Steve McQueen

06/03/2026

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An Odd Type of Integrity

Steve McQueen’s superstardom coincided with a moment of taciturnity in film. Around the same time Bullitt was released in 1968, so too were Playtime, Once Upon a Time in the West, Le Samourai and 2001. Before Bullitt, McQueen was very much a star, but a little less than a superstar. He was memorable in both The Magnificent Seven and The Great Escape, but these were ensemble films more than star vehicles, and perhaps The Cincinnati Kid was the first work that suggested he could carry a film and generate a particular persona. But it was as if McQueen coincided with a cinematic interest in quiet, and he was always less voluble than Newman, Brando, Reynolds, Dustin Hoffman and Al Pacino, and stiller than Gene Hackman or Jack Nicholson. The actors he most resembled may have been Clint Eastwood and Robert Redford in their stillness and capacity for silence, but these two stars were not interchangeable actors. (Could anyone imagine Redford as Dirty Harry or The Man with No Name; Eastwood as Jay Gatsby or Bob Woodward?) McQueen would have been far from perfect in Eastwood’s key roles, and less than ideal in Redford’s — but he could have been more plausibly cast in Redford or Eastwood parts than Redford or Eastwood in each other’s.
This might explain why numerous roles were offered to the actor, many of which he turned down. In Apocalypse Now: “The first port of call on the film’s odyssey to hell was the crisis of casting. Coppola had wanted Steve McQueen for the main role of Willard, but after months of expressing interest, McQueen dropped out over concerns about the (initially scheduled) 14-week shoot in the jungle.” (Far Out Magazine) McQueen turned down both Dirty Harry and The French Connection, deciding “…both were too close to his 1968 cop film Bullitt. (New York Post). On Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, “although he liked the script, he dropped out, reportedly in a disagreement over who got top billing.” (Independent). That is an impressive list of rejections, and we can include The Sorcerer and Close Encounters of the Third Kind. In the former instance, McQueen just didn’t want to go off on an arduous shoot and leave his partner, Ali McGraw, at home, or take her with him, seeing her idly sitting around instead of furthering her own career. Friedkin regarded his insistence on shooting in Latin America “one of the most foolish decisions I ever made because a close-up of Steve McQueen was worth much more than any landscape in the world.” (Film Talk). Of Close Encounters of the Third Kind, “Spielberg’s first choice was McQueen. Alas, when Spielberg met up with the actor to discuss the role, he declined because he claimed he couldn’t cry on cue.” (Far Out Magazine) With the possible exception of The Sorcerer, none of these films would have been any better with McQueen in the role, which suggests the actor had the talent of a casting director, allied to the protective ego of a star. At the same time, we could see why directors would wish to give him roles in especially Dirty Harry, Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid and The French Connection. He may not have been the toughest of tough guys, and Charles Bronson would always be better casting if you wanted brutal, Eastwood if you wanted mildly sadistic, and Hackman if you wanted frustrated aggression. But he could cover a broader range of masculinity than the others, without quite saying, for example, that he was a better actor than Hackman. If McQueen was offered so many roles, it wasn’t just that he was a big star, where, after Bullitt and The Thomas Crown Affair “…he would become the highest paid actor in the world. No mean feat for someone who came from a broken home, having never met a father who had left his mother when McQueen was six months old, and who was placed in reform school aged 14.” (Independent) It was also that he could be seen in a surprising range of parts for a star who would never have been viewed as an actor of range. Yet when one hears he was lined up for the role as Audrey Hepburn’s boyfriend in Breakfast at Tiffany’s (but couldn’t get out of his contract for the TV show Wanted: Dead or Alive), this is the sort of part Jack Lemmon might have played, but refused, Robert Redford would have suited, and George Peppard ended up playing. Could we have seen Hackman, Bronson or Eastwood in the part?
Yet for all this relative flexibility, McQueen’s abiding persona is as a man of few words, and who better to put in solitary confinement and expect him to come out of the encounter still sane, more than McQueen? Admittedl,y in The Great Escape, he can talk through a wall to others when he is in the Cooler, but in Papillon, he is all alone, and locked up in solitary more than once. For a talkative type, that would be hell; for the reticent, merely purgatory. Those other films from the same period, where words were generally absent, could have all comfortably contained McQueen, except, of course, for Playtime. Though Lemmon and McQueen may have been both considered for Breakfast at Tiffany’s, the crossover was minimal, while the crossover with Redford and Eastwood was maximal. This partly rests on the volubility of Lemmon against the tight-lipped McQueen, but it also shows that just as McQueen knew he couldn’t do lachrymose, he wasn’t going to be much better at humour. If Lemmon may not have been ideal in Playtime, and that Tati was of course in the Chaplin, Keaton and Woody Allen tradition of nobody playing the role they have written better than themselves, for Lemmon to have played Monsieur Hulot would merely have resulted in likely disappointment. With McQueen, it would obviously have been catastrophic. We could, however, imagine him playing the Kier Dullea role in 2001, an American Jef Costello in Le Samurai, and Leone could have found a place for him somewhere in Once Upon a Time in the West. After all, the Western is perhaps the most taciturn of genres.
McQueen may never have been as iconic a figure as Eastwood, but he could be comfortable in a genre that showed him playing cowboys on several occasions, including in The Magnificent Seven, Nevada Smith and Tom Horn. He was also a modern cowboy in Junior Bonner and, like Eastwood, started out as a TV cowboy in Wanted: Dead or Alive. But he was best playing modern, yet out of his time, a figure who could adjust better than almost anybody to the mechanical technology around him, and whose love for cars was evident in several of his films, but less so with the emotions demanded of a person living in the later part of the 20th century. It is as if he understood the era he lived in required more words than he was willing to provide, and envied an era when, by drawing on a pistol, you could avoid elaborate argumentation. As Pauline Kael reckoned: “McQueen is an amusing actor of considerable skill but a reserved actor.” (Reeling) Yet David Thomson, over time, could see that reserve had value: “his remorseless honesty becomes more affecting. He may be brutal, or brutish at times — but when is he fake?” (Biographical Dictionary of Film) It was as if modern machines compensated for the difficulties in modern living, and though McQueen had a few relationships and three marriages, he had far more motorbikes and cars. Thomson may be right when saying, McQueen “exulted in his duet with motorbike in The Great Escape…” but this was merely an early onscreen love affair that would become more pronounced in both his public and private life. He owned so many cars that Wikipedia lists them as if they were part of his filmography. These include a Porsche 911S, a Ferrari 250 GT Berlinetta Lusso, a Jaguar XKSS and a Ford GT40. The Rolls-Royce he drives in The Thomas Crown Affair may have a socially metonymic function quite different from the Mustang in Bullitt, but both cars convey a man’s need for solitude. The Rolls-Royce shows the titular Thomas Crown making the most of the good life when it comes to material items. The car is a consumer luxury, but so is the suit he wears and the gated house where he lives. When he drives out to a cemetery, he is trailed by the getaway driver turned informer, and the contrast between the vehicles is pronounced. The informer drives a station wagon that serves as a family car (as well as the getaway vehicle) and resembles the police cars that are functional too. But everything Thomas Crown moves around in makes us aware of the luxury he expects to possess, including a banana-coloured glider and that black Rolls-Royce. He also eyes up a wine-coloured 1967 Ferrari 275 GTS, as if its owner is almost an afterthought - even if it happens to be Faye Dunaway sitting in it. When he passes the car outside a New York auction, his friend tells him to hurry up as he lingers over the car’s beauty. The friend says it is one of those rare Italian things, and McQueen replies that yes, it is one of those rare Italian things, as aware of its value as his friend is oblivious to its significance. Peter Jurow notes: “What is there to say about a car that last sold in 2013 for just under $28 million? Though it appears in The Thomas Crown Affair more to provide some Ferrari star power…only ten were made and, fittingly…Steve McQueen ended up owning one of them.” (Revs Automedia) McQueen had a penchant for buying up the vehicles that appeared alongside him, and it was no doubt a great heartache that he never could purchase that most talismanic of McQueen movie vehicles, the green Ford Mustang 390 GT from Bullitt. He tried, but the owner wouldn’t part with it, and McQueen’s truculent pursuit probably didn’t enamour himself to its owner. “McQueen had tried to buy the car from its previous owner, but it slipped through his grasp. His curt four-sentence letter to [the new owner Robert) Kiernan begins. ‘Again, I would like to appeal to you’” (Daily Telegraph)
We could see in such anecdotes avarice, but it might be more a needy materialism that could insist on things a safety McQueen may have believed people could never provide, a reflection of McQueen being brought up in a broken home. “When a kid doesn't have any love when he's small, he begins to wonder if he's good enough. My mother didn't love me, and I didn't have a father. I thought, 'Well, I must not be very good.’" (Steve McQueen: In His Own Words) Biographer Christopher Sanford reckoned that, “what depressed and surprised McQueen’s friends more than the promiscuity was how little happiness it seemed to bring him. As his own daughter put it a few years later, ‘My dad hated all women but me.’” (McQueen) Whatever the truth concerning his personal life, he was one of several actors during the ‘60s and ‘70s who gave the impression of a solitude so great that even if McQueen did star in those early ensembles, The Magnificent Seven and The Great Escape, stardom made him solitary. This might seem an inevitable consequence of becoming a star: the actor wants to steal the show rather than lending out enough limelight to others. But it seemed this was a character trait as much as an ego trip. While some might see in the complicated manoeuvring over star-status, in The Towering Inferno, an insecure actor determined to get top billing over Paul Newman, what the film itself shows is McQueen’s retreat from gregariousness and Newman’s sociability. Newman always appeared happier in company, and Cool Hand Luke, Butch Cassidy..., The Sting, and Slapshot show an actor looking to play off others. It wasn’t that Newman couldn’t be solitary (The Hustler and Hud key examples), but little good came from it, and it seemed more like hubris and selfishness than solitude.
