that at the end realized how flawed and terrible person he'd been and tried to do some good and knew he was going to be killed, but he allowed Tom Cruise's wife to be alive, to escape. Yeah, that was... Everything about him was... He was a great... He played a role that Sobalski in A Bridge Too Far, the Polish paratrooper, that they had a Polish airborne...

That according to the Market Garden, I'm doing this by memory, so the Market Garden plan was a flawed plan from A to Z. Terrible. Montgomery's disaster. He didn't get the harbor secured at Antwerp, but he did get on this crazy idea of leapfrogging into the Rhine across five bridges. But nevertheless, the last one at Arnheim... They were supposed to get there in 48 hours, but it was five days.

And so finally, the idea was to give the first British airborne reinforcements from a Polish division, but it was so foggy and they... landed him on the wrong side of a tributary, and it was just a screw-up because they came late because of the fog. They landed under difficult positions. They had to go across a river to help. They couldn't do it.

They almost got away, and he played that police general. People flawed him, and the reviews of that movie, I remember they said that his accent wasn't good. But he looked Polish. He acted Polish. I thought it was a good role. I thought he did a wonderful job. But I noticed later that for some reason, critics who didn't like that movie, I liked the movie.

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