Steve McQueen - Marc Eliot [119]
The Los Angeles Times said, “Steve McQueen is explosive and forceful in one of his finest performances.”
But perhaps it was Sam Peckinpah who summed it up best: “I made a film where nobody got shot and nobody went to see it.”2
Despite the movie’s box office failure, Steve loved Junior Bonner and often referred to it as his favorite of all the films he’d made. During its production he had told one reporter, “There’s a rare quality in my town, y’know?” He went on to explain, “People in Hollywood will hem and haw and fuck around playing all kinds of cute little games, and then you’ll finally realize they want something from you. Sam’s not like that.” Peckinpah had felt the same way about Steve. He told the same interviewer, “If you really want to learn about acting for the screen, watch McQueen’s eyes.” Their mutual admiration, combined with the emotional disarray in both their lives, their battles during The Getaway, and their insatiable desire for women (and their endless troubles with them), made them a pair of crazy kindred souls.
The Getaway opened December 13 to good reviews. It grossed $18 million in its initial domestic release, enough to make it the seventh highest-grossing film of the year. It made an additional $35 million overseas.3
THAT SEPTEMBER 1972, Ali’s divorce from Evans became final. She found an empty house for rent next to Steve’s up in Topanga Canyon. Because of the eccentric layout of the homes to ensure privacy, her driveway was almost four miles away from his, though the actual houses were separated only by a large field. It was not exactly an intimate setup, but Ali didn’t care. She wanted to be as close to Steve as she could get.
They were not together in the canyon for very long. Steve had decided to star in an adaptation of the worldwide bestseller Papillon (the book Neile had given to him, via Foster, while they were still married), Henri Charrière’s account of his true-life escape from Devil’s Island. The film was scheduled to be shot on location in Jamaica and later in Spain as a substitute for French Guiana, off the coast of which the notorious Devil’s Island was situated.
What had made the book so compelling was that no one had ever escaped from Devil’s Island. Charrière had always claimed he was innocent of the crime of murder (of a pimp) and unjustly convicted. Sentenced to Devil’s Island for life, he served seven years in solitary confinement and nearly that much again in limited general population. The atrocities he witnessed and the cruelty he endured for all that time drove him to attempt his daring, “impossible” escape. These were the perfect ingredients for a great action-adventure film with a deep emotional sensibility.
Steve may have been impressed with the story and its cinematic possibilities, but because of his divorce, the failure of Solar, and his string of less-than-successful films, he owed some more back taxes and needed cash; he suggested to one interviewer that that was the real reason he had agreed to make Papillon. “I may be doing the film version of the famous French bestseller,” he told Liz Smith. “And then again I may not if we don’t see a good script. I owe the government a little bit of money, so I’ll have to work a little.”
Steve was offered $2 million by Allied Artists to star in the film. (It would not be part of his First Artists deal and came with no producing responsibilities; it was strictly an acting job for pay. Allied Artists’ foreign partner was Columbia, which did not invest in the film but handled worldwide distribution.) Dustin Hoffman, cast as Charrière’s prison mate Louis Dega, accepted $1.25 million for his work in the film. Despite his sensational debut in Mike Nichols’s 1967 The Graduate, Hoffman had no problem accepting the lesser figure. He was not as big a star as Steve, and it had become increasingly difficult to find commercially viable roles for him. Audiences went to see Steve McQueen in this film, not Dustin Hoffman.
The director and co-producer was Franklin Schaffner (The