The Getaway

Every film has its own history. From the completion of the post production, when positive prints are made from the original negative, to initial release when the prints are distributed to a certain number of theaters in a certain number of cities, to the end of the film's first run, when the prints are returned to the production company. The only difference between now and then is that instead of reels of 35mm film to be mounted on a projector, special multi-layered digital discs are distributed to theaters. The reels of film or the discs are returned to the production company, they are destroyed and the negative is stored in a vault.

Such was the fate of the 1972 film The Getaway, starring Steve McQueen and Ali MacGraw. It was the second-highest grossing American film in release in 1973, and was the biggest hit for its director, Sam Peckinpah. But it received unfavorable reviews from the critics. The Getaway started out as a novel by Jim Thompson published in 1958. Steve McQueen, who owned the rights to a film adaptation, brought Jim Thompson on board to write a script that was to be directed by Peter Bogdanovich, but disagreements led to the exit of both Thompson and Bogdanovich. McQueen was a big enough star at the time that he could call the shots. Walter Hill was hired to write a screenplay and Sam Peckinpah, who had worked with McQueen on Junior Bonner the year before, was the director. Only McQueen had approval of the final cut, which bothered Peckinpah enough, on one occasion, for him to take out a full page ad in Variety thanking Jerry Fielding for the music he wrote for the film, which didn't satisfy McQueen. Quincy Jones replaced him.

Sam Peckinpah was no studio stooge. Stanley Kauffmann wrote of him: "He is not an oblique puritan, he is a talented maniac who loves his bloody work. And the work is significant."(1) But that was The Wild Bunch. Something as yet undefined inspired Peckinpah to go above and beyond conventional expectations of an American film. Ride the High Country, his second feature film, is a classic of its kind, but it's still well within the boundaries of the Western genre. The Wild Bunch, his fourth film, vivisected the genre and found its beating heart. Kauffman noted that its use of violence called to mind Antonin Artaud's Theater of Cruelty. Pauline Kael was evidently so overwhelmed by Straw Dogs, Peckinpah's 6th film, that she was moved to write, "The siege is not simply the climax but the proof, and it has the kick of a mule. What I am saying, I fear, is that Sam Peckinpah, who is an artist, has, with Straw Dogs, made the first American film that is a fascist work of art."(2)

In The Getaway, Steve McQueen plays Doc McCoy, whom we first see not adapting very well to life in a Texas prison. His wife Carol, played - improbably - by Ali MacGraw, visits him and he tells her, from his side of the cage, to do whatever she has to do to get him out. She succeeds, on condition that he pull off one more heist for Jack Beynon, a San Antonio crime boss (Ben Johnson, a crime boss who wears a cowboy hat). The heist is put together so mechanically by Peckinpah (it reminded me of Kubrick's equally overwrought heist at the heart of The Killing), in such preposterous detail that it comes as no surprise when almost everything goes wrong. When it's over, with only Doc and Carol surviving (Rudy is left for dead), Doc goes to Beynon's house to give him his cut. What he doesn't know is that Carol is then supposed to shoot him in the back, as arranged by Beynon. She shoots Beynon instead, which justifies the remainder of the protracted "getaway."

The bank robbery takes up far too much time - its planning and execution are so carefully laid out for no appreciable reason. It isn't Fort Knox - it's only a savings & loan with one old security guard. There is a genuinely suspenseful sequence aboard a train. And the garbage truck scene is somewhat scary, but only because delicate Ali MacGraw is inside it. Watching her and McQueen together makes one wonder what the attraction was - I mean, other than sex. And not just from her perspective. What was McQueen doing with this beautiful girl who belonged on top of a Christmas tree, not in a heist movie? Sally Struthers, before All in the Family made her immortal, is just another excuse for Peckinpah to show us his misogyny. I mean, who wasn't relieved when, screaming "Rudy! Rudy! Rudy!", McQueen knocked her out with a left jab?

When location shooting started, MacGraw was married to the producer Robert Evans. She and McQueen hit it off during shooting, and it shows onscreen. Although McQueen was known to be physically abusive, MacGraw's vulnerability brings out an unexpected tenderness in McQueen in other scenes, like the one in which they make love after McQueen's release from jail, and he finds that not being with a woman in three years has made him momentarily impotent. MacGraw's patience patience in the scene is touching.

Clearly, Peckinpah wasn't inspired when he made The Getaway. Even the violent scenes feel puffed up - the slowing down of the action that seemed to contribute another dimension to The Wild Bunch seem here to be nothing but highlighting. McQueen slaps Ali MacGraw repeatedly and knocks Sally Struthers out cold, just like a hardened criminal like his character should. But Peckinpah was angered by McQueen's choice of shots, showing him off from his best angles. Two scenes in particular, one inside a garbage truck trash-masher, and the final shootout in an El Paso hotel (or was it a motel?) are utterly gratuitous. And the sickly sweet happy ending, with the couple shuffling off to Mexico - some kind of ultimate sanctuary for Peckinpah's heroes - is unearned by these unlikely partners in crime.

But all this would've been academic had it not occurred to a team of idiots to remake The Getaway in 1994. When a different team of idiots remade the Charles Bronson film, The Mechanic, in 2012, I wrote: "Contemporary American movies are so uniformly execrable that they make even the trashiest movies of the past seem splendid." The remake of The Getaway didn't make Peckinpah's film seem splendid, but it did give it almost iconic status among critics anxious to show off their comparative cinema skills. Alec Baldwin can't even act tough convincingly. Perhaps worried about his image, it's Kim Basinger, as Carol, who knocks out Rudy's girlfriend in the hotel scene. Compared to the remake, Peckinpah's The Getaway is what it always was - a competently-made heist movie. Trash, but skilfully made.

Peckinpah needed a hit when he made The Getaway and he got one. Just as the critical attention that his TV production of Noon Wine led to his contract to make The Wild Bunch, The Getaway gave Peckinpah a new lease on his directing career in 1973. He used it to make Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia the following year, which his fans admire so much but which goes to even greater depths than The Getaway in depravity. The only real difference is there is no sweet ending tacked on to the end of Garcia to carry the viewer out of the theater. Peckinpah managed to pull one more good film out of his hat - Cross of Iron (1977), the cumulative violence of which left me trembling, forty years ago, as I walked back to my car. John Simon was moved to admit that Peckinpah had a "Wagnerian sense of violence." Coincidentally, the heroes of Cross of Iron are Wehrmacht soldiers retreating on the Eastern Front.


(1) Stanley Kauffmann, Figures of Light (New York: Harper & Row, 1971), p. 180.
(2) Pauline Kael, The New Yorker, January 29, 1972.