Steve McQueen - Marc Eliot [46]
The film has a great deal going for it. There is a major if somewhat ironic antiwar theme that goes much farther than the overacting school hysterics of Hell Is for Heroes by cleverly intertwining it with a doppelganger relationship between the relatively well-balanced, handsome Lieutenant Ed Bolland (Wagner) and the severely unbalanced and not-as-handsome Rickson; it is as if Bolland is not just Rickson’s healthier “other” but the spur that kicks Rickson into trying to prove he is both a better bomber and a better lover, if indeed there is a difference, to Bolland (really, of course, to himself).7
All of this comes into sharper (and deeper) focus when both men meet Daphne Caldwell (played extremely well by the beautiful British stage, TV, and film actress Shirley Anne Field), another type of war lover. She was previously involved with at least one other American pilot, who was killed in action, and the film suggests she has since become a serial lover of Americans in uniform. When she socially tests both Bolland and Rickson, and chooses Bolland as her next lover, the stronger, interior plot of the film emerges. Rickson becomes so jealous and enraged that he sets out on a course of mass destruction in the air and sexually perverse revenge on the ground that irrevocably links sex, violence, and war as a continuum of rage, destruction, and death.
Quite surprisingly for a mainstream war movie of the early sixties, Caldwell is the sexual aggressor. She initiates the affair with Bolland when he brings her home and at her suggestion she stays the night. This triggers a series of events that clarifies Bolland’s disillusionment with Rickson. As the film races toward its exciting climax, an aerial raid makes Rickson even more desperate, and he brazenly tries to steal a not-unwilling Caldwell from Bolland by following her home one night and practically raping her. Her defense against him is yet another interesting twist: she preaches nonviolence to him, with a sermon on the couch about the meek inheriting the earth. We do not see what follows, but the strong suggestion is that a sexually violent or violently sexual encounter has taken place, perhaps even a murder.
On his next mission, Rickson’s plane is hit, and after forcing everyone else out to save themselves, he tries what might be a consciously impossible and therefore suicidal emergency return-to-base landing that results in his crashing head-on into the white cliffs of Dover, where he dies in an apocalyptic explosion. With a final scene (that feels tacked on), Bolland is reunited with Caldwell in a happily-ever-after embrace. Before this mission, Bolland, whose tour of duty is coming to an end, had shown no prior interest in carrying his relationship beyond a wartime fling. Partly a concession to the censors, this ending also suggests that with his own darker side eliminated (Rickson), he can now pursue a healthy and long-term relationship with Caldwell; hence, the deeper and more complex meanings of “war lover” become apparent.
In the film, Steve played a character closer to who he really was, less charmingly romanticized and rougher than any he had previously attempted; Vin in The Magnificent Seven, Sgt. Ringa in Never So Few, and Private Reese in Hell Is for Heroes are more cardboard cutouts than flesh and blood. His strong portrayal of Rickson is three-dimensional; the character is overtly sexual, angry, nonredemptive (his final act of heroism aboard the doomed B-17 is less about saving others than about needing to die in a solo reverie of imagined immortality, the ultimate orgasm), rough and tough and utterly believable. The War Lover was by far Steve’s