Steve McQueen - Marc Eliot [3]
Without that type of directorial vision and guidance, over time McQueen’s intensity, inner turmoil, poor choice of scripts, and reliance on directors he knew he could control reduced him to the level of a two-dimensional actor, leaving his audiences to look for newer heroes. Ironically, the power he had accumulated through his best mainstream films allowed him to eventually run his career off the rails. One can only wonder what type of performance visionary auteurists such as John Ford or Howard Hawks or Francis Ford Coppola or even Sergio Leone could have delivered through Steve McQueen.
Another factor is early death. That is why James Dean will forever be celebrated as a rebel without a cause while fewer and fewer audiences actually see the three features that made him a forceful and driven actor very much with a cause. After McQueen’s comparatively early passing, his image quickly ossified into that of the tough, good-looking, blue-eyed, two-fisted kid, the afterburn lasting in the mind’s eye of his fans far longer than the recollection of his actual performances. He is remembered today mostly for his boyish cuteness and physical grace in The Magnificent Seven; his all-American baseball-glove-and-motorcycle rebel POW in The Great Escape; his blue-eyed poker prowess in The Cincinnati Kid; his laser-intense car-crazy lawman in Bullitt; his psychotic, wife-beating ex-con in The Getaway; his obsessive prisoner in Papillon; and his heroic fireman in The Towering Inferno. Of these magnificent seven, not one casts him as a traditional Hollywood romantic lover boy, despite the fact that he was considered one of the major sex symbols of his day; audiences tend to remember his action films more than the early black-and-white romance-novels 1963’s Love with the Proper Stranger and 1965’s Baby the Rain Must Fall (both films directed by Robert Mulligan and produced by Alan Pakula). In the end, traditional action embalmed McQueen’s memory more than offbeat romance could keep it alive.
Early death also robs movie stars of their deeper legacy when the circumstances of their passing take on far more (often ghoulish) importance than any of the films they made. Who remembers the details of any actual movies starring Rudolph Valentino? Or Jean Harlow? Or even Marilyn Monroe? They are the victims of their disturbingly early deaths rather than victors of their tragically forgotten films. Had Clint Eastwood died at fifty, the same age Steve McQueen was when he died, Eastwood never would have matured into the actor and director he did in his middle-to-late period. His career would have ended with a couple of spaghetti westerns and a few offbeat policiers; if he was to be remembered at all, it would be as the Man with No Name or Dirty Harry, rather than the deeper, more complex, talented, and unnerving director of such later classics as Unforgiven, Million Dollar Baby, Flags of Our Fathers, Letters from Iwo Jima, The Changeling, Gran Torino, Invictus, and others. It is both tragic and tantalizing that McQueen did not live long enough to direct, and direct himself, although he came tantalizingly close to getting there. Late in his career, McQueen wanted to take over the direction of his final film, The Hunter, but because of a tangle of union regulations, he couldn’t do it, and he never got another chance.
Nonetheless, Steve McQueen remains one of our most perfect cinema gods. His unforgettable physical beauty, his soft-spoken manner, his tough but tender roughness, and his aching vulnerability were part Dean, part Brando, part Eastwood, part Paul Newman, but all McQueen. We see his screen legacy today in actors such as the sensitive and beautiful James Franco, the all-American good-bad boy Brad Pitt, the charming but elusive George Clooney, and the