Steve McQueen - Marc Eliot [55]
5 His other films include, among others, Life in Her Hands (1951), The Brave Don’t Cry (1952), The Little Kidnappers (1953), Let No Man Write My Epitaph (1960), and his final feature, a year after The War Lover, Tamahine (1963), after which he returned to American episodic television.
6 The War Lover has other connections to Hitchcock. Leacock was British and worked primarily in America, as did Hitchcock once he crossed the pond, and the musical score was conducted by the prolific Muir Mathieson, who conducted the great Bernard Herrmann score for Hitchcock’s 1958 Vertigo.
7 Hitchcock had often used a similar technique, most prominently in Notorious (1946), Strangers on a Train (1952), Dial M For Murder (1954), and Vertigo (1957), and most spectacularly in Psycho (1960).
8 The original camp was in occupied Poland. Sturges and Relyea tried to visit the actual site prior to filming but Poland was, since the end of World War II, part of the Soviet Union and they could not get permission to enter the country. Instead, they used photographs and original blueprints to re-create Stalag Luft III.
The minute a picture is over, I run like a thief.… I’ll put the old lady and the kids in my Land Rover and take off. Up in the mountains, out in the desert, anywhere … man, I don’t want to be bugged by anybody.
—STEVE MCQUEEN
ONCE HE FINISHED FILMING HIS SCENES, STEVE WENT BACK to California. Feeling certain that The Great Escape couldn’t miss, he and Neile confidently bought a beautiful new $300,000 stone house in Brentwood that overlooked the city of Santa Monica and the beautiful Pacific crescent. They affectionately nicknamed it “the Castle.”
The first thing Steve added to it was a sophisticated home gymnasium where he could work out daily, or “fanatically,” as Neile described his then-obsessive body conditioning in her memoir. Prior to this he had worked out three times a week at a Beverly Hills club, where Neile often went along and took jazz dancing classes. He also invested even more heavily in his two favorite non-film-related hobbies, fast cars and fancy handguns, and added to his already impressive collection of both.
As they settled back into the Southern California lifestyle, a welcome change from the long, dank European winter, David Foster arranged for Life magazine to do a cover story on the now very hot Steve that emphasized his passion for cars and racing as well as his acting to run that summer to coincide with the American release of The Great Escape. The cover was a color close-up of Steve and Neile riding double-saddle on a motorcycle, with only the handles visible. Lest Steve come off as too much like Brando, another Method actor with a penchant for bikes, Foster made sure Steve and Neile looked clean-cut, smiling, cute, and happy: Mr. and Mrs. Perfect Young Couple, movie-star style.
At the same time, with much less fanfare, Steve quietly presented the first of what was to be the annual Steve McQueen College Scholarship at the Boys Republic in Chino, a fund he had set up to help other lost boys like himself. He kept his participation determinedly low-key, and except for a very occasional mention by someone else in the press, it was not something he talked much about.
Steve, meanwhile, despite his strong feeling the film would be a hit, was still smarting from his experience in The Great Escape, which had left him feeling like a combination of powerless employee, mannequin to be moved as the director saw fit, and slave to the dictates of the corporate machine. He decided to form his own independent company, so that no one could ever again push him around or tell him what to do.
He named it Solar Productions (the original name was Scuderia Condor, but Neile urged him to choose something