Newman was also an actor who talked, and often had an interest in theatre, with two of his early key roles in Tennessee Williams adaptations, Suddenly Last Summer and Cat on a Hot Tin Roof. Most of the films he directed were adaptations of novels or plays. When McQueen starred in a 1978 version of Ibsen’s An Enemy of the People, it seemed anomalous, and whatever the limits or otherwise of McQueen’s thespian abilities, he seems so clearly an actor of film. If cinema is chiefly a visual medium, this indicates dialogue is a very secondary function, and was of course literally the case when film had thirty years of existence before sound came in. What often matters is that an actor can convey, in body language, action and facial gesture, the import in a scene. Often in early cinema, this was based on exaggerated gestures, with the primitive technology capturing bolder movements and struggling with more nuanced ones. But by the sixties, a new type of silent cinema arrived, with sound effects important, but dialogue muted, and this wasn’t only evident in the late sixties examples, offered at the beginning of this article. It is there in early 1960s films too like Antonioni’s L’Avventura and The Eclipse, while Michel Chion sees it earlier still, noting that “with A Man Escaped (1956) Bresson proves to be one of the first directors after Kurosawa to have systematized what I call ritualised cinema — a cinema where sparse and sober dialogue, as well as the minimal place accorded to music, frees the ear and allows us to hear how sounds and movement in the image organize time.” (Film, A Sound Art) It is indeed Chion who discusses Once Upon a Time in The West, 2001, Bullitt, Playtime and Le Samourai director Jean-Pierre Melville’s slightly later The Red Circle, when noting that these were laconic works. There were few actors more laconic than McQueen. While many a heist is an elaborate exposition as the viewer discovers how a robbery will take place, The Thomas Crown Affair rests on just a few lines of dialogue, as we work out how the heist is executed, while details of its execution will be revealed later by other characters trying to understand how it came about. When it comes to discussing how he gets the money out of the country, this is dialogue given to Faye Dunaway as supposition. She reckons it will be in a Swiss bank account, and when her co-investigator asks how he could get all that bulky cash out of the US, she says the Swiss can be very lax when it comes to such things — they hardly check luggage at all. This could all have been dialogue given to McQueen as the person behind the plan but, by putting it into the mouth of Dunaway and her colleague, it gives McQueen a detached relationship with the very action he has instigated.
The twin perils for many an actor are too little dialogue and too much exposition. As William Goldman noted, “stars, without exception, hate carrying the plot” (Adventures in the Screentrade) and Goldman worked with many stars we have already discussed: Redford, Newman, Hoffman, Reynolds, and wrote a novel A Soldier in The Rain, that was turned into an early McQueen vehicle, and Goldman also worked on an early version of Papillon. When discussing exposition, Goldman offers an intriguing generalisation and a couple of useful observations. He claims that as a scriptwriter, it is great “if you can, make your star description like stretch socks — one size fits all.” He also notes there are certain actors who can carry exposition and others who will do anything to resist it. Offering a passage of typical Western genre explanation about a long trek in dangerous terrain, Goldman says that it will work well in the mouth of Wayne. You just cut back and forth from Wayne to the huddled masses, and what comes across isn’t the info dump, but Wayne’s magnitude. If anybody can get them through the trip, it will be this iconic figure. He also says that Cary Grant “was famous in his films for trying to get other people in the scene to do the expository talking. Grant was a brilliant listener, and often scenes would be shifted to suit him.” (Adventure in the Screentrade) There is a potential contradiction between Goldman’s claim that “most stars are relatively interchangeable” and the difference between an actor like Wayne, who could carry exposition, and someone like Grant, who understood, perhaps, that his persona needed to resist it. This might seem especially odd given that Wayne would seem a much more taciturn actor than Grant. But this is where the actor isn’t only not interchangeable; the actor isn’t even reducible to a type. Goldman is right to see that such expositional dialogue works well for Wayne, but it wouldn’t work well for McQueen, even though both are actors not known for voluble genres. Grant, on the other hand, was a master of screwball (The Awful Truth; His Girl Friday) and best at ironic action (Only Angels Have Wings; To Catch a Thief). He should have been okay with exposition, but resisted it.
What does all this confusion tell us? That actors are more singular than we might have assumed and part of our purpose in suggesting similarities within differences, in seeing McQueen sharing characteristics with Redford, for example, all the better to understand an actor’s singularity. It might seem odd in some ways that so much more attention has been given to a director’s originality over an actor’s — not just because audiences have been more inclined to see a film due to its stars over its director, but also because a director's vision is a formal thing, while an actor’s behaviour is a physical thing. Anybody can see differences between two actors; only someone with at least a modest knowledge of cinema could distinguish, for example, the work of Billy Wilder and Howard Hawks. There is no directorial equivalent to miscasting. While of course directors were often given to certain genres (John Ford westerns and war movies; Hitchcock thrillers and romances), certainly no more so than actors. Few might have wished to see Hitchcock direct a western, but fewer still would want to see Cary Grant as The Man with No Name.
In understanding McQueen’s work, it helps if we comprehend his singularities: the images that conjure up a star in our mind long after the individual films, their plots and situations, have all but disappeared, even if we need to look again at specific works in understanding how they have entered our consciousness. To do so, we can look at various films McQueen made before becoming a superstar. Thinking of Hell is for Heroes and Love with a Proper Stranger, we may note that the latter is a better film than the former, even if Don Siegel (who directed the former war movie) is regarded more highly than Robert Mulligan (who made the latter romance). McQueen is very good in both of them, but it is Siegel’s movie that would have done much more to produce the McQueen persona than Mulligan’s. In it, he plays a lowly private after being demoted from sergeant during a court martial, and he arrives in the French town ready for action but with an attitude problem, evident in breaking the rules, curt behaviour, and poor timekeeping. As we see him arriving at the makeshift barracks, the sergeant says he is three days late. McQueen's Rees doesn’t apologise; he says he saw a friend. A minute later, the platoon’s hawker announces that if Rees wants anything, he is the man to speak to, and Rees tells him to beat it. That evening, he ventures into a bar, and the barmaid says he shouldn’t be there: she’s been told she can’t sell to soldiers. But Rees won’t budge, gets his booze and fags, and stands at the bar. When she tells him he will be in trouble when the MPs arrive, he says, “lady, the whole world is full of trouble.” Rees is a man of few words, and most of them are truculent, a troubled soul who seems to be containing within him more than the surliness of a man who has lost his sergeant status. Two-thirds of the way through the film, he will be responsible for other men’s deaths when he makes a decision to advance without permission from higher up in the military command. As a private, he has no legitimacy, and when the captain says that if they weren’t in need of rest for a six o’clock morning assault, he would be holding him accountable right in the field. There won’t be a need for a court-martial at all: Rees dies taking the pill box that he had earlier advanced towards.
There is often in McQueen’s work a belief that instincts are countered by authority rather than augmented by it — a common enough theme in American cinema interested in action and plot development, and where risk assessments would hamper the fast-paced Hollywood demands. McQueen may have turned down both Dirty Harry and The French Connection, but it made sense that he was offered them. These are advanced versions of his Rees character, guys who want to do things their way but also have to evade the red tape. Perhaps one reason why McQueen was never synonymous with the cowboy was that the westerner was given to freedoms the criminal, the cop and the soldier weren’t. McQueen is someone who is best seen as a man resisting the law rather than operating in its absence, and this covers The Great Escape, Bullitt, The Thomas Crown Affair, The Getaway and Papillon: many of McQueen’s best-known films. Other roles McQueen was offered but turned down, The Sorcerer, The Driver, The Gauntlet and Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, were all films about people resisting authority, and the latter a western that had enough of a smattering of civilisation for it to have establishments like banks and trains that could be robbed. Hell is for Heroes may be a minor film, but it helped augment the development of a major movie image. In it, McQueen rarely speaks, never smiles and hardly blinks. It is in back and white, and yet those blue eyes manage to convey an icy blueness despite the film’s colour neutrality. There are moments where he is staring death in the face, and McQueen’s got the eyes that make the idiom vivid. In an early scene, when he talks to the sergeant about his court-martial, he is at his most uncomfortable. He blinks a couple of times and looks like he just might be able to take orders from a man who at least acknowledges him as an individual. It is often this tension between individuality and its suppression that makes McQueen interesting. Give him too much liberty, or too much power, and that tension would be likely to dissipate.
One reason why Love with a Proper Stranger is a very good film but not much of a McQueen vehicle doesn’t rest only on the leading credit going to Natalie Wood, but also that Wood is playing closer to type than McQueen. Wood often plays characters constrained by parental influence and getting into situations that lead close to or result in collapse: Inside Daisy Clover, Splendor in the Grass, Gypsy. Here, Angie finds herself pregnant after a one-night stand with Rocky Papasano (McQueen). Rocky can’t remember her when she comes to a dance club and announces she is pregnant, and musician Rocky catches up with her through the crowd as he accepts his responsibility and they agree to raise the money to abort the fetus. McQueen seems much less self-reliant than usual as he relies on his girlfriend Barbie for a place to stay, money from his parents to help fund the abortion, and realises the moment before the operation will take place that he wants to keep the child, even if he couches it in safety terms — that the abortionist doesn’t look like she has any medical qualifications. He also later becomes jealous when it seems Angie will marry someone else, and Rocky declares his feelings on a busy street while carrying a sign saying: Better wed than dead?
