Steve McQueen documentary - Thursday

The film is about how McQueen became a born-again Christian; Mel Gibson is an interviewee.

One can see the trailer here:

Steve McQueen documentary

Now, the story could be quite compelling. I hope, however, that the filmmaker does not use McQueen as propaganda for proselytizing.

And there will be an encore showings on October 10 and October 19.

I did not see it, but I may well attend one of the encore presentations. (The documentary is certainly hitting theaters again on October 10 and possibly once more on October 19.)

I have to admit that I have not seen and studied McQueen's movies to the extent that I would prefer. I still have never seen his two early seventies films directed by Sam Peckinpah (Junior Bonner and The Getaway); I actually have not seen The Towering Inferno or Enemy of the People; I have not seen his final film, The Hunter (outside of a scene here or there), and I have only viewed his other post-hiatus movie, the Western Tom Horn, once, almost twenty years ago now circa December 1997. I have not seen a number of his early starring roles in the early-to-mid-sixties (although I have seen The Blob, The Magnificent Seven, Hell Is for Heroes, and The Great Escape), and I have only seen parts of Nevada Smith and barely anything from The Sand Pebbles. Nor have I seen Le Mans, although there is apparently not much to see there from what became a disastrous production. I sort of would like to see all or most of McQueen's films, and see again all the movies of his that I have viewed just once, before taking in a documentary featuring scenes from throughout his career. 

But I do not know when I will be able to see all these films, and I recently recorded The Getaway on Turner Classic Movies. I will probably watch it during the next few days and then perhaps give the documentary a look; if so, I will subsequently relay my thoughts. 

I just viewed The Getaway, and I will probably attend the documentary this evening (the final showing). 

... more later. 

Yes, Hell Is for Heroes is memorable and searing. I viewed the film in 2005, and McQueen offers perhaps his most tense and misanthropic performance, transcending "coolness" and suggesting a more delicately poised and animalistic inner fury. Don Siegel constituted one of the best directors that McQueen would ever work with. 

The War Lover seems intriguing, so I will look out for that one on Turner Classic Movies. 

I viewed The Getaway yesterday, and I enjoyed and appreciated it quite a bit—based on an initial screening, I consider the film "good/very good." Like many movies from that era, the whole seems to be greater than the sum of its parts, even if the various parts are highly respectable. The plotting is pretty loose and is not necessarily that meaningful, nor does the movie amount to a consistent character study. But the atmosphere, mood, and milieu are all palpable, with the film evoking a seamy society full of depravity and perversity. In that sense, The Getaway is vaguely reminiscent of the superior Point Blank (John Boorman, 1967), starring Lee Marvin, from a half-decade earlier, but the feeling of decay and licentiousness has become more pervasive. Ironically, though, while The Getaway suggests that the law is corrupt or meaningless, the film holds onto a sense of morals via the notion of marital commitment. A vague sense of bend-yet-do-not-break loyalty and togetherness between a man and his wife emerges as the only reliable value in a capricious world full of double-crossers, hypocrites, and opportunists.  

Of course, this dynamic of fidelity amidst depravity hardly functions in a reactionary manner. Obliquely, The Getaway suggests that the Vietnam War has corroded American society. McQueen's paroled convict Doc McCoy is tantamount to a US Air Force POW returning to the States after several years of imprisonment in Hanoi, an analogy perhaps later reinforced on a train when the camera observes McCoy reading a newspaper featuring a headline regarding several American pilots who have been shot down over Laos. Meanwhile, children run around the train shooting water pistols. The subtext is not completely clear, but something is going on here. 

There is an oddly dislocated quality to The Getaway, one punctuated by Peckinpah's famous slow-motion treatment of gun violence. Indeed, while The Getaway is quite a violent film and one that fits into the early-seventies trend of escalating screen violence, Peckinpah's manner arguably heightens the indulgence and dilutes the impact. Still, much of the action—especially the final shootout sequence—is undeniably exciting, and Peckinpah understands how to use silence and stillness to foster tension and dread. Moreover, the dislocated quality encourages the film's sense of a desultory society, while the use of dusty Texas locales adds to that same sensibility. 

