Interesting video essay on Steve McQueen by Matt Zoller Seitz. It's sort of revisionist take on Matt's own feelings about one of his one-time movie star heroes. The upshot is that McQueen's screen image as the coolest, the toughest, and the meanest guy around was the result of artistic timidity and a personal lack of confidence. McQueen wasn't ever going to be a great actor, but he was much less than he could have been because he limited himself to---imprisoned himself within is Matt's analysis---that image.
"I don't want to be the guy who learns," McQueen told screenwriter William Goldman, rejecting a storyline that would have shown his character as softer and more vulnerable than McQueen wanted to play him, "I want to be the guy who knows."
Of course the definition of a hero is practically "the guy who learns."
McQueen's film career was pretty much over by the time I became an independent movie-goer. He was only fifty when he died of cancer in 1980, but he hadn't made a real hit since Papillion, seven years before. I knew who he was and liked him from late-night showings of his movies on television, which means that for me he was essentially a television star. I don't think I've seen a single one of his films on a big screen. And maybe that's why I would never have thought to compare him to the likes of Humphrey Bogart or even his contemporary and rival Paul Newman, as Matt does. That comparison struck me as unfair when I watched Matt's essay the first time, but that's because in my head I think I had McQueen filed in the same drawer as George Peppard and Rock Hudson, stars I knew had had big screen success but who were to me simply among the best leading men on television, which is the only screen on which I saw their movies.
Thinking it over, and reviewing McQueen's movies in my head---he didn't make that many, and I've seen all of them that matter, from The Magnificent Seven through Tom Horn, and a couple that don't, including to my everlasting dismay and bad dreams The Towering Inferno---I can see Matt's point. Even compared to Peppard and Hudson, McQueen is an actor of a very few notes. He's instinctively closed off, from the audience and from his co-stars. In the scenes Matt shows between Bogart and Bacall in The Big Sleep and Newman and Patricia Neal in Hud, you can see both Bogart and Newman opening themselves up, offering them themselves, to their leading ladies. It's hard to remember that McQueen ever had leading ladies, and at one time or another he played opposite Faye Dunaway, Natalie Wood, and Lee Remick.
It's even hard to remember he had male co-stars. Well, except for Dustin Hoffman in Papillion.
The quintessential McQueen movie would seem to be The Great Esacpe in which he very often seems to be, because he almost literally is, in completely separate movie all on his own, his co-star and love interest being his motorcycle.
But that's a trick of memory and definitely unfair.
Matt mentions Junior Bonner, Enemy of the People, and Baby, the Rain Must Fall as the few films in which McQueen stepped out of his "comfortable prison" of an image. But I'd add The Reivers and Soldier in the Rain, actually my two favorite McQueen movies, in both of which he proved he could do comedy by playing totally uncool, sweet-tempered, good-natured doofuses.
But there's something else working against McQueen in any attempt to assess his career and place him in his right ranking among the movie greats.
He was the most unnecessary leading man of his time.
It wasn't just that for any movie he might have been right for, if you could get Paul Newman instead you got Newman. During his prime, the 1960s into the early 70s, his competition also included, besides Newman, Warren Beatty, Clint Eastwood, James Garner, Gene Hackman, and Robert Redford.
Burt Lancaster and Kirk Douglas and John Wayne were still hanging around, and then there was Brando.
Newman's presence was the biggest challenge. McQueen did The Cincinnati Kid, but Newman did The Hustler. McQueen did Nevada Smith but Newman did Hombre. McQueen did The Great Escape. Newman did Cool Hand Luke. But the challenges, and the overshadowings, came from all sides. McQueen did Love With a Proper Stranger. Beatty did Splendor in the Grass. McQueen did Bullitt, Eastwood did Dirty Harry and Hackman did The French Connection.
There's hardly a single one of his best movies that can't be skipped in order to watch a similar but better movie starring somebody else. Of course, part of what made those better movies better is the presence of those somebody elses.
When all's said and done, though, I wouldn't try to stack McQueen's career up against Newman's. The comparison is irresistible but it doesn't really help in thinking about what McQueen did accomplish because who does stack up against Newman?
I think it's more helpful to look at Redford and Eastwood, the two actors who in a way took over from McQueen---with Redford this was literally the case. At one point, McQueen was going to play The Sundance Kid.
Neither of them has shown any great range as an actor. Both have tended to avoid risks, and with Redford that seems to be a case of his sharing some of McQueen's timidity and lack of confidence. But there's something about each of their careers that distinguishes them from McQueen and I think explains why they both accomplished more in their primes than McQueen did in his.
So I'm talking about their work as actors and leading men exclusively, and not including what they've done since as directors.
