Steve McQueen - Marc Eliot [45]
On the last night of his stay at the Savoy, before his family was scheduled to arrive, Steve threw a wild party in his hotel suite for his racing buddies and their girls—and a few extra girls for good measure. It quickly got out of hand, a small fire broke out, and Steve had to run into the hallway in his underwear to find an extinguisher to put it out. The next day the Savoy made a point of evicting him, even though his stay was officially over. He quickly packed his bags, threw them in his car, and drove to the airport to pick up Neile and the kids and take them to Lord Russell’s house.
When the story hit the British and American newspapers the next day, the forever loyal Neile, who was still on the other side of the pond when the events of that night had taken place, angrily denied the published story about Steve “getting gassed and bounding around the hotel in his briefs.”
“Balderdash,” she said. “Somebody hollered ‘fire,’ and Stevo lunged out of their room minus his Levi’s to find an extinguisher!”
A month later, Steve dropped a note to Hedda Hopper suggesting that British hotels in general were the problem. “The servants make me nervous as hell. I find myself wanting to get up as soon as they come into the room.”4
PHILIP LEACOCK was primarily a TV director who made a handful of mostly undistinguished and forgettable films in the 1950s and early ’60s, of which The War Lover was his penultimate big-screen adventure, and by far the best of his features.5 Leacock was hired by Columbia to make the film on location in London. Although it is often referred to as a foreign film, The War Lover was actually an American film shot by Columbia Studios on location at the Royal Air Force (RAF) air stations at Bovingdon in Hertfordshire and Manston in Kent, in Cambridgeshire, and at the legendary Shepperton Studios in England. Leacock insisted that no miniatures be used for the flight sequences, the essential visuals of the film—that, in fact, all the planes to be used had to be rebuilt from their original plans and fully capable of flying.
To accommodate him, Columbia hired Captain John Crewdson of the RAF, working for Aviation Services, Ltd., an organization originally created for Alfred Hitchcock’s To Catch a Thief, when the rotund director wanted to use helicopters to film the famous rooftop chase and needed special equipment to do it. Captain Crewdson was now charged with resurrecting three Boeing B-17 “Flying Fortresses” that had been sitting disused for a decade outside of Dallas, Texas, and getting them to the RAF base at Bovingdon for refurbishing.6 All the production values, including the costumes and props for The War Lover, were a vast improvement over the tacky ones used in Hell Is for Heroes, with several rare stock shots of actual aerial combat used to flesh out the battles that gave Robert Huke’s black-and-white wide-screen cinematography a greater elegance.
The plot of The War Lover is deceptively simple. The film is set in 1943. A squadron of American bomber pilots are stationed in England, from where they conduct frequent bombing raids into the heart of Germany. The story centers around the lives of two pilots, a captain and his co-pilot, McQueen and Hollywood pretty boy and former Fox contract player Robert Wagner. In the film, they are not-so-friendly rivals, with Wagner by far the more “normal” and conventionally attractive of the two. Here, for one of the very few times in his career, Steve’s wild and haunted eyes took on a thematic value; his character, Buzz Rickson, links violence to sex, and sex to violence. In one fantastic scene in The War Lover, his body convulses orgasmically during one of the early bombing raids in the film,