Steve McQueen - Marc Eliot [59]
And while Steve, despite his ethnic shortcomings, otherwise fit perfectly into Papasano, Natalie Wood, even with her dark hair, looked even less Italian, and far too glamorous to be believable as plain-Jane Angela Rossini, a working-class salesgirl at Macy’s.
Moreover, throughout the shoot, off-set, Wood kept trying to seduce Steve, all but drawing red arrows on the floor of the set from the soundstage to her dressing room. He didn’t bite because he considered Bob Wagner, her husband, whom he had starred with in The War Lover, a good friend. And Warren Beatty, her present lover, was as well. But even if he had wanted to he couldn’t. Throughout the production, Neile clung to Steve like a tick to a dog’s neck.
She needn’t have worried; there was no real heat between Wood and Steve. Natalie had to rely on her feelings for Beatty to get herself into character. According to actor Tom Bosley, who played Natalie’s father in the film, “She was able to use, obviously, her relationship with Beatty in some of the scenes with McQueen, there’s no question about it.” And Edie Adams, who played Steve’s regular girlfriend in the film, remembered that “she was vulnerable to anything at that point. She was more fragile than people thought.” But if Wood suffered from an unsatisfying sexual transfer fantasy with Steve, she seemed blissfully unaware of it. Quite the opposite. As Wood remembered, or preferred to remember, “Making Love with the Proper Stranger was the most rewarding experience I had in films, all the way around.… [M]y personal life was quite meager then, and the picture was ‘it,’ we were like a family.”
IT TOOK a year of postproduction before Sturges felt The Great Escape was ready for release. Fittingly, in tribute to the soldiers whose escape had made them something of a legend, the film’s world premiere was held in London on July 4, 1963. To Sturges’s surprise, the film received at best mixed reviews. Many there felt the story had been too Americanized and took much of the deserved glory away from the British. Respected British film critic Leslie Halliwell called it nothing more than a “pretty good but overlong POW adventure with a tragic ending.” After the lukewarm London reception, MGM, which had signed on late as the film’s American distributor after Dore Schary, the studio’s new head, decided it should be involved with the film after all, pushed back its release date to August 7, well after the summer’s surefire blockbusters.
But when it finally did open in the States, it proved the blockbuster Sturges had hoped and Steve knew it would be, grossing $6 million in its initial domestic release (against the $4 million it cost to make), becoming the ninth-highest-grossing film of 1963 in America, and earning an additional $12 million worldwide.1 The U.S. box office no doubt was bolstered by American reviewers less sensitive to the factual liberties Sturges had taken with the story. Judith Crist, in the New York Herald Tribune, called The Great Escape “a first-rate adventure film, fascinating in its detail, suspenseful in its plot, stirring in its climax and excellent in performance. Steve McQueen plays a familiar American war-movie type—brash, self-interested, super-brave emoter. For sheer bravura, whether he’s pounding a baseball in his catcher’s mitt in solitary or stumping cross-country on a motorcycle with scores of Germans in pursuit, Steve McQueen takes the honors.”
Time said, “The use of color photography is unnecessary and jarring, but little else is wrong with this film. With accurate casting, a swift screenplay, and authentic German settings, Producer-Director John Sturges has created classic cinema of action. There is no sermonizing, no soul probing, no sex. The Great Escape is simply