With Eastwood it's simply a matter of artistic discipline. Even in the Man With No Name movies he's careful---as in taking great care---in a way I can't picture in my memory McQueen knowing how to be. Eastwood knew better than to try to reach beyond his range, but he also knew how to maneuver within it. I think he was already directing in his head. He could "see" himself on screen as he acted. It makes him a sharper, more commanding but more useful screen presence. He allowed himself to be used by the camera. Most actors, including McQueen, expect that the camera is there to be used by them, mostly for the sake of making them look good.
Redford, though, has always taken a more skeptical attitude towards the heroes he's played. While he never tried to be a character actor like the stars who came right after him---Nicholson, Hoffman, Pacino---he's usually chosen to play heroes who turn out to be less heroic, less successful, and less sympathetic than audiences might expect a hero who looks like Robert Redford to be.
He has not just played flawed heroes. He has played weak men.
If, according to William Goldman, McQueen insisted on playing the guy who knows and never the guy who learns, then Redford has often insisted on playing the guy who needs to learn and fails to.
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Related from the New York Times:
WHEN Steve McQueen died 25 years ago in Juarez, Mexico, he left behind two children, some 30 movies and a legacy as "The King of Cool" (the title of a documentary about him). He also left behind two custom-made trunks containing 16 leather-bound notebooks full of drawings, photographs from period magazines, and a detailed script continuity — a screenplay without dialogue — written in a kind of hyper-stylized poetry. These materials were his plans for "Yucatan," the vanity project he yearned, but failed, to make.
Ah Mannion, you warm the cockles of the Siren's heart by mentioning the sadly underrated The Reivers. Great score, too.
Posted by: Campaspe | Saturday, June 27, 2009 at 04:36 PM
Did you ever see "Hell Is For Heroes"? I think McQueen is brilliant in that, and it's hard to imagine anyone else playing the part.
Posted by: Dan Leo | Saturday, June 27, 2009 at 04:59 PM
Interesting that you mention "Soldier in the Rain". It's probably my favorite early (i.e. pre-Princess Bride) William Goldman novel. Goldman was an incredible success as a young novelist, but most of his earlier work has aged badly. SitR has a sweetness that's still fresh today.
Posted by: Mike Schilling | Saturday, June 27, 2009 at 05:10 PM
Yeah, but how many of those other guys had a Rolling Stones song about them?
Posted by: Bill Altreuter | Sunday, June 28, 2009 at 11:49 AM
You left out what I think is his best role, the sailor Jake Holman in The Sand Pebbles. This was both a visually stunning movie, and a role in which McQueen does show his human side. He has a love interest (Candice Bergan's first movie role) and friends whom he loses (Mako and Richard Attenbourgh). He comes across as both brave and vulnerable, and completely human.
Posted by: Matt | Monday, June 29, 2009 at 01:40 PM
I'll second The Sand Pebbles. In the climactic battle scene (one of the best ever filmed), when Jake Holman's shouting "What the hell are we doing here," he's commenting on US foreign policy in SE Asia in the Sixties. Legend has it McQueen didn't like the character, because Holman was too sensitive and weak, not like McQ would've been in the same situation.
I became an independent movie goer at 16, in 1972, mainly at the Calvin Theater in Dearborn. I saw McQueen in Peckinpaugh's The Getaway. Crazy violent is the bank robbery sequence. In one satisfying scene McQueen cooly disables a prowler with double-aught buck shot. In another hoot, he and Ali McGraw escape by hiding in a garbage tip, only to be dumped in a land fill. Jack Dodson who you know better as "Howard Sprague" comes to an unhappy end and Ben Johnson and Slim Pickens put in good turns. Sally Struthers has some fine scenes (she tells how her mother explains the origin of her dimpled chin - a mean heart-breaking story). Yes, flawed personalities making ruthless choices, but we end up hoping they'll get away.
Watch it, you won't be sorry though it is not quite as bleak and unrelenting as Peckinpaugh's Bring Me the Head Of Alfredo Garcia (1974), with Warren Oates. How about an essay on Sam or Warren? I'll enjoy it like I enjoyed this one.
Posted by: Buffalo Savage | Tuesday, June 30, 2009 at 12:24 PM
Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia has to be the sweatiest movie this side of Cool Hand Luke.
Posted by: Matt | Tuesday, June 30, 2009 at 01:35 PM
Having come of age in the sixties, I can attest to Steve McQueen's star quality during that era. Before 'Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid,' women regularly talked about 'Steve McQueen and Paul Newman' as the two sexiest male movie stars. They were on equal footing as heartthrobs. To this day, I'll watch 'Love with the Proper Stranger' whenever it's playing.
Posted by: suemick | Wednesday, July 01, 2009 at 11:04 PM