Steve McQueen - Marc Eliot [70]
Nevada Smith was originally written by Robbins to be a teenager, eighteen or nineteen years old. Steve was thirty-six at the time of filming, but was able to project the image of someone young and fit enough to make the film’s essential story of a young man’s murder, rage, and revenge plausible to moviegoers.
Harold Robbins had first bonded with Steve during the making of Never Love a Stranger, and when Nevada Smith was green-lighted, Robbins insisted Steve was the only actor who could play the title role. The author had sold the rights to The Carpetbaggers to Joseph E. Levine, envisioning a series of films of the extended backstories he had included for each of the novel’s main characters. Nevada Smith was the first, and, as it turned out, the only one to be made into a movie. The character of Nevada Smith was said to be based on the combined early lives of two Hollywood cowboys, Tom Mix and William Boyd (the latter became identified in the movies and on TV as Hopalong Cassidy).
The cast of Nevada Smith included Suzanne Pleshette, Brian Keith, Arthur Kennedy, Janet Margolin, Howard Da Silva, Pat Hingle, Martin Landau, and, at Steve’s insistence, Karl Malden to play the villainous Tom Fitch, who murdered Nevada’s parents. The film was, to be sure, Method-heavy. Besides Steve and Malden, both Margolin and Pleshette were graduates of New York’s High School of Performing Arts, a Method breeding ground for Broadway and live TV in the 1950s and ’60s. Da Silva was an alumnus of the highly respected Method-teaching Carnegie Tech; Landau was a product of New York television, where almost every actor at one time or another had studied the Method. And Malden was a product of the Group Theater, where he had met Elia Kazan, who cast him in several key roles on stage and screen opposite Marlon Brando.
The screenplay for Nevada Smith was written by Robbins and Hitchcock favorite John Michael Hayes (1954’s Rear Window, 1955’s To Catch a Thief, 1955’s The Trouble with Harry, 1956’s The Man Who Knew Too Much). Hayes had also written several hit movies for other directors, but no westerns. Robbins was confident he could supply the action and authenticity the genre required and that Hayes could give it great dialogue. However, soon after casting was completed, Robbins distanced himself from the production, preferring to work on his next two novels and subsequent Carpetbaggers screenplays.
To direct, Levine chose Henry Hathaway, a veteran Hollywood journeyman whose career had begun in the early 1930s and for whom Nevada Smith was the thirty-first of his thirty-seven feature films, many of them westerns (To the Last Man, 1933; The Trