Steve McQueen - Marc Eliot [60]
And yet, despite its ample commercial success, the film was for the most part dismissed by the major studio–dominated Academy, which at the time still looked down its nose at elaborate independent films, even (or especially) those that made money. It was therefore not surprising that The Great Escape was nominated for only one Oscar, for Ferris Webster’s editing, who lost to Dorothy Spencer and Elmo Williams for Fox’s disastrous Cleopatra.
Audiences, however, loved the film and especially Steve, the reason many people went to see it, so much so that in Hollywood it elevated him from a star to a type, as in “Get me a Steve McQueen,” an action movie star who could also act and bring huge numbers of men into theaters to see him do it.
However, Steve knew he would never be considered a true A-list star until he became a romantic leading man and was able to attract a large female audience. It was why he had wanted to do Love with the Proper Stranger.
But before Love was released in December 1963, six months after The Great Escape, he had to live through—or live down—the quiet opening and even quieter closing a month earlier of Soldier in the Rain. Not surprisingly, the reviews for it were awful. What did surprise Steve was how he, not Gleason, was singled out for all the tongue-lashings. Bosley Crowther wrote in his New York Times review that “McQueen is simply callow with his striking of foolish attitudes, his butchering of the English language, and his sporting of hick costumes.” Judith Crist, one of Steve’s most loyal critical supporters, wrote in the New York Herald Tribune that “McQueen, one of the more exciting actors around, is totally suppressed as a mush-mouthed stupid devoted to dawg and buddy to the point of tears.” Wanda Hale, writing in the Daily News, was less poetic: “McQueen, with phony accent, jumps around as if he had ants in his pants, overdoing it so much that I could hardly recognize the fine comedian of The Great Escape and The Honeymoon Machine.” To Hale, Soldier in the Rain was so bad it made The Honeymoon Machine look good. And Archer Winsten, writing for the New York Post, put it this way: “The film should set back [Steve’s] blossoming career one giant step.”
What saved Soldier in the Rain from doing any real damage to Steve’s career was the timing of its release. It opened November 27, 1963, five days after the assassination of John F. Kennedy, and virtually nobody went to see any movie that week. The film mercifully disappeared after a very brief run and has rarely been seen since.2
By the time Soldier in the Rain had opened and closed, The Great Escape was still playing in theaters everywhere. Steve, confident that the upcoming Love with the Proper Stranger was going to be a huge success and quite possibly bring him the ultimate in official validation, an Academy Award, quickly agreed to appear in another Mulligan/Pakula production. Based on a 1954 Horton Foote stage play, The Traveling Lady, the film originally had the title Highway, which, following the rise to number twelve on the Billboard charts of an Elmer Bernstein song written for the film and recorded by folksinger Glenn Yarbrough, was changed to Baby the Rain Must Fall.
The film focuses on the life of Henry Thomas, a just-released ex-con and highly unlikely would-be folksinger. (Steve did his own singing for the film, which made the premise even more improbable. To say that he couldn’t sing, despite an enormous amount of postproduction overdubbing supervised by guitarist Billy Strange, would be a major understatement. He learned the guitar just for the film and played like it.) The story begins as Thomas, sent to prison for stabbing a man during a drunken brawl, returns to civilian life in Texas and to the waiting arms of the young and beautiful wife (Lee Remick) and small child he left behind. At this point, the plot has all the makings of a good, if not great, small-budget film. But then the unlikeliest of complications arises, turning the film into fourth-rate Tennessee Williams as if made by Psycho-era Hitchcock.