Freedom chains in The Getaway (1972). When the film opens, Doc (Steve McQueen) is in his fourth year of a decade-long prison sentence for armed robbery. His parole is denied until his wife, Carol (Ali MacGraw), does some maneuvering (i.e., sleeps) with an influential parole board member (Ben Johnson) who grants Doc’s discharge on one condition: that he both organizes and takes an active part in a bank robbery. Carol and a couple of hired henchmen — one a dolt who can barely hold a conversation without pausing to brush his hair (Bo Hopkins), one prone to impulsive brutishness (Al Lettieri) — will fill out his “team.” Prison sentence aside, Doc and Carol are good at this kind of thing. The henchmen, though, are not, unable to finish the heist without unnecessarily killing a security guard and without some double-crossing.
The double-crosses will only multiply as The Getaway goes on; not even Doc and Carol’s marriage is safe. Yet this objectively twisty and action-packed movie manages to mostly be a bore. The only people in it who seem to actively have their hearts in the material is the assembly of colorful supporting actors who do not get to fill out the screen as much as MacGraw, a beautiful machine dispensing limp line readings, and McQueen, whose trademark cool-and-collectedness in this iteration is mostly better at suggesting disinterest. (Watching The Getaway, it’s no surprise that McQueen acted only a couple more years before deciding he’d rather that be his hobby and not the motorcycle racing that had until then been mostly a side gig.)
But you quickly lose interest in the character actors given the film’s other dominating side plot. It’s a misconceived, frankly unbelievable one where the henchman I described earlier as an impulsive brute takes hostage a veterinarian (Jack Dodson) — who at gunpoint tends to some fresh wounds — and his wife (Sally Struthers) en route to catch up with Carol and Doc. Ostensibly overcome with the world’s worst case of Stockholm Syndrome, the vet’s wife immediately starts an affair with the henchman that she flaunts in front of her husband. The wife character is written as little more than an empty-brained vixen who coos more than she speaks, the husband a basically silent cuckold. Scenes with the trio mostly just induce eye rolls.
Steve McQueen in The Getaway.
Sam Peckinpah, a filmmaker whose hardened movies always thump with luridly thrilling frissons of viciousness and misanthropy, effectively sets up and executes the film’s best action set pieces: a car chase where the usually chill-behind-the-wheel McQueen struggles through heavy plumes of smoke and fire and a civilian’s pristinely white front porch; a final shootout often suspended with well-deployed slow motion; an attempt to survive the inflexible churn of a garbage truck stowed away in. (Though the most exciting sequence in The Getaway is actually its least showy: the pursuit of a con man on a train by McQueen after the former has snatched the bag carrying neat stacks of robbery money.)
But you can tell, with the movie’s surfeit of dead air, that this isn’t material about which he’s that passionate. That hunch isn’t hard to confirm: Peckinpah was lured to the project as a way to get clearance for a more personal film, 1973’s Emperor of the North Pole, that would cruelly be taken away from him after he signed on to The Getaway.
The film was ultimately a box-office success; I watched it puzzled that anyone might give it the positive word of mouth that couldn’t escape the lips of the sparse theatergoers who showed up for McQueen’s last few movies. In The Getaway, the cool with which he’s associated does not seem that much different than symptoms of artistic rigor mortis.
Peterson Reviews 