Made a couple of years after Breakfast at Tiffany’s, McQueen could still be sought after as a romantic star who, at the same time, contains within him a little romantic need. This neediness, which must be a dimension of any love story if it isn’t to become a one-sided account of a man reluctantly bagged by a woman, often finds its corrective in the comic, with many a story of love fitting into the romantic comedy, as a man uses humour, while the audience can see in it denial. Cary Grant was its master, but other comedic practitioners, including Clarke Gable and Hugh Grant, could give the impression of resistance leading to acquiescence, while others like Tom Hanks and Jack Lemmon were often more vulnerably able to play the feeling straight, even if the film was no less humorous. McQueen possessed neither the humour nor the obvious sensitivity to make a career out of romance, with his persona proposing that, if it takes two to tango, this might be one too many. Yet despite this, McQueen convinces far more as a romantic lead than he does as a member of the Italian-American community, and there are beautiful moments of pusillanimity and also compassion. The former instance comes when he returns to his lover’s place after Angie tells him she is pregnant. He goes into the bathroom, looks in the mirror and then leans against the sink and puts his head in his hand as he wonders what he will say to Barbie. He sighs, and says, while still alone in the bathroom, and speaking to Barbie offscreen, “a friend of mine…asked me if I’d ask you the name of maybe a kind of doctor.” He says it, knocking his fingers against the tap, and it is a fine example of a character weak, while an actor plays strong. McQueen’s body language is assured, even if his request is cowardly; his lean, athletic physique indicates an actor’s nonchalance. Barbie susses straightaway. It isn’t a friend who needs the doctor as she ejects him from the apartment.
Later, running away from Angie’s brothers, Rocky and Angie hide out in the basement of an antiques place, and the location helps define the characters’ emotions, with Angie feeling both frustrated and close, and Rocky agitated, yet beginning to show signs of deep affection. They’d met Rocky’s family shortly before, outside in a park, and Angie gets to see a side of Rocky she hadn’t known, while Rocky sees how good Angie is with his folks. In the basement, Mulligan makes great use of the cluttered yet expansive space to tease out the combination of intimacy and distance the couple is feeling, as he often frames them within the same shot but at a remove from each other, and with objects emphasising their separateness. In one shot, Angie sits on a table a few yards away from Rocky, who is seated at a desk. When she gets up to leave, it isn’t only that Rocky stays seated as she goes to the door — the camera offers Angie in medium-close-up, while initially McQueen remains viewed in long-shot. This makes sense perceptually: Angie is looking at him from a distance, but wouldn’t Rocky be looking at her from the same distance? Yet the point is chiefly dramatic: to propose a difference that the film will then close as the characters close it between themselves. When she decides to stay, the film initially offers a medium-long shot with Rocky in the foreground and Angie in the background, the roomy space allowing for the form to illustrate the emotion as the non-diegetic music stops. The film then moves into a medium-close-up of Rocky, and then a medium-close-up on Angie, who is arranging her coat and not looking up. Rocky asks her for the first time why she went with him that night up on the mountains, and the film moves towards an intimacy that the form remains ambivalent about, as it still sometimes offers shots of Rocky in the foreground and Angie in the distance, and long shots of the two of them standing next to each other.
We wouldn’t want to get lost in describing this scene, nor is it always useful to insist on a director’s deliberation. But the sequence captures well a filmic tone that absorbs comedy, yet is at its best resisting its insistence. With another actor in the role, it might have too predictably shown Rocky eventually seeing that he wishes for a more traditional life than he initially appears to want. With McQueen, however, if the film were to end with his love rival getting the girl, and Rocky aware of what he let go, it wouldn’t have come as a surprise. Sure, the love rival here is comedic: played by Tom Bosley, who would go on to appear as Howard Cunningham in the TV show Happy Days. But Anthony is also affectionate and sensitive, if also clumsy and incapable of finishing a sentence when he meets Angie’s family. Bosley plays him as the sort of man who would be a hopeless date, though probably a great husband and father. It wouldn’t have been a tragedy had she plumped for Anthony. It would have been for Rocky, but McQueen is the sort of actor who can make unhappiness his own: we could come away from the film accepting other lives will be okay, but not his. But the reason will be that other people don’t possess McQueen’s innate capacity for self-destruction, and that frequent flirtation with risk.
This can incorporate anything from Hell is for Heroes to The Thomas Crown Affair, from The Cincinnati Kid to The Great Escape. It isn’t usually the happiness of the ending that matters, but the amount of resistance or self-assertion McQueen offers. At the end of The Towering Inferno, he is the fire chief who scolds architect Paul Newman for putting up tall buildings without thinking enough of the firemen who will lose their lives when things go wrong. In The Great Escape, he ends up back in the cooler once again. In The Cincinnati Kid, he won’t play safe and loses a fortune at the card table. In The Thomas Crown Affair, he is forced to leave the country, but not before pulling off another heist that he couldn’t resist, although he already possesses a large fortune. If McQueen became famous as the king of cool, it rested on showing indifference towards societal demand or expectation, for a principle that was very far from the pursuit of happiness. It is why Love with a Proper Stranger could have survived an unhappy ending, and McQueen would have played more into his evolving character than against it. Equally, though he ends up with the girl at the end of The Cincinnati Kid, this is only because of her decency and owes nothing to his. He cheats on Christian with his friend’s girlfriend, Melba, when he realises that Shooter has been cheating with the cards all the better so that someone Shooter owes money to can pay off his debts. McQueen discovers the friend’s ploys, refuses to continue as long as he is doling out the cards, and sleeps with Melba in an act of revenge that also inevitably hurts Christian when she walks in on him just after the sexual encounter. Yet a while afterwards, after he loses big, Christian hugs him on the street, after all the others have witnessed a loser, and we see failed sexual politics meeting narrative hastiness. Christian may still want to give him another chance, but this is a woman offering unfailing love without any concern for what must be her profound hurt. It is all very well for the film to say that this is the only person he can really trust, but it owes her a couple of scenes that indicate he will, in the future, be capable of being trustworthy, and that she has seen enough decency to justify her return.
There has always been a vulnerable quality to McQueen behind that taciturn scowl, far more than we find in Eastwood’s wince or Redford’s self-reserve, and we can accept that Christian would wish to love him, and that the Kid would want to love her back. Most of the actors we have thus far invoked within the context of McQueen quite possess this quality. In this sense, the actor can be the heir to James Dean, even if he happened to be a year older than the icon who died so young. There is in McQueen a feeling of an earlier abandonment that manifests itself in rebelliousness, and ties in with our earlier thoughts about his modern aspect, one which made him less than the perfect Western actor. There is, of course, a biographical underpinning to this, but we wouldn’t wish to make too much of it. Sure, McQueen was from a troubled background: his mother was “a nineteen-year-old runaway and drunk” (McQueen: the Biography), according to Christopher Sandford. His father abandoned his mother, and his mother, in turn, abandoned him, sending him off to live with his grandparents, who then left McQueen with a great uncle. When McQueen moved back in with his mother, his stepfather beat him up, and he took to living on the streets. He was only nine. Sandford quotes him saying, “My life was screwed up before I was born.” (McQueen: The Biography) McQueen had the face of the wizened and the youthful, a paradox too far perhaps, but one that found its embodiment in McQueen, and might explain his appeal if we accept its combination gave him an attractive quality rare enough in a star. Antonia Quirke reckoned, “the boy's extreme prettiness had the cut of corrugated iron: his face, although manifestly young, was incredibly lined [… ] With McQueen, the lines were explicit scars, stains in wood. It makes you trust him.” (New Statesman) McQueen often looks troubled, and a face creased by its mid-thirties can convey, within youth, lived experience. When in The Cincinnati Kid, Melba initially comes on to him, he kisses her and then slaps her hard on the bottom, as if to say he can see through her manipulations. It is the action of someone who is wise to feelings, not because he can express his own, but because he is well aware of their frequent absence in others. That childhood may have helped him there, but what we do know is that he has the face to register it. When he does sleep with Melba later, this has nothing to do with the affection he feels towards her, but, as we have noted, the contempt he feels for Shooter.
This vulnerability meeting cruelty, the awareness that love is hard to believe in, but betrayal is easily understood, is played out too in Baby the Rain Must Fall. Here, there is a backstory missing from The Cincinnati Kid as McQueen plays Henry Thomas, recently released from prison, whose wife and the child he never knew seek him out in a small town in Texas, near the prison, and near where the woman who brought him up after his parents died lives. Adopted by this woman who never thought he was any good, the old lady still has power over him, and once again, McQueen plays a character who can’t trust in love. Though he tries to make a life with his wife and child, we know he is likely to end up back in prison, and sure enough, he does. But McQueen isn’t simply the tough guy looking for trouble; he is also the sensitive figure trying to succeed as a singer. He says to his wife that he is going to be a success. ‘People are going to hear about Henry Thomas.” He isn’t a bad singer, but we notice that he is tormented by terrible dreams, intimidated by his ward, and sensitive to people who won’t take his music seriously. When he plays a gig, someone starts howling as he sings, and afterwards, McQueen starts an altercation he easily wins, until the man’s friends get involved. In both The Cincinnati Kid and Baby the Rain Must Fall, McQueen plays talented people, but with a self-destructive streak showing hubris meeting insecurity. This might bea  common enough combination in Hollywood heroes, but the balance between the two is rarely as evident as in McQueen’s work. Newman, for example, could be hopelessly hubristic in The Hustler and Hud, and clearly sexually insecure in Cat on a Hot Tin Roof. But in many a role, McQueen can be simultaneously arrogant and vulnerable, which allows us to accept the ending of The Cincinnati Kid that will make Christian more than a doormat. If she is, it is one that says Welcome, with the film earlier having shown us the healthy, loving farm family Christian is part of when the Kid goes and visits. The ending is troublesomely unwilling to entertain Christian’s surely complex feelings, but it isn’t merely a chauvinistic account of a woman standing by her man, no matter how bad his behaviour. An actor who managed to convey cockiness without looking lost would have encapsulated no more than the macho, but Christian is a woman who has faith in her man because she knows he does the worst of things for the best of reasons. A more complete script would have shown why she would take this man back, beyond narrative contrivance that proposes the Kid will now see in Christian that she is the most authentic thing in his life.
