Steve McQueen - Marc Eliot [20]
The Blob was part of a fifties film fad that saw many of these B horror movies unexpectedly earn huge profits. Don Siegel’s 1956 Invasion of the Body Snatchers, the best of the decade’s metaphorical, paranoid anticommunist films, turned into a sleeper hit, earning millions and making a star out of Kevin McCarthy (as well as typecasting him into Hollywood horror film hell). The other genre that The Blob happened to key into was the teen rebellion/delinquent movie, like Nicholas Ray’s 1955 Rebel Without a Cause, which had helped make a sensation out of James Dean.
Harris’s had all the key ingredients: a minimal investment, the obligatory monster, and frightened but good-looking teens who can’t get any authority figures (police, parents, the school principal) to believe them, let alone help them, and wind up being their own heroes. Once the film was completed, Harris showed it to Paramount, who bought distribution rights with an advance of $300,000 against future earnings, meaning that Harris broke even before the film even opened. Sure enough, The Blob proved a huge hit, grossing more than $1.5 million in its first month and earning what was, for its time, an astonishing $12 million in its initial domestic release.1 Had Steve accepted the initial deal Harris had offered (and urged him to take), he would have become a millionaire overnight.
But he didn’t, and what was worse, he feared The Blob had turned him into the oldest kid in America, uncastable in anything but teen B movies. His fears looked as if they were coming true when, with no other offers, he took another B movie with another independent producer, this one called The Great St. Louis Bank Robbery. Shot on location and directed by Charles Guggenheim and John Stix, it was produced by Guggenheim, who managed to snag a distribution deal for it with United Artists.
Shot in black and white, The Great St. Louis Bank Robbery was based on a 1953 bank robbery attempt at the Southwest Bank of St. Louis. It was intended to be an art-house heist movie but lacked any stylistic appeal. It wound up doing little business outside of St. Louis, where the robbery attempt had become part of the local folklore. In the film, Steve played the driver of a getaway car. The same day production ended, Steve, frustrated and fed up, jumped into the Corvette and drove to California to be with Neile, who had just finished her successful stint at the Tropicana and had returned to California in the hopes of getting her film career back on track.
Steve was frustrated, but didn’t want Neile to know it. He put on a happy face for her that ultimately worked against him, because Neile was worried by his apparent lack of concern about acting, or anything else. She was making $50,000 a year to Steve’s $3,000, and it bothered her that it didn’t seem to bother him. Rather, she thought, he was content to spend her money as if it were his, buying new and expensive clothes, driving the ’Vette, and spending lavishly on hotels and long-distance phone calls. At one point she suggested they open separate bank accounts, and Steve told her she was crazy. I married you, didn’t I? was the upshot of his response, meaning not just Hey, that’s a pretty fair amount of caring but also What’s yours is mine. Neile kept their joint account open, but her concerns about Steve continued to deepen—until his life took an unexpected and dramatic turn that changed everything.
BY THE late 1950s, westerns, a slowly fading movie genre, had successfully made the move from the large screen to the small one.