As McCoy, McQueen delivers a very solid performance as a hard-boiled hard man, almost a Bogart-like figure updated for an edgier time. Ali MacGraw's performance seems to be panned by many viewers, but her acting strikes me as realistic and as both sensuous and resolute. Her figure is intriguing in the sense that she at times seems to be the stereotypical woman who messes matters up for her man, yet she is also a courageous character with initiative and daring who participates in dangerous action. She may represent contradiction more than complexity, but she is multidimensional. 

Unfortunately, I did not archive the post; at the time, I proved a bit complacent and unaware of how IMDb would periodically delete threads without any editorial discretion whatsoever. However, I will attempt to summarize and paraphrase my basic argument. (As a caveat, I have only seen Bullitt once, in November 2004; I wrote the post in the summer of 2006.)

Basically, in Bullitt, McQueen's San Francisco cop is dour and one can sense his deepening restlessness and growing disillusionment with the hierarchical structure that he serves. But he is not quite sour or completely alienated—not yet, anyway—and not quite ready to become a full renegade. He is uneasy with the proverbial system, but he is not wrathful or spiteful towards it. And his life is not that bad—he has an elegant girlfriend, however perfunctory her presence may be, and dines at a nice restaurant. One can feel the clouds darkening, but the storm has not quite fully arrived, and one would be hard-pressed to envision him quitting his job. 

Now imagine Frank Bullitt three years down the road, after three more years of frustration, repression, and silently mounting bitterness. Imagine that he stops receiving haircuts as often and that he starts talking back to his bosses more vociferously. Imagine the dissolution of his romantic life amidst a fractured society where the veneer of consensus has collapsed. Now you are talking about Harry Callahan in Dirty Harry, a cop ultimately willing to abandon the authoritarian, hierarchical system that he serves. Even the films' respective scores, both composed and arranged by Lalo Schifrin, reflected this darkening, from Bullitt's breezy jazz to Dirty Harry's harsher, funkier, propulsive and at times exotic melange, which included melancholy keyboards, violent strings, and ahead-of-its-time thrash/speed-metal elements.

The evolution between the two movies reflected the changes in American society between 1968 and 1971. Although the country descended into discord in 1968—a year seared by unspeakable violence in myriad forms—the vestiges of idealism, hope, and the potential to create constructive change, forces that had largely defined the 1960s, inside and outside the government—remained. Disillusionment was growing and sometimes exploding into bloodshed, but pessimism and alienation had not completely engulfed the country, and Bullitt perfectly reflected that profound ambivalence. Conversely, by 1971, those sanguine vestiges were gone, and Dirty Harry represented that sense of bleakness, grayness, and morose iconoclasm. The McQueen aficionado that I mentioned, who was about the same age as your parents and was living through these times and seeing these films as they came out (he also liked Eastwood, Lee Marvin, and others, although McQueen constituted his favorite), responded that my commentary was spot-on—"these are excellent points," he wrote, before commenting further. (By the way, if I come across him again in cyberspace, I will try to direct him to this board; we were still communicating when IMDb closed last February.)  

Incidentally, I recently came across a couple of other commentaries that would seem to confirm my argument. On November 7 on MSNBC's Morning Joe, the Washington Post's David Ignatius made the following statement regarding 1968:


And last month, on MSNBC's Hardball with Chris Matthews, the eponymous host closed one of his shows by commemorating the fiftieth anniversary of the famous march on the Pentagon in opposition to the Vietnam War. Matthews, then twenty-one-years old and a participant in the march, recalled the "innocence" and "prevailing good cheer" of the antiwar protesters, along with the "innocent" and "hopeful" nature of the antiwar movement at that time, despite the ominous reactionary repression. But then he noted that by the time that the US finally withdrew its forces from South Vietnam (the last combat troops came home in 1972, and the last regular military personnel returned in March 1973), "so much more bitterness" had been sown by the inertia of the federal government.

link

In other words, a lot changed in the national mood and disposition between 1968 and 1971, and two iconic and high-grossing San Francisco cop movies—Bullitt and Dirty Harry—perfectly reflected those changes. The movies, of course, were not disparate; instead, one can see a logical and remarkable progression that mirrored America's tempestuous evolution during that span.  
 
And Turner Classic Movies is airing Bullitt this afternoon, on November 12. I am going to record it, and hopefully the film will receive a fiftieth-anniversary theatrical re-release in 2018.