But we should remember that it would be hard for Christian to think that he is the most authentic thing in her life. He hasn’t only avenged his friend, he has betrayed Christian, and with someone Christian believed was a friend of hers, saying, early in the film, “I happen to like Melba.” We might think, too, of the scene where Christian discusses a French film she saw, in which the Spanish general sends a message to say that he is going to spend the night in a town with his army. The local men are scared, but the wives have a big party with the soldiers, and they go to bed with the troops, then the soldiers leave the next morning. The men have been spared; the women have satisfied the army, and life goes on. Christian says that it shows the men cared more for their lives than for their dignity, and the Kid, who is in the bath, as she tells him the story, misreads the meaning of it. Shortly afterwards, Christian, in joking irritation, dunks his head under the water. We might assume that by the end of the film, she has no dignity herself as she goes back to McQueen. Yet this wouldn’t be fair to how the film plays out, even if we might have wished for Christian’s willingness to allow him back in be given more substance, if she were to return at all. Yet the story she tells proposes there are things greater than dignity, and the Kid might just be ready to learn about a few of them. The audience may, instead of seeing Christian as weak, view her as wise, and the Kid should consider himself lucky to be privy to that wisdom.
This capacity to make a weakness in the script work is perhaps one of the central features of stardom, and why we might wonder how interchangeable actors are, no matter Goldman’s proclamations. Christian returning to a Kid played by Eastwood could have seemed far more masochistic, and we might not have easily imagined a similar scene with Eastwood in a bath and a teasing Tuesday Weld gently undermining his masculinity. It is this early scene, along with the visit the Kid makes to Christian’s family farm, that allows us to accept the ending, even if we might feel she too hurriedly accepts the Kid’s infidelity. Someone keen to see strong female characters on screen would understandably be horrified by what appears to be Christian’s willingness to take him back as the film ends differently from the script. In the screenplay, Christian and Kid have an exchange where she says she loves him but doesn’t think it is enough and takes off in a taxi. The script’s ending is more plausible and, while hardly feminist, would at least appear to respect Christian’s dignity more readily. However, the film’s ending proposes that dignity is a complicated thing, and what can seem like weakness isn’t quite the same as dignity’s absence. At the end of the film, one may believe that the Kid is weaker than she is, and strength lies in overcoming pride and being there for what in this instance may be the weaker sex, the male one, just as it was in the story she tells about the town where the women save the men’s lives by sleeping with the foreign troops.
The point rests, however, on whether McQueen can register the requisite sensitivity. If we believe he can, it is because we see in McQueen, if not uniqueness, then nevertheless a nuance that doesn’t make him just another action star. He is an action man who has within him not so much a fear of intimacy as an expectation of its failure. In some roles, this doesn’t even become a question. In The Towering Inferno, he has to do little more than put out fires, and in Papillon, little more than escape from Devil’s Island. These may appear achievements of great magnitude, but they don’t ask for feelings of much range, and this is why we will with on the film he made just prior to these two huge hits, The Getaway. Sam Peckinpah directed the film after making Straw Dogs with Dustin Hoffman, as the alliteratively mild-mannered mathematician going gung-ho in a sleepy yet sleazy English village, and one of his gentler works, Junior Bonner, with McQueen, the contemporary cowboy who makes a living doing rodeos and precariously survives. In The Getaway, Doc (McQueen) asks his wife Carol (Ali McGraw) to do anything she can to get him released from prison, and discovers, as if in a nod to the story Christian tells in The Cincinnati Kid, that what she has done is sleep with a corrupt businessman, Beynon, who is also on the parole board. He doesn’t realise what she has done till later in the film, just as he doesn’t initially know when doing a bank robbery for Beynon, that he is robbing it partly to hide money that has already gone missing. The robbery is centrally to cover the hole in accounts: Doc, Carol and others steal half a million, but the news reports $750,000 has been taken. Doc understandably feels doubly aggrieved, and it isn’t helped by the uselessness and venality of the Beynon hires he is forced to work with.
Yet for all the machismo in Peckinpah’s films, and for all the apparent emotional unavailability expressed in McQueen’s, the film’s most important aspect is whether Doc can forgive Carol. When he works out what happened, he slaps her around in one of those all too familiar scenes in ‘70s cinema where a man’s gotta do what a man’s gotta do — and part of that was domestic violence. But the film isn’t condoning Doc’s behaviour. It is showing his torturous frustration when he asked her to show her love by making sure he was released. She has shown it by sleeping with another man, and he can’t quite see this as the enormous sacrifice she was willing to make, rather than an act showing she is a woman he can’t trust. Later, when he asks her to listen ,saying, “It’s hard enough for me as it is’’, as he wants to make amends, she says, “You’re not tough enough to forget Beynon”, as she makes clear she chose Doc and not the other man. But the film proposes that dignity is only as good as the love that sits behind any deed, and the important thing is to ignore the deed and understand the feeling. In different ways, Christian and Doc understand this, even if the Kid sleep with Melba out of disgust towards his friend’s betrayal, and Carol out of necessity, as she wants Doc released. Yet in both instances, what matters is the instinct for love over the specifics of the actions. In contrast, in The Getaway, another character in The Getaway, Rudy, is cuckolded when his wife takes up with one of the other men involved in the heist. She and her husband run a vet surgery that they are forced to leave, as Rudy kidnaps the pair of them, and the kidnapper has regular sex with the wife as the husband, tied up, is forced to look on. He eventually hangs himself and there has been no sense the wife has been sleeping with Rudy out of obligation. The deed might be the same — Carol’s sexual assignation with Beynon; the wife’s with Rudy — but an enormous difference in intent. By the end of the film, Doc comprehends that intent, but we might wonder if other actors would have been so willing.
Yes, Dustin Hoffman, Jack Lemmon, maybe Al Pacino, but John Wayne, Charles Bronson or Clint Eastwood? To understand an aspect of McQueen’s appeal isn’t to see him as an interchangeable tough guy, but that toughness comes out of a damaged sensibility, one looking for a bit of love that can repair it. If both Eastwood and McQueen were great wincers, Eastwood always had more cruelty in his eyes than McQueen, and could narrow them into ready meanness. McQueen offered a more open aperture, no doubt partly because of the startling blueness of those eyes (second only to Newman's), but also because he could convey startle and surprise more readily than Eastwood could. When Pauline Kael said, “Clint Eastwood isn’t offensive; he isn’t an actor, so one could hardly call him a bad actor. He’d have to do something before we could consider him bad at it,’’ she also added: “Eastwood couldn’t express grief any more than he could express tenderness.” (New Yorker). This wouldn’t be at all a fair claim to make of McQueen, who expresses the latter in numerous films, no matter if he was supposedlyn’t much interested in it in life. As David Thomson says, McQueen was “a man who seems to have been likeable in the gaps between ‘Action’ and ‘Cut’.” (Have You Seen…?)
Most of the time, though, McQueen wasn’t quite likeable, but neither was he villainous, and Doc McCoy seems a good example of McQueen’s capacity for creating ambivalent responses in a viewer, ones that can allow us to see his point of view without quite agreeing with it. In Eastwood’s roles, and at a more extreme level in Bronson’s, there is often an ambivalence in the viewer extra- diegetically. In other words, the film may ask us to see Eastwood and Bronson as killing machines in Dirty Harry and Death Wish, Sudden Impact and The Mechanic, but the viewer might wish to generate a distance from the extreme violence, even if the film believes it is offering it for the benefit of a good cause. There are murderers and rapists indiscriminately killing, and Eastwood and Bronson will discriminately kill in turn. But one can’t quite eradicate the notion that their characters are sadists looking for a good excuse to find some victims who, in their guilt, hide our action stars' cruel streak. The films don’t want us to question Eastwood and Bronson’s motives; they want us to see that they are just wearily taking out the garbage, removing the scum off our streets.
This wouldn’t quite describe the characters McQueen would usually play, and this is partly why one can find the trace of Brando, Dean and other Method-inclined actors. It was proof, perhaps, of his work early with acting coach Sanford Meisner, who saw McQueen dedicated to the craft. “Professionalism, always professionalism. Dog tired, he’d put his feet in a bucket of ice water to jerk himself awake while he learnt lines.” (McQueen) If Kael could say a bit unfairly that Eastwood would have to act so we could decide if he was any good at it, McQueen took acting seriously enough to study with Meisner. Whether it was Meisner’s advice or McQueen’s natural talent, he played action roles without reducing them to a penchant for vindictiveness, and his co-stars were often more than mere love interest. The relationship between Doc and his wife in The Getaway is vital throughout the film: she is the one who gets him out of jail, however horrifically for Doc and for her, is centrally involved in the robbery, and the spat between them over sleeping with Beynon becomes an important part of the film’s second half. He might not have seemed the most obvious person to play opposite Audrey Hepburn in Breakfast of Tiffany’s, but the more we think about, and the more we look especially at his work in Love with a Proper Stranger, Baby the Rain Must Fall and The Cincinnati Kid, the more we see someone who wasn’t so much keeping his feelings to himself, but was capable of sharing them in the wariest of ways, As Meisner noted, the actor “was warm but always conditional.” (McQueen: The Biography) McQueen may have been known as the “king of cool”, but he was, perhaps, more ice defrosting when he felt the emotional temperature was right. Whether this only ever happened between action and cut is not for us to speculate over; all we need say is that there is far more feeling in McQueen’s works than he usually receives credit for. And we can note, too, that he was never the person who indicated a solitary self-composure (unlike Redford). He needed people to love and authorities to fight against, and this combination sums up the ambivalence he often managed to express: a need for affection and a fight for credibility. These are two qualities that hardly suggest ‘cool’, but instead something more interesting from an actor’s perspective: the intricacy of need and the awareness of power. Yet his capacity for silence allowed him to give the impression of self-containment and the ability to cope with solitary confinement. McQueen may have said on turning down The French Connection, “I’m only good at doing authority my way” (McQueen: The Biography), yet this needn’t be read as an escape from it, more the form it would have to take for him to be plausible in the role. Goldman was clearly more confident over an actor’s interchangeability than McQueen was, and though many may rue the numerous roles that he rejected, it also left him with a body of work that shows an odd type of integrity.

