Steve McQueen - Marc Eliot [43]
Despite that one time, Siegel later talked about all the trouble he had trying to get Steve to perform the way Siegel wanted him to: “For one scene I wanted a close-up of Steve crying. I had a long talk with him about his motivations for breaking down. We both had worked with the Stanislavski [sic] method, and I felt confident that Steve, face set, eyes straight ahead, military bearing, when he walked from an extreme long shot into a huge close-up, would start crying. We shot it. Nothing, absolutely nothing in those bitter blue eyes. Not a glimmer of a tear. We didn’t give up. When Steve walked into his close-up, we blew chopped onion shreds directly below his eyes. It might as well have been chopped liver.
“Steve probably had the strongest eyes in the world. I decided on a desperate measure. This time when I yelled ‘Action,’ as steely-eyed Steve started walking I slapped him sharply across the face—then dived over an embankment, expecting him to tackle me. Instead, he walked on and, as usual, nothing happened. My eventual solution wasn’t what I wanted, but it worked. We put drops into Steve’s eyes to make him look as if he was crying. I made a one-foot dissolve from the huge close-up to an insert of his eyes crying.”
The production dragged on for four months, which further stretched the film’s already minuscule budget. Much of it was shot in the woods in Redding, California, where the temperature often reached 117 degrees. Steve had a stipulation in his contract that provided him a rental car. His frustration trying to find the handle on the character of Reese probably added to his lack of off-set concentration and he wound up crashing three cars, after which Coburn, who had accompanied him every day, refused to ride alongside him anymore on the way to the set.
Despite all the film’s preproduction problems and on-set mishaps, Steve’s dramatic death scene gave him the chance to show what he could do. The critics, at least, saw what Steve wanted them to see, and reacted in kind when the picture finally opened on June 26, 1962. Reviewing the picture for the New York Post, Eugene Archer wrote, “An arresting performance by Steve McQueen, a young actor with presence and a keen sense of timing, is the outstanding feature [of the film]. McQueen sharply outlines a provocative modern military type.” The New York Times said, “Steve McQueen is extraordinarily good.” The New York Daily News called the film “an unstintingly honest depiction of the hell of war. Among the more memorable men in the squad is Steve McQueen, whose word-at-a-time speech indicates an undercurrent of hostility.” Andrew Sarris, in his groundbreaking The American Cinema, perhaps best explains what made the film such a good vehicle for both McQueen and his director: “Siegel’s most successful films express the doomed peculiarity of the anti-social outcast. The director’s gallery of loners assimilates an otherwise anomalous group of actors [including] Steve McQueen in Hell Is for Heroes.” The film set the table for cinema’s most ambitious loner of all, Siegel fan Clint Eastwood, whom Siegel would later direct in such films as Coogan’s Bluff (1968), Two Mules for Sister Sara (1970), The Beguiled (1971), and the cinematic landmark Dirty Harry.
Hell Is for Heroes did nothing at the box office, despite a rarely seen introduction by John F. Kennedy, in his first year as president of the United States (the introduction was cut after Kennedy’s assassination). Perhaps the final blow came when the film censorship board tried, unsuccessfully, to have the word