The Getaway
(Sam Peckinpah, 1972)
2 stars
Wow, Steve McQueen is a crappy criminal. During the course of “The Getaway”, he botches a bank robbery, loses the money to a second-rate con artist, tries to kill a guy by shooting him in the shoulder, manages to get every cop in Texas on his tail, stops at a restaurant while those cops are on his tail and finally, to evade capture, hides out in the back of a garbage truck.
How did this happen? It’s all wrong! This is Steve McQueen, we’re talking about here. The Steve McQueen. The ultimate badass, the king of cool. The guy who jumped the fence in the motorcycle, the guy who escaped the island prison camp, the guy who chased two crooks down the streets of San Francisco in a ’68 Ford Mustang. Isn’t there some kind of law against putting him in movies where he’s an incompetent idiot?
Listen to his brilliant plan for robbing a tiny, one-room bank in a small town in rural Texas: “The diversionary explosives are placed sixty seconds apart,” he says. Diversionary explosives? Has he seen this bank? (Rhetorical question – of course he’s seen the bank, he took about a million unnecessary photos of it and has a copy of the blueprints sitting behind him.) It’s tellered by little old ladies, for God’s sake. The security guard’s gun isn’t even loaded. Diversionary explosives are completely pointless. His partners understand this. “That’s a walk-in bank, man,” says Rudy (Al Lettieri, who played Sollozzo in “The Godfather”). Does it ever occur to Steve just how right Rudy is? No. No it does not.
Of course, after the plan fails (surprise, surprise!) and Rudy starts trying to kill everybody, etc., we're treated to scene after scene of criminal stupidity: Steve trying to kill Rudy by shooting him the shoulder. Steve trusting Ali McGraw with the money. Steve letting children on a train see his face. My favorite act of criminal stupidity was when he stops at a restaurant (not a drive-thru, mind you, but a sit-down restaurant) when every cop in the state knows who he is and what he looks like. Seriously, this is Darwin Awards stuff.
But it isn’t just that Steve McQueen plays a crappy criminal – that I could at least understand, if not approve. It’s that he plays a crappy criminal who thinks he’s the baddest kid on the block. All throughout the movie McQueen sports his trademark steely-eyed badass glare, even when he’s doing things like riding a bus back into the town he just shot his way out of. He never gives off the impression that maybe, just maybe, he doesn’t know what he’s doing. He’s playing his image in a role that’s the complete opposite of that image and it’s so jarring it’s painful. How painful? Knives on a chalkboard. A chalkboard with kittens on it. Cute kittens. (Imagine if Al Pacino had played the inept bank robber in “Dog Day Afternoon” as a sure, confident badass who knew exactly what he was doing, even when the cops had him surrounded, and you’ll have a good idea of what’s going on here).
What was Sam Peckinpah thinking? He was the most badass director ever, and here he’s given one of the most badass movie stars ever – and he makes him roll around in the trash with Ali MacGraw? I guess he was trying to demystify the Steve McQueen legend (he did call "The Getaway" his first attempt at satire), which I can appreciate. Of course, I can also appreciate the fact that it completely doesn’t work. I don’t know why. Maybe some stars are just immune to demystification. Maybe he was just too obvious about it (rolling around in the trash isn’t exactly subtle). Maybe someone should have told Steve McQueen, “Hey Steve, you’re not a badass in this one.”
Other casting mistakes hurt this movie. For example, Sally Struthers plays a woman that Rudy enlists to help him on his chase. Yes, that Sally Struthers. It’s more than a little bit creepy having to watch Sollozzo from “The Godfather” have sex with Gloria from "All in the Family." Plus Ali MacGraw just sucks. She plays Steve’s wife/escape partner, and we’re supposed to sympathize with her because this whole situation is putting a strain on their marriage or something, but we don’t because she just can’t act. At all. (At one point, she tells Steve “We won’t be the same anymore.” Really? I thought. You certainly don’t seem very distressed about it.) Thankfully there’s a nice scene where Steve McQueen pimp-slaps her. I like to think it’s because he’s tired of her sucking so much at acting.
But “The Getaway” isn’t a total loss. I liked the rural Texas atmosphere (you can tell that this movie wasn’t shot on sets in LA), and Peckinpah’s trademark bloody slow-motion shootouts are here in spades. The last shootout in particular is one of his best. (But even here you can see how inept Steve McQueen is. At least throw the bullets where he can’t get at them when he wakes up a few minutes later). Peckinpah was a great director and even his failures were infused with his uniquely dark, rebellious world view.
Who else could take the simple act of blowing out the headlights on an empty cop car with a twelve-gauge shotgun and make it feel like some sort of grand, exhilarating act of defiance?
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