© Tony McKibbin

Tony McKibbin

Steve McQueen

An Odd Type of Integrity

Steve McQueen’s superstardom coincided with a moment of taciturnity in film. Around the same time Bullitt was released in 1968, so too were Playtime, Once Upon a Time in the West, Le Samourai and 2001. Before Bullitt, McQueen was very much a star, but a little less than a superstar. He was memorable in both The Magnificent Seven and The Great Escape, but these were ensemble films more than star vehicles, and perhaps The Cincinnati Kid was the first work that suggested he could carry a film and generate a particular persona. But it was as if McQueen coincided with a cinematic interest in quiet, and he was always less voluble than Newman, Brando, Reynolds, Dustin Hoffman and Al Pacino, and stiller than Gene Hackman or Jack Nicholson. The actors he most resembled may have been Clint Eastwood and Robert Redford in their stillness and capacity for silence, but these two stars were not interchangeable actors. (Could anyone imagine Redford as Dirty Harry or The Man with No Name; Eastwood as Jay Gatsby or Bob Woodward?) McQueen would have been far from perfect in Eastwood’s key roles, and less than ideal in Redford’s — but he could have been more plausibly cast in Redford or Eastwood parts than Redford or Eastwood in each other’s.
This might explain why numerous roles were offered to the actor, many of which he turned down. In Apocalypse Now: “The first port of call on the film’s odyssey to hell was the crisis of casting. Coppola had wanted Steve McQueen for the main role of Willard, but after months of expressing interest, McQueen dropped out over concerns about the (initially scheduled) 14-week shoot in the jungle.” (Far Out Magazine) McQueen turned down both Dirty Harry and The French Connection, deciding “…both were too close to his 1968 cop film Bullitt. (New York Post). On Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, “although he liked the script, he dropped out, reportedly in a disagreement over who got top billing.” (Independent). That is an impressive list of rejections, and we can include The Sorcerer and Close Encounters of the Third Kind. In the former instance, McQueen just didn’t want to go off on an arduous shoot and leave his partner, Ali McGraw, at home, or take her with him, seeing her idly sitting around instead of furthering her own career. Friedkin regarded his insistence on shooting in Latin America “one of the most foolish decisions I ever made because a close-up of Steve McQueen was worth much more than any landscape in the world.” (Film Talk). Of Close Encounters of the Third Kind, “Spielberg’s first choice was McQueen. Alas, when Spielberg met up with the actor to discuss the role, he declined because he claimed he couldn’t cry on cue.” (Far Out Magazine) With the possible exception of The Sorcerer, none of these films would have been any better with McQueen in the role, which suggests the actor had the talent of a casting director, allied to the protective ego of a star. At the same time, we could see why directors would wish to give him roles in especially Dirty Harry, Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid and The French Connection. He may not have been the toughest of tough guys, and Charles Bronson would always be better casting if you wanted brutal, Eastwood if you wanted mildly sadistic, and Hackman if you wanted frustrated aggression. But he could cover a broader range of masculinity than the others, without quite saying, for example, that he was a better actor than Hackman. If McQueen was offered so many roles, it wasn’t just that he was a big star, where, after Bullitt and The Thomas Crown Affair “…he would become the highest paid actor in the world. No mean feat for someone who came from a broken home, having never met a father who had left his mother when McQueen was six months old, and who was placed in reform school aged 14.” (Independent) It was also that he could be seen in a surprising range of parts for a star who would never have been viewed as an actor of range. Yet when one hears he was lined up for the role as Audrey Hepburn’s boyfriend in Breakfast at Tiffany’s (but couldn’t get out of his contract for the TV show Wanted: Dead or Alive), this is the sort of part Jack Lemmon might have played, but refused, Robert Redford would have suited, and George Peppard ended up playing. Could we have seen Hackman, Bronson or Eastwood in the part?
Yet for all this relative flexibility, McQueen’s abiding persona is as a man of few words, and who better to put in solitary confinement and expect him to come out of the encounter still sane, more than McQueen? Admittedl,y in The Great Escape, he can talk through a wall to others when he is in the Cooler, but in Papillon, he is all alone, and locked up in solitary more than once. For a talkative type, that would be hell; for the reticent, merely purgatory. Those other films from the same period, where words were generally absent, could have all comfortably contained McQueen, except, of course, for Playtime. Though Lemmon and McQueen may have been both considered for Breakfast at Tiffany’s, the crossover was minimal, while the crossover with Redford and Eastwood was maximal. This partly rests on the volubility of Lemmon against the tight-lipped McQueen, but it also shows that just as McQueen knew he couldn’t do lachrymose, he wasn’t going to be much better at humour. If Lemmon may not have been ideal in Playtime, and that Tati was of course in the Chaplin, Keaton and Woody Allen tradition of nobody playing the role they have written better than themselves, for Lemmon to have played Monsieur Hulot would merely have resulted in likely disappointment. With McQueen, it would obviously have been catastrophic. We could, however, imagine him playing the Kier Dullea role in 2001, an American Jef Costello in Le Samurai, and Leone could have found a place for him somewhere in Once Upon a Time in the West. After all, the Western is perhaps the most taciturn of genres.
McQueen may never have been as iconic a figure as Eastwood, but he could be comfortable in a genre that showed him playing cowboys on several occasions, including in The Magnificent Seven, Nevada Smith and Tom Horn. He was also a modern cowboy in Junior Bonner and, like Eastwood, started out as a TV cowboy in Wanted: Dead or Alive. But he was best playing modern, yet out of his time, a figure who could adjust better than almost anybody to the mechanical technology around him, and whose love for cars was evident in several of his films, but less so with the emotions demanded of a person living in the later part of the 20th century. It is as if he understood the era he lived in required more words than he was willing to provide, and envied an era when, by drawing on a pistol, you could avoid elaborate argumentation. As Pauline Kael reckoned: “McQueen is an amusing actor of considerable skill but a reserved actor.” (Reeling) Yet David Thomson, over time, could see that reserve had value: “his remorseless honesty becomes more affecting. He may be brutal, or brutish at times — but when is he fake?” (Biographical Dictionary of Film) It was as if modern machines compensated for the difficulties in modern living, and though McQueen had a few relationships and three marriages, he had far more motorbikes and cars. Thomson may be right when saying, McQueen “exulted in his duet with motorbike in The Great Escape…” but this was merely an early onscreen love affair that would become more pronounced in both his public and private life. He owned so many cars that Wikipedia lists them as if they were part of his filmography. These include a Porsche 911S, a Ferrari 250 GT Berlinetta Lusso, a Jaguar XKSS and a Ford GT40. The Rolls-Royce he drives in The Thomas Crown Affair may have a socially metonymic function quite different from the Mustang in Bullitt, but both cars convey a man’s need for solitude. The Rolls-Royce shows the titular Thomas Crown making the most of the good life when it comes to material items. The car is a consumer luxury, but so is the suit he wears and the gated house where he lives. When he drives out to a cemetery, he is trailed by the getaway driver turned informer, and the contrast between the vehicles is pronounced. The informer drives a station wagon that serves as a family car (as well as the getaway vehicle) and resembles the police cars that are functional too. But everything Thomas Crown moves around in makes us aware of the luxury he expects to possess, including a banana-coloured glider and that black Rolls-Royce. He also eyes up a wine-coloured 1967 Ferrari 275 GTS, as if its owner is almost an afterthought - even if it happens to be Faye Dunaway sitting in it. When he passes the car outside a New York auction, his friend tells him to hurry up as he lingers over the car’s beauty. The friend says it is one of those rare Italian things, and McQueen replies that yes, it is one of those rare Italian things, as aware of its value as his friend is oblivious to its significance. Peter Jurow notes: “What is there to say about a car that last sold in 2013 for just under $28 million? Though it appears in The Thomas Crown Affair more to provide some Ferrari star power…only ten were made and, fittingly…Steve McQueen ended up owning one of them.” (Revs Automedia) McQueen had a penchant for buying up the vehicles that appeared alongside him, and it was no doubt a great heartache that he never could purchase that most talismanic of McQueen movie vehicles, the green Ford Mustang 390 GT from Bullitt. He tried, but the owner wouldn’t part with it, and McQueen’s truculent pursuit probably didn’t enamour himself to its owner. “McQueen had tried to buy the car from its previous owner, but it slipped through his grasp. His curt four-sentence letter to [the new owner Robert) Kiernan begins. ‘Again, I would like to appeal to you’” (Daily Telegraph)
We could see in such anecdotes avarice, but it might be more a needy materialism that could insist on things a safety McQueen may have believed people could never provide, a reflection of McQueen being brought up in a broken home. “When a kid doesn't have any love when he's small, he begins to wonder if he's good enough. My mother didn't love me, and I didn't have a father. I thought, 'Well, I must not be very good.’" (Steve McQueen: In His Own Words) Biographer Christopher Sanford reckoned that, “what depressed and surprised McQueen’s friends more than the promiscuity was how little happiness it seemed to bring him. As his own daughter put it a few years later, ‘My dad hated all women but me.’” (McQueen) Whatever the truth concerning his personal life, he was one of several actors during the ‘60s and ‘70s who gave the impression of a solitude so great that even if McQueen did star in those early ensembles, The Magnificent Seven and The Great Escape, stardom made him solitary. This might seem an inevitable consequence of becoming a star: the actor wants to steal the show rather than lending out enough limelight to others. But it seemed this was a character trait as much as an ego trip. While some might see in the complicated manoeuvring over star-status, in The Towering Inferno, an insecure actor determined to get top billing over Paul Newman, what the film itself shows is McQueen’s retreat from gregariousness and Newman’s sociability. Newman always appeared happier in company, and Cool Hand Luke, Butch Cassidy..., The Sting, and Slapshot show an actor looking to play off others. It wasn’t that Newman couldn’t be solitary (The Hustler and Hud key examples), but little good came from it, and it seemed more like hubris and selfishness than solitude.
