Is Steve McQueen Really That Cool?
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"Anyway the movie is doing well and what it is supposed to do, which is make $20 million."
-Sam Peckinpah to Ali McGraw, on The Getaway.
I think Junior Bonner, meanwhile, is one of the really great American films. (Though upon reflection Robert Preston and Ida Lupino kind of fill in a lot of the space of McQueen.) Particularly the way Peckinpah uses the beat-up body of a cinematic axiom of American masculinity to represent the flagging national spirit.
(An ideal triple feature: Junior Bonner, Slap Shot and The Friends of Eddie Coyle, about which I'll have lots more to say later incidentally.)
For those reasons -- and much more specific ones having to do with certain editing choices -- The Wrestler is basically a remake of Junior Bonner. Aronofsky's no Peckinpah (and actually, Robert D. Siegel's no Jeb Rosebrook), but now I'm reconsidering McQueen's (very fine, stoic) performance in light of Rourke, who's similarly minimal, but -- like Newman in the Hud clip, and as is frequently the case with the big lug -- daringly effeminate at times.
Steve MEHcQueen?
sorry, couldn't resist...
I love that triple feature idea. It's going on the calendar for the Repertory Theater of Matt's Imagination.
I hadn't thought of "The Wrestler" as a reimagining of "Junior Bonner" with steroids and mullets, but the description totally fits.
Agreed that both Rourke and Newman have a facility for playing soft/effeminate in a playful way, without ever compromising their machismo. That's a gift that McQueen didn't have or chose not to exercise, and it's one of the qualities that elevates the great leading men above the rest. Jack Nicholson and Warren Beatty were also good at it; in fact Beatty's career, in particular, seems an exercise in seeing how helpless, vulnerable and otherwise not in control he can seem while maintaining his heterosexual ladykiller cred.
Oh, totally. Not to take this too far afield, but there's that locker room scene in The Wrestler where Aronofsky cuts from The Ram getting his wounds treated to flashbacks of how he got them -- that's basically the conceit of the opening credits of Junior Bonner.
(So we're apparently in agreement that McQueen did his best work in the opening credit montages of Sam Peckinpah movies. Huh.)
(I seem to recall reading that Peckinpah let his assistant editors do a lot of The Getaway's credit sequence, but will have to look that up.)
The story is that Warren Beatty was really excited to play Clyde Barrow as impotent, but, as producer, he stipulated to Benton and Newman: "I gotta do it once."
"(So we're apparently in agreement that McQueen did his best work in the opening credit montages of Sam Peckinpah movies. Huh.)"
Yeah. That sounds a little weird at first, but when you think about montages as the purest expression of cinematic language -- putting shots together to create ideas, and putting ideas together to create a statement -- it makes sense. McQueen by himself, thinking, in a long take, could be boring or shallow or just opaque if he wasn't kicking ass. But cut shots of McQueen thinking together with other shots that seem to create a complicated argument within McQueen's mind or heart, and you've got pure movie gold.
Terence Stamp is obviously a much deeper actor than McQueen, but I think Steven Soderbergh was hip to the same dynamic in "The Limey" and exploited it extraordinarily well. That entire movie is basically the Kuleshov Effect illustrated over the course of 90 badass minutes.
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