The Getaway

The Getaway, from 1972 and directed by Sam Peckinpah, was one of Steve McQueen's bigger hits. It's a gritty and quirky crime drama that has a fairly simple story with pretensions of a layered psychological character study. It's better when it sticks to the crime.

McQueen is Doc McCoy, and as the film begins he's turned down for parole. He's had enough of prison life, and misses his wife, Ali MacGraw (who can blame him?). He tells her to approach a local political bigwig, Ben Johnson, to arrange for him to get sprung in return for doing Johnson's bidding.

That bidding turns out to be a bank job. MacGraw is not only beautiful, she's an accomplice, but McQueen is forced to team with two men of Johnson's choosing, which of course leads to disaster. One of them is Al Lettieri (you'll recognize him as Solozzo in The Godfather), and after the robbery he tries to abscond with all the ill-gotten gains. McQueen shoots him but doesn't kill him, so the rest of the movie is a chase, as McQueen and MacGraw attempt to get into Mexico ahead of Lettieri.

A friend of mine saw this film recently and noted similarities to No Country For Old Men. Sure enough, a scramble for a suitcase full of cash through West Texas does strike a resemblance, but The Getaway doesn't have the existential dread of the Coen Brothers film. Peckinpah, frankly, didn't have that kind of film in him. Part of the problem is that McQueen's character isn't particularly interesting. He's kind of a dick, actually, the way he treats MacGraw, so he doesn't come across as an antihero, he's just a schmuck.

Perhaps the most interesting part of the film is the mordantly funny business that Lettieri has with a couple he kidnaps and forces to drive him to El Paso. The husband is a veterinarian, played by Jack Dodson (Howard Sprague from Mayberry R.F.D.), and the wife is Sally Struthers, who at the time was on top of the TV world as Gloria Stivic in All In the Family. Her character immediately sees what side she should be on, and openly flirts with her captor. She and Lettieri have sleazy motel room sex while Dodson is tied to a chair, forced to watch, a vacant expression on his face. Instead of plotting revenge, Dodson ends up hanging himself in the motel room shower.

The film ends, predictably for a Peckinpah film, in an orgy of violence, with several characters blasted with a shotgun. It's too late, though, as the film has meandered too much along the way. A fifteen-minute trim could have done it a world of good.

The film was re-made about twenty years later with Alec Baldwin and Kim Basinger, but that version remains unseen by me.