Newman was also an actor who talked, and often had an interest in theatre, with two of his early key roles in Tennessee Williams adaptations, Suddenly Last Summer and Cat on a Hot Tin Roof. Most of the films he directed were adaptations of novels or plays. When McQueen starred in a 1978 version of Ibsen’s An Enemy of the People, it seemed anomalous, and whatever the limits or otherwise of McQueen’s thespian abilities, he seems so clearly an actor of film. If cinema is chiefly a visual medium, this indicates dialogue is a very secondary function, and was of course literally the case when film had thirty years of existence before sound came in. What often matters is that an actor can convey, in body language, action and facial gesture, the import in a scene. Often in early cinema, this was based on exaggerated gestures, with the primitive technology capturing bolder movements and struggling with more nuanced ones. But by the sixties, a new type of silent cinema arrived, with sound effects important, but dialogue muted, and this wasn’t only evident in the late sixties examples, offered at the beginning of this article. It is there in early 1960s films too like Antonioni’s L’Avventura and The Eclipse, while Michel Chion sees it earlier still, noting that “with A Man Escaped (1956) Bresson proves to be one of the first directors after Kurosawa to have systematized what I call ritualised cinema — a cinema where sparse and sober dialogue, as well as the minimal place accorded to music, frees the ear and allows us to hear how sounds and movement in the image organize time.” (Film, A Sound Art) It is indeed Chion who discusses Once Upon a Time in The West, 2001, Bullitt, Playtime and Le Samourai director Jean-Pierre Melville’s slightly later The Red Circle, when noting that these were laconic works. There were few actors more laconic than McQueen. While many a heist is an elaborate exposition as the viewer discovers how a robbery will take place, The Thomas Crown Affair rests on just a few lines of dialogue, as we work out how the heist is executed, while details of its execution will be revealed later by other characters trying to understand how it came about. When it comes to discussing how he gets the money out of the country, this is dialogue given to Faye Dunaway as supposition. She reckons it will be in a Swiss bank account, and when her co-investigator asks how he could get all that bulky cash out of the US, she says the Swiss can be very lax when it comes to such things — they hardly check luggage at all. This could all have been dialogue given to McQueen as the person behind the plan but, by putting it into the mouth of Dunaway and her colleague, it gives McQueen a detached relationship with the very action he has instigated.
The twin perils for many an actor are too little dialogue and too much exposition. As William Goldman noted, “stars, without exception, hate carrying the plot” (Adventures in the Screentrade) and Goldman worked with many stars we have already discussed: Redford, Newman, Hoffman, Reynolds, and wrote a novel A Soldier in The Rain, that was turned into an early McQueen vehicle, and Goldman also worked on an early version of Papillon. When discussing exposition, Goldman offers an intriguing generalisation and a couple of useful observations. He claims that as a scriptwriter, it is great “if you can, make your star description like stretch socks — one size fits all.” He also notes there are certain actors who can carry exposition and others who will do anything to resist it. Offering a passage of typical Western genre explanation about a long trek in dangerous terrain, Goldman says that it will work well in the mouth of Wayne. You just cut back and forth from Wayne to the huddled masses, and what comes across isn’t the info dump, but Wayne’s magnitude. If anybody can get them through the trip, it will be this iconic figure. He also says that Cary Grant “was famous in his films for trying to get other people in the scene to do the expository talking. Grant was a brilliant listener, and often scenes would be shifted to suit him.” (Adventure in the Screentrade) There is a potential contradiction between Goldman’s claim that “most stars are relatively interchangeable” and the difference between an actor like Wayne, who could carry exposition, and someone like Grant, who understood, perhaps, that his persona needed to resist it. This might seem especially odd given that Wayne would seem a much more taciturn actor than Grant. But this is where the actor isn’t only not interchangeable; the actor isn’t even reducible to a type. Goldman is right to see that such expositional dialogue works well for Wayne, but it wouldn’t work well for McQueen, even though both are actors not known for voluble genres. Grant, on the other hand, was a master of screwball (The Awful Truth; His Girl Friday) and best at ironic action (Only Angels Have Wings; To Catch a Thief). He should have been okay with exposition, but resisted it.
What does all this confusion tell us? That actors are more singular than we might have assumed and part of our purpose in suggesting similarities within differences, in seeing McQueen sharing characteristics with Redford, for example, all the better to understand an actor’s singularity. It might seem odd in some ways that so much more attention has been given to a director’s originality over an actor’s — not just because audiences have been more inclined to see a film due to its stars over its director, but also because a director's vision is a formal thing, while an actor’s behaviour is a physical thing. Anybody can see differences between two actors; only someone with at least a modest knowledge of cinema could distinguish, for example, the work of Billy Wilder and Howard Hawks. There is no directorial equivalent to miscasting. While of course directors were often given to certain genres (John Ford westerns and war movies; Hitchcock thrillers and romances), certainly no more so than actors. Few might have wished to see Hitchcock direct a western, but fewer still would want to see Cary Grant as The Man with No Name.
In understanding McQueen’s work, it helps if we comprehend his singularities: the images that conjure up a star in our mind long after the individual films, their plots and situations, have all but disappeared, even if we need to look again at specific works in understanding how they have entered our consciousness. To do so, we can look at various films McQueen made before becoming a superstar. Thinking of Hell is for Heroes and Love with a Proper Stranger, we may note that the latter is a better film than the former, even if Don Siegel (who directed the former war movie) is regarded more highly than Robert Mulligan (who made the latter romance). McQueen is very good in both of them, but it is Siegel’s movie that would have done much more to produce the McQueen persona than Mulligan’s. In it, he plays a lowly private after being demoted from sergeant during a court martial, and he arrives in the French town ready for action but with an attitude problem, evident in breaking the rules, curt behaviour, and poor timekeeping. As we see him arriving at the makeshift barracks, the sergeant says he is three days late. McQueen's Rees doesn’t apologise; he says he saw a friend. A minute later, the platoon’s hawker announces that if Rees wants anything, he is the man to speak to, and Rees tells him to beat it. That evening, he ventures into a bar, and the barmaid says he shouldn’t be there: she’s been told she can’t sell to soldiers. But Rees won’t budge, gets his booze and fags, and stands at the bar. When she tells him he will be in trouble when the MPs arrive, he says, “lady, the whole world is full of trouble.” Rees is a man of few words, and most of them are truculent, a troubled soul who seems to be containing within him more than the surliness of a man who has lost his sergeant status. Two-thirds of the way through the film, he will be responsible for other men’s deaths when he makes a decision to advance without permission from higher up in the military command. As a private, he has no legitimacy, and when the captain says that if they weren’t in need of rest for a six o’clock morning assault, he would be holding him accountable right in the field. There won’t be a need for a court-martial at all: Rees dies taking the pill box that he had earlier advanced towards.
There is often in McQueen’s work a belief that instincts are countered by authority rather than augmented by it — a common enough theme in American cinema interested in action and plot development, and where risk assessments would hamper the fast-paced Hollywood demands. McQueen may have turned down both Dirty Harry and The French Connection, but it made sense that he was offered them. These are advanced versions of his Rees character, guys who want to do things their way but also have to evade the red tape. Perhaps one reason why McQueen was never synonymous with the cowboy was that the westerner was given to freedoms the criminal, the cop and the soldier weren’t. McQueen is someone who is best seen as a man resisting the law rather than operating in its absence, and this covers The Great Escape, Bullitt, The Thomas Crown Affair, The Getaway and Papillon: many of McQueen’s best-known films. Other roles McQueen was offered but turned down, The Sorcerer, The Driver, The Gauntlet and Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, were all films about people resisting authority, and the latter a western that had enough of a smattering of civilisation for it to have establishments like banks and trains that could be robbed. Hell is for Heroes may be a minor film, but it helped augment the development of a major movie image. In it, McQueen rarely speaks, never smiles and hardly blinks. It is in back and white, and yet those blue eyes manage to convey an icy blueness despite the film’s colour neutrality. There are moments where he is staring death in the face, and McQueen’s got the eyes that make the idiom vivid. In an early scene, when he talks to the sergeant about his court-martial, he is at his most uncomfortable. He blinks a couple of times and looks like he just might be able to take orders from a man who at least acknowledges him as an individual. It is often this tension between individuality and its suppression that makes McQueen interesting. Give him too much liberty, or too much power, and that tension would be likely to dissipate.
One reason why Love with a Proper Stranger is a very good film but not much of a McQueen vehicle doesn’t rest only on the leading credit going to Natalie Wood, but also that Wood is playing closer to type than McQueen. Wood often plays characters constrained by parental influence and getting into situations that lead close to or result in collapse: Inside Daisy Clover, Splendor in the Grass, Gypsy. Here, Angie finds herself pregnant after a one-night stand with Rocky Papasano (McQueen). Rocky can’t remember her when she comes to a dance club and announces she is pregnant, and musician Rocky catches up with her through the crowd as he accepts his responsibility and they agree to raise the money to abort the fetus. McQueen seems much less self-reliant than usual as he relies on his girlfriend Barbie for a place to stay, money from his parents to help fund the abortion, and realises the moment before the operation will take place that he wants to keep the child, even if he couches it in safety terms — that the abortionist doesn’t look like she has any medical qualifications. He also later becomes jealous when it seems Angie will marry someone else, and Rocky declares his feelings on a busy street while carrying a sign saying: Better wed than dead?
