There was a reasonSteve McQueenwas anointed the “King of Cool.” Idolized by men and adored by women back in the day, McQueen became a top box office star throughout the 1960s and 70s as the counterculture’s idea of an action star. LikeJohn WayneandGary Cooperbefore him, he gained fame by embodying the strong, silent type. But whereas Wayne and Cooper mostly played uncomplicated heroes, McQueen reflected the changing times by playing a more complicated antihero, someone with near antipathy towards acts of valor, who wasn’t above using violence in ways that weren’t necessarily noble. His star persona hit its apex withThe Getaway,Sam Peckinpah’s brutal, nihilistic heist filmthat was reviled in its time but has since been recognized as a classic of action cinema.
The Getaway
The Getaway follows Doc McCoy, a recently paroled bank robber, and his wife Carol as they attempt to flee to Mexico after a heist goes wrong. Pursued by both the law and criminal associates, the couple navigates betrayal and danger in their desperate bid for freedom.
What Is Sam Peckinpah’s ‘The Getaway’ About?
McQueen plays Carter “Doc” McCoy, a career criminal serving time in a Texas prison. His wife, Carol (Ali MacGraw), strikes a deal with corrupt parole board member Jack Beynon (Ben Johnson) to get her husband out of jail in exchange for him robbing a bank with goons Rudy Butler (Al Lettieri) and Frank Jackson (Bo Hopkins). The heist goes haywire when Frank kills a bank guard and Rudy kills Frank, only to be shot himself when he tries to kill Doc. Doc learns that Carol had been sleeping with Beynon and originally agreed to double-cross her husband after the job was done. But Carol turns the tables on Beynon, and she and Doc flee to El Paso with the cash, trying to outrun both a wounded Rudy and the police.
In hindsight,The Getawayfeels like an inevitable meeting of the minds between McQueen and Peckinpah, considering the paths their respective careers were taking. After rising to stardom withThe Magnificent Seven,The Great Escape, andThe Cincinnati Kid, McQueen achieved icon status withBullitt,playing an ultra-cool San Francisco police detective trying to take down a mob boss who killed a witness he was assigned to protect. Revered forits famous car chase— which played on McQueen’s own skills as a professional race car driver —Bullittcemented the actor’s screen persona: masculine, sexy, yet never one to take himself too seriously.
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The King of Cool had limits for what he was willing to do on film.
Peckinpah, meanwhile, had become a leading New Hollywood director withThe Wild Bunch, a revisionist take on cinema’s oldest genre: the western. Controversial for its bloody, slow-motion violence, the film spoke to audiences who were traumatized by televised images of the Vietnam War, and reflected a growing sense of hopelessness and irony throughout the country. Although Peckinpah and McQueen would first collaborate on the gentler, more amiableJunior Bonner(also released in 1972), it was withThe Getawaythat the two found a project that played to their unique strengths,one that would come to define their respective filmographies from then on out.
Steve McQueen’s Scandals Nearly Overshadowed ‘The Getaway’s Production
Tabloid fascination with movie productions is nothing new, and when it came toThe Getaway,stories about its productionthreatened to overshadow the film itself. Things got off to a rocky start before cameras even rolled, as original writerJim Thompson, who had been hired to adapt his own hard-boiled novel for the screen, was fired by McQueen and replaced byWalter Hill. There was also a game of musical directors chairs, as original helmerPeter Bogdanovich, who was in high demand followingThe Last Picture Show, left the production to makeWhat’s Up, Doc?. Peckinpah was brought in as a replacement, and McQueenclashed with him over his on-set drinking.
But what putThe Getawayon the scandal sheets wasan off-screen romance between the two onscreen leads. MacGraw, who at the time was married to Paramount Pictures chiefRobert Evans, began an affair with McQueen during production that led to the two getting married in 1973 (they later divorced in 1978). Speculation about whether the pair’s real life chemistry would translate to the screen undoubtedly led to ticket sales, and the film ended 1972 asone of the year’s top box office draws. It was a financial highlight for both Peckinpah and McQueen, who would struggle to regain that success for the remainder of the decade. (McQueen made only five more films before dying in 1980 at age 50, while Peckinpah directed six more movies before passing away in 1984 at age 59).
‘The Getaway’ Cemented Steve McQueen as the King of Cool
Although it was a big hit with audiences,The Getawaywasn’t exactly revered by critics, the majority of whom found it to be just another example of Hollywood’s growing obsession with violence. Indeed, the New Hollywood had kicked off with the blood-soakedBonnie and Clydeand had continued onward with the equally savageThe French Connection,Dirty Harry,and Peckinpah’s ownStraw Dogs.What critics particularly detested aboutThe Getaway, in contrast to those other titles, was how empty it seemed. AsRoger Ebert, who wasa big fan ofThe Wild Bunch,put it, the film was “a big, glossy, impersonal mechanical toy. It’s like one of those devices for executive desks, with the stainless steel balls on the strings: It functions with great efficiency but doesn’t accomplish anything. Click. Click. Click.”
Yetcontemporary assessment has improved, thanks in no small part toa detested 1994 remakestarring then-married starsAlec BaldwinandKim Basinger. What the original got right that the remake got wrong was its sense of desperation. Whereas Baldwin and Basinger’s Doc and Carol commit crimes for the fun of it, McQueen and MacGraw’s do it because life has left them no other choice. When you live in a world of violence — as America in the 1970s was increasingly becoming due to Vietnam War protests and backlash to the Civil Rights Movement — how else do you respond except with more violence?It’s little wonder the cynicism ofThe Getawayspoke so strongly to audiences in its time,in much the same way McQueen’s too-cool-for-school persona did.
For McQueen,The Getawaybuilt upon the star persona he had already established inBullitt,taking it a step further to create his coolest and most violent performance.Whereas Frank Bullitt had the law on his side, Doc McCoy acts without impunity, killing at will and running away with the money. Yet, despite being a criminal, he still has a code of ethics he lives by, in stark contrast to the totally amoral henchmen he’s working with. He might be a bad guy, but he was at least a bad guy you could root for. It takes a special kind of movie star to make audiences relate to a character as unscrupulous as McCoy, and McQueen was certainly that special of a star.
The Getawayis available to watch on Prime Video in the U.S.
