Steve McQueen - Marc Eliot [57]
Soldier in the Rain concerns the intertwining lives of Sergeant Eustis Clay (Steve)—Goldman liked to choose characters’ names to describe their personality—a not-too-bright southern soldier (the type that TV would find its epitome in with Gomer Pyle), and Master Sergeant Maxwell Slaughter (Gleason), a lifer who is brighter than Eustis and therefore more cynical about life. As the plot unfolds, it becomes clear that Eustis sees his future tied to Max’s, and wants them both to resign from the service when their time is up. Eustis figures Max will help him succeed in private business. Max, in turn, sees his own misspent youth in Eustis, and agrees to take the boy under his wing. As their relationship progresses, women and failed schemes come and go, until one night all of Eustis’s hopes and dreams come to a shattering end in a barroom brawl during which Max is killed. Eustis then gives up his dreams of becoming rich and living the good life and, older and bitterer, reenlists, in effect becoming Max.
All of this reads funnier and far more poignant in Goldman’s thin novel than it played on the screen, where Steve came off as an uninteresting country bumpkin and Gleason got a chance to show off an unfunny dullness playing a boring loser (wordy scripts, as Goldman’s was, that talk endlessly about the past and the future are anathema to physical comedy). Even the luscious Tuesday Weld was wasted in the film; in the original novel, the character of Bobby Jo was a true nymphet, but in the film she was aged and tamed in a tailored-for-the-censor script.
The film went into production in September 1963, and by the time it wrapped a month later, Steve knew he had a loser on his hands. The script never gelled, the director’s pace needed crutches, and not even a search party could find Gleason’s comic timing. There were rumors that Gleason and Steve didn’t hit it off on the set, that Steve did not appreciate Gleason’s star turn of using a golf cart to get around, and objected to his constantly showing up late to calls, a form of self-imposed star-tripping that Steve as executive producer felt did the production no good. In the end, Steve hoped the eighty-seven-minute final cut could somehow just disappear, go away, and never see the silver screen light of day.
He plunged straight into yet another movie, this time strictly as an actor for hire (Solar had no more cash reserves and Allied Artists wanted to wait for the results from Soldier in the Rain before extending its commitment). This one was a romantic comedy that was, unfortunately, heavy on the romance and light on the comedy. Love with the Proper Stranger was written by Arnold Schulman, another veteran of 1950s live TV dramas who had since written a couple of decent movies, including George Cukor’s 1957 Wild Is the Wind and Frank Capra’s 1959 A Hole in the Head, and earlier in 1963 the book for a Broadway musical, Jennie.
Love with the Proper Stranger came to Steve via Alan Pakula, a producer who had started in the cartoon department of Warner Bros. in the 1950s and had hit it big in 1962 at Paramount with the multiple Academy Award–winning screen adaptation of To Kill a Mockingbird, from the superb Harper Lee novel. That film was directed by Robert Mulligan, yet another live TV alumnus, who’d helmed his first movie in 1957 (Fear Strikes Out) and won the Oscar for Best Director for Mockingbird. Mulligan and Pakula then formed their own production unit at Paramount and searched for the right project to follow Mockingbird, something dramatic that resonated with a layer of social consciousness. They believed they had found it in Schulman’s Love with the Proper Stranger. On paper it had all the makings of one of those 1950s kitchen-sink TV dramas they both had cut their teeth on. To Kill a Mockingbird had dealt with race and rape; Love with the Proper Stranger confronted the issue of illegal