Made a couple of years after Breakfast at Tiffany’s, McQueen could still be sought after as a romantic star who, at the same time, contains within him a little romantic need. This neediness, which must be a dimension of any love story if it isn’t to become a one-sided account of a man reluctantly bagged by a woman, often finds its corrective in the comic, with many a story of love fitting into the romantic comedy, as a man uses humour, while the audience can see in it denial. Cary Grant was its master, but other comedic practitioners, including Clarke Gable and Hugh Grant, could give the impression of resistance leading to acquiescence, while others like Tom Hanks and Jack Lemmon were often more vulnerably able to play the feeling straight, even if the film was no less humorous. McQueen possessed neither the humour nor the obvious sensitivity to make a career out of romance, with his persona proposing that, if it takes two to tango, this might be one too many. Yet despite this, McQueen convinces far more as a romantic lead than he does as a member of the Italian-American community, and there are beautiful moments of pusillanimity and also compassion. The former instance comes when he returns to his lover’s place after Angie tells him she is pregnant. He goes into the bathroom, looks in the mirror and then leans against the sink and puts his head in his hand as he wonders what he will say to Barbie. He sighs, and says, while still alone in the bathroom, and speaking to Barbie offscreen, “a friend of mine…asked me if I’d ask you the name of maybe a kind of doctor.” He says it, knocking his fingers against the tap, and it is a fine example of a character weak, while an actor plays strong. McQueen’s body language is assured, even if his request is cowardly; his lean, athletic physique indicates an actor’s nonchalance. Barbie susses straightaway. It isn’t a friend who needs the doctor as she ejects him from the apartment.
Later, running away from Angie’s brothers, Rocky and Angie hide out in the basement of an antiques place, and the location helps define the characters’ emotions, with Angie feeling both frustrated and close, and Rocky agitated, yet beginning to show signs of deep affection. They’d met Rocky’s family shortly before, outside in a park, and Angie gets to see a side of Rocky she hadn’t known, while Rocky sees how good Angie is with his folks. In the basement, Mulligan makes great use of the cluttered yet expansive space to tease out the combination of intimacy and distance the couple is feeling, as he often frames them within the same shot but at a remove from each other, and with objects emphasising their separateness. In one shot, Angie sits on a table a few yards away from Rocky, who is seated at a desk. When she gets up to leave, it isn’t only that Rocky stays seated as she goes to the door — the camera offers Angie in medium-close-up, while initially McQueen remains viewed in long-shot. This makes sense perceptually: Angie is looking at him from a distance, but wouldn’t Rocky be looking at her from the same distance? Yet the point is chiefly dramatic: to propose a difference that the film will then close as the characters close it between themselves. When she decides to stay, the film initially offers a medium-long shot with Rocky in the foreground and Angie in the background, the roomy space allowing for the form to illustrate the emotion as the non-diegetic music stops. The film then moves into a medium-close-up of Rocky, and then a medium-close-up on Angie, who is arranging her coat and not looking up. Rocky asks her for the first time why she went with him that night up on the mountains, and the film moves towards an intimacy that the form remains ambivalent about, as it still sometimes offers shots of Rocky in the foreground and Angie in the distance, and long shots of the two of them standing next to each other.
We wouldn’t want to get lost in describing this scene, nor is it always useful to insist on a director’s deliberation. But the sequence captures well a filmic tone that absorbs comedy, yet is at its best resisting its insistence. With another actor in the role, it might have too predictably shown Rocky eventually seeing that he wishes for a more traditional life than he initially appears to want. With McQueen, however, if the film were to end with his love rival getting the girl, and Rocky aware of what he let go, it wouldn’t have come as a surprise. Sure, the love rival here is comedic: played by Tom Bosley, who would go on to appear as Howard Cunningham in the TV show Happy Days. But Anthony is also affectionate and sensitive, if also clumsy and incapable of finishing a sentence when he meets Angie’s family. Bosley plays him as the sort of man who would be a hopeless date, though probably a great husband and father. It wouldn’t have been a tragedy had she plumped for Anthony. It would have been for Rocky, but McQueen is the sort of actor who can make unhappiness his own: we could come away from the film accepting other lives will be okay, but not his. But the reason will be that other people don’t possess McQueen’s innate capacity for self-destruction, and that frequent flirtation with risk.
This can incorporate anything from Hell is for Heroes to The Thomas Crown Affair, from The Cincinnati Kid to The Great Escape. It isn’t usually the happiness of the ending that matters, but the amount of resistance or self-assertion McQueen offers. At the end of The Towering Inferno, he is the fire chief who scolds architect Paul Newman for putting up tall buildings without thinking enough of the firemen who will lose their lives when things go wrong. In The Great Escape, he ends up back in the cooler once again. In The Cincinnati Kid, he won’t play safe and loses a fortune at the card table. In The Thomas Crown Affair, he is forced to leave the country, but not before pulling off another heist that he couldn’t resist, although he already possesses a large fortune. If McQueen became famous as the king of cool, it rested on showing indifference towards societal demand or expectation, for a principle that was very far from the pursuit of happiness. It is why Love with a Proper Stranger could have survived an unhappy ending, and McQueen would have played more into his evolving character than against it. Equally, though he ends up with the girl at the end of The Cincinnati Kid, this is only because of her decency and owes nothing to his. He cheats on Christian with his friend’s girlfriend, Melba, when he realises that Shooter has been cheating with the cards all the better so that someone Shooter owes money to can pay off his debts. McQueen discovers the friend’s ploys, refuses to continue as long as he is doling out the cards, and sleeps with Melba in an act of revenge that also inevitably hurts Christian when she walks in on him just after the sexual encounter. Yet a while afterwards, after he loses big, Christian hugs him on the street, after all the others have witnessed a loser, and we see failed sexual politics meeting narrative hastiness. Christian may still want to give him another chance, but this is a woman offering unfailing love without any concern for what must be her profound hurt. It is all very well for the film to say that this is the only person he can really trust, but it owes her a couple of scenes that indicate he will, in the future, be capable of being trustworthy, and that she has seen enough decency to justify her return.
There has always been a vulnerable quality to McQueen behind that taciturn scowl, far more than we find in Eastwood’s wince or Redford’s self-reserve, and we can accept that Christian would wish to love him, and that the Kid would want to love her back. Most of the actors we have thus far invoked within the context of McQueen quite possess this quality. In this sense, the actor can be the heir to James Dean, even if he happened to be a year older than the icon who died so young. There is in McQueen a feeling of an earlier abandonment that manifests itself in rebelliousness, and ties in with our earlier thoughts about his modern aspect, one which made him less than the perfect Western actor. There is, of course, a biographical underpinning to this, but we wouldn’t wish to make too much of it. Sure, McQueen was from a troubled background: his mother was “a nineteen-year-old runaway and drunk” (McQueen: the Biography), according to Christopher Sandford. His father abandoned his mother, and his mother, in turn, abandoned him, sending him off to live with his grandparents, who then left McQueen with a great uncle. When McQueen moved back in with his mother, his stepfather beat him up, and he took to living on the streets. He was only nine. Sandford quotes him saying, “My life was screwed up before I was born.” (McQueen: The Biography) McQueen had the face of the wizened and the youthful, a paradox too far perhaps, but one that found its embodiment in McQueen, and might explain his appeal if we accept its combination gave him an attractive quality rare enough in a star. Antonia Quirke reckoned, “the boy's extreme prettiness had the cut of corrugated iron: his face, although manifestly young, was incredibly lined [… ] With McQueen, the lines were explicit scars, stains in wood. It makes you trust him.” (New Statesman) McQueen often looks troubled, and a face creased by its mid-thirties can convey, within youth, lived experience. When in The Cincinnati Kid, Melba initially comes on to him, he kisses her and then slaps her hard on the bottom, as if to say he can see through her manipulations. It is the action of someone who is wise to feelings, not because he can express his own, but because he is well aware of their frequent absence in others. That childhood may have helped him there, but what we do know is that he has the face to register it. When he does sleep with Melba later, this has nothing to do with the affection he feels towards her, but, as we have noted, the contempt he feels for Shooter.
This vulnerability meeting cruelty, the awareness that love is hard to believe in, but betrayal is easily understood, is played out too in Baby the Rain Must Fall. Here, there is a backstory missing from The Cincinnati Kid as McQueen plays Henry Thomas, recently released from prison, whose wife and the child he never knew seek him out in a small town in Texas, near the prison, and near where the woman who brought him up after his parents died lives. Adopted by this woman who never thought he was any good, the old lady still has power over him, and once again, McQueen plays a character who can’t trust in love. Though he tries to make a life with his wife and child, we know he is likely to end up back in prison, and sure enough, he does. But McQueen isn’t simply the tough guy looking for trouble; he is also the sensitive figure trying to succeed as a singer. He says to his wife that he is going to be a success. ‘People are going to hear about Henry Thomas.” He isn’t a bad singer, but we notice that he is tormented by terrible dreams, intimidated by his ward, and sensitive to people who won’t take his music seriously. When he plays a gig, someone starts howling as he sings, and afterwards, McQueen starts an altercation he easily wins, until the man’s friends get involved. In both The Cincinnati Kid and Baby the Rain Must Fall, McQueen plays talented people, but with a self-destructive streak showing hubris meeting insecurity. This might bea  common enough combination in Hollywood heroes, but the balance between the two is rarely as evident as in McQueen’s work. Newman, for example, could be hopelessly hubristic in The Hustler and Hud, and clearly sexually insecure in Cat on a Hot Tin Roof. But in many a role, McQueen can be simultaneously arrogant and vulnerable, which allows us to accept the ending of The Cincinnati Kid that will make Christian more than a doormat. If she is, it is one that says Welcome, with the film earlier having shown us the healthy, loving farm family Christian is part of when the Kid goes and visits. The ending is troublesomely unwilling to entertain Christian’s surely complex feelings, but it isn’t merely a chauvinistic account of a woman standing by her man, no matter how bad his behaviour. An actor who managed to convey cockiness without looking lost would have encapsulated no more than the macho, but Christian is a woman who has faith in her man because she knows he does the worst of things for the best of reasons. A more complete script would have shown why she would take this man back, beyond narrative contrivance that proposes the Kid will now see in Christian that she is the most authentic thing in his life.
