Steve McQueen - Marc Eliot [52]
When Steve was told about the locale change, he was both excited—he had, since his merchant marine days, always loved to travel to new countries—and concerned. He enjoyed being overseas, but it meant he would be away from Hollywood for a solid year, except for the few weeks following the completion of The War Lover. He didn’t want to become one of those American actors who only worked abroad. Sturges calmed his fears by reminding him he had top billing for the first time in his career and assuring him that he and the family would be put up in a beautiful chalet in Deining, Bavaria. Plus, Sturges pointed out, there were no speed limits in Germany. Technically that wasn’t true—only the autobahn had no speed limit; limits on local roads were strictly enforced—but it was enough to get Steve to consent to the German shoot. To prevent Steve from speeding anywhere besides the autobahn, and potentially being arrested and delaying the production, Sturges hired a private escort to make sure he stayed within the legal limit when he drove. It was an unintentional boost for a Method actor playing a POW in Germany.
Six writers and eleven drafts later, on location in Germany with a script that was still mostly improvised from setups the director gave his actors, it became increasingly clear that as far as Sturges was concerned, this was Steve’s picture, despite his smaller role of the American Captain Virgil Hilts. “The Cooler King,” as he was known, was an amalgam of several of the relatively few American POWs detained at the camp. Hilts spends most of the film in solitary confinement—a prison within a prison—throwing a baseball against his cell wall and catching it in his mitt, a nice image of the meaningless monotony of prison life. According to James Coburn, “Steve’s performance was perfect in the film. He represented everything about the indomitable spirit these guys had.”
All well and good, but Steve quickly grew frustrated with what he perceived was, in fact, a secondary role, and, as he had with Yul Brynner in The Magnificent Seven and Bobby Darin in Hell Is for Heroes, he quickly got into a contentious relationship with the actor he perceived as his biggest competitor in the film—not Attenborough, who played the leader of the escape, but James Garner, the American who was by far the most charming actor in the cast. Darkly handsome, with a warm smile and an easy manner reminiscent of middle Cary Grant, Garner had come up through the TV western series ranks as Steve had, starring in the offbeat weekly one-hour series Maverick. Whereas Wanted: Dead or Alive had been all business, with simple by-the-book stories that highlighted the sullen personality of its star, Maverick was a goofball comedy-drama about a slick, slightly cowardly gambler whose winning personality immediately connected with audiences and made Garner a TV star. Like Steve, Garner too was in the midst of an uneven transition to the big screen, having appeared the year before in Michael Gordon’s comedy Boys’ Night Out and, as soon as filming was completed on The Great Escape, was scheduled to star opposite Doris Day in Norman Jewison’s romantic comedy The Thrill of It All.
As far as Steve was concerned, however, Garner was less a charmer than a schemer, doing his best to make the movie his own. He had the bigger, more interesting role, and his character actually takes part in the “escape.” To turn the focus back on himself, Steve came up with the idea for the sequence that everyone remembers far more than anything Garner did in the film.
“We got to Germany and Steve’s part was still not defined,” recalled Neile. “Nothing to say, ‘Ah, that’s a Steve McQueen film!’ Then, when Jimmy [Garner] came on with his cap, and white tee-shirt, Steve said he wasn’t going to continue unless they fixed his part.”
“When Sturges and film editor Ferris Webster foolishly showed a rough-cut to the cast of the first six weeks’ worth of shooting,