But we should remember that it would be hard for Christian to think that he is the most authentic thing in her life. He hasn’t only avenged his friend, he has betrayed Christian, and with someone Christian believed was a friend of hers, saying, early in the film, “I happen to like Melba.” We might think, too, of the scene where Christian discusses a French film she saw, in which the Spanish general sends a message to say that he is going to spend the night in a town with his army. The local men are scared, but the wives have a big party with the soldiers, and they go to bed with the troops, then the soldiers leave the next morning. The men have been spared; the women have satisfied the army, and life goes on. Christian says that it shows the men cared more for their lives than for their dignity, and the Kid, who is in the bath, as she tells him the story, misreads the meaning of it. Shortly afterwards, Christian, in joking irritation, dunks his head under the water. We might assume that by the end of the film, she has no dignity herself as she goes back to McQueen. Yet this wouldn’t be fair to how the film plays out, even if we might have wished for Christian’s willingness to allow him back in be given more substance, if she were to return at all. Yet the story she tells proposes there are things greater than dignity, and the Kid might just be ready to learn about a few of them. The audience may, instead of seeing Christian as weak, view her as wise, and the Kid should consider himself lucky to be privy to that wisdom.
This capacity to make a weakness in the script work is perhaps one of the central features of stardom, and why we might wonder how interchangeable actors are, no matter Goldman’s proclamations. Christian returning to a Kid played by Eastwood could have seemed far more masochistic, and we might not have easily imagined a similar scene with Eastwood in a bath and a teasing Tuesday Weld gently undermining his masculinity. It is this early scene, along with the visit the Kid makes to Christian’s family farm, that allows us to accept the ending, even if we might feel she too hurriedly accepts the Kid’s infidelity. Someone keen to see strong female characters on screen would understandably be horrified by what appears to be Christian’s willingness to take him back as the film ends differently from the script. In the screenplay, Christian and Kid have an exchange where she says she loves him but doesn’t think it is enough and takes off in a taxi. The script’s ending is more plausible and, while hardly feminist, would at least appear to respect Christian’s dignity more readily. However, the film’s ending proposes that dignity is a complicated thing, and what can seem like weakness isn’t quite the same as dignity’s absence. At the end of the film, one may believe that the Kid is weaker than she is, and strength lies in overcoming pride and being there for what in this instance may be the weaker sex, the male one, just as it was in the story she tells about the town where the women save the men’s lives by sleeping with the foreign troops.
The point rests, however, on whether McQueen can register the requisite sensitivity. If we believe he can, it is because we see in McQueen, if not uniqueness, then nevertheless a nuance that doesn’t make him just another action star. He is an action man who has within him not so much a fear of intimacy as an expectation of its failure. In some roles, this doesn’t even become a question. In The Towering Inferno, he has to do little more than put out fires, and in Papillon, little more than escape from Devil’s Island. These may appear achievements of great magnitude, but they don’t ask for feelings of much range, and this is why we will with on the film he made just prior to these two huge hits, The Getaway. Sam Peckinpah directed the film after making Straw Dogs with Dustin Hoffman, as the alliteratively mild-mannered mathematician going gung-ho in a sleepy yet sleazy English village, and one of his gentler works, Junior Bonner, with McQueen, the contemporary cowboy who makes a living doing rodeos and precariously survives. In The Getaway, Doc (McQueen) asks his wife Carol (Ali McGraw) to do anything she can to get him released from prison, and discovers, as if in a nod to the story Christian tells in The Cincinnati Kid, that what she has done is sleep with a corrupt businessman, Beynon, who is also on the parole board. He doesn’t realise what she has done till later in the film, just as he doesn’t initially know when doing a bank robbery for Beynon, that he is robbing it partly to hide money that has already gone missing. The robbery is centrally to cover the hole in accounts: Doc, Carol and others steal half a million, but the news reports $750,000 has been taken. Doc understandably feels doubly aggrieved, and it isn’t helped by the uselessness and venality of the Beynon hires he is forced to work with.
Yet for all the machismo in Peckinpah’s films, and for all the apparent emotional unavailability expressed in McQueen’s, the film’s most important aspect is whether Doc can forgive Carol. When he works out what happened, he slaps her around in one of those all too familiar scenes in ‘70s cinema where a man’s gotta do what a man’s gotta do — and part of that was domestic violence. But the film isn’t condoning Doc’s behaviour. It is showing his torturous frustration when he asked her to show her love by making sure he was released. She has shown it by sleeping with another man, and he can’t quite see this as the enormous sacrifice she was willing to make, rather than an act showing she is a woman he can’t trust. Later, when he asks her to listen ,saying, “It’s hard enough for me as it is’’, as he wants to make amends, she says, “You’re not tough enough to forget Beynon”, as she makes clear she chose Doc and not the other man. But the film proposes that dignity is only as good as the love that sits behind any deed, and the important thing is to ignore the deed and understand the feeling. In different ways, Christian and Doc understand this, even if the Kid sleep with Melba out of disgust towards his friend’s betrayal, and Carol out of necessity, as she wants Doc released. Yet in both instances, what matters is the instinct for love over the specifics of the actions. In contrast, in The Getaway, another character in The Getaway, Rudy, is cuckolded when his wife takes up with one of the other men involved in the heist. She and her husband run a vet surgery that they are forced to leave, as Rudy kidnaps the pair of them, and the kidnapper has regular sex with the wife as the husband, tied up, is forced to look on. He eventually hangs himself and there has been no sense the wife has been sleeping with Rudy out of obligation. The deed might be the same — Carol’s sexual assignation with Beynon; the wife’s with Rudy — but an enormous difference in intent. By the end of the film, Doc comprehends that intent, but we might wonder if other actors would have been so willing.
Yes, Dustin Hoffman, Jack Lemmon, maybe Al Pacino, but John Wayne, Charles Bronson or Clint Eastwood? To understand an aspect of McQueen’s appeal isn’t to see him as an interchangeable tough guy, but that toughness comes out of a damaged sensibility, one looking for a bit of love that can repair it. If both Eastwood and McQueen were great wincers, Eastwood always had more cruelty in his eyes than McQueen, and could narrow them into ready meanness. McQueen offered a more open aperture, no doubt partly because of the startling blueness of those eyes (second only to Newman's), but also because he could convey startle and surprise more readily than Eastwood could. When Pauline Kael said, “Clint Eastwood isn’t offensive; he isn’t an actor, so one could hardly call him a bad actor. He’d have to do something before we could consider him bad at it,’’ she also added: “Eastwood couldn’t express grief any more than he could express tenderness.” (New Yorker). This wouldn’t be at all a fair claim to make of McQueen, who expresses the latter in numerous films, no matter if he was supposedlyn’t much interested in it in life. As David Thomson says, McQueen was “a man who seems to have been likeable in the gaps between ‘Action’ and ‘Cut’.” (Have You Seen…?)
Most of the time, though, McQueen wasn’t quite likeable, but neither was he villainous, and Doc McCoy seems a good example of McQueen’s capacity for creating ambivalent responses in a viewer, ones that can allow us to see his point of view without quite agreeing with it. In Eastwood’s roles, and at a more extreme level in Bronson’s, there is often an ambivalence in the viewer extra- diegetically. In other words, the film may ask us to see Eastwood and Bronson as killing machines in Dirty Harry and Death Wish, Sudden Impact and The Mechanic, but the viewer might wish to generate a distance from the extreme violence, even if the film believes it is offering it for the benefit of a good cause. There are murderers and rapists indiscriminately killing, and Eastwood and Bronson will discriminately kill in turn. But one can’t quite eradicate the notion that their characters are sadists looking for a good excuse to find some victims who, in their guilt, hide our action stars' cruel streak. The films don’t want us to question Eastwood and Bronson’s motives; they want us to see that they are just wearily taking out the garbage, removing the scum off our streets.
This wouldn’t quite describe the characters McQueen would usually play, and this is partly why one can find the trace of Brando, Dean and other Method-inclined actors. It was proof, perhaps, of his work early with acting coach Sanford Meisner, who saw McQueen dedicated to the craft. “Professionalism, always professionalism. Dog tired, he’d put his feet in a bucket of ice water to jerk himself awake while he learnt lines.” (McQueen) If Kael could say a bit unfairly that Eastwood would have to act so we could decide if he was any good at it, McQueen took acting seriously enough to study with Meisner. Whether it was Meisner’s advice or McQueen’s natural talent, he played action roles without reducing them to a penchant for vindictiveness, and his co-stars were often more than mere love interest. The relationship between Doc and his wife in The Getaway is vital throughout the film: she is the one who gets him out of jail, however horrifically for Doc and for her, is centrally involved in the robbery, and the spat between them over sleeping with Beynon becomes an important part of the film’s second half. He might not have seemed the most obvious person to play opposite Audrey Hepburn in Breakfast of Tiffany’s, but the more we think about, and the more we look especially at his work in Love with a Proper Stranger, Baby the Rain Must Fall and The Cincinnati Kid, the more we see someone who wasn’t so much keeping his feelings to himself, but was capable of sharing them in the wariest of ways, As Meisner noted, the actor “was warm but always conditional.” (McQueen: The Biography) McQueen may have been known as the “king of cool”, but he was, perhaps, more ice defrosting when he felt the emotional temperature was right. Whether this only ever happened between action and cut is not for us to speculate over; all we need say is that there is far more feeling in McQueen’s works than he usually receives credit for. And we can note, too, that he was never the person who indicated a solitary self-composure (unlike Redford). He needed people to love and authorities to fight against, and this combination sums up the ambivalence he often managed to express: a need for affection and a fight for credibility. These are two qualities that hardly suggest ‘cool’, but instead something more interesting from an actor’s perspective: the intricacy of need and the awareness of power. Yet his capacity for silence allowed him to give the impression of self-containment and the ability to cope with solitary confinement. McQueen may have said on turning down The French Connection, “I’m only good at doing authority my way” (McQueen: The Biography), yet this needn’t be read as an escape from it, more the form it would have to take for him to be plausible in the role. Goldman was clearly more confident over an actor’s interchangeability than McQueen was, and though many may rue the numerous roles that he rejected, it also left him with a body of work that shows an odd type of integrity.

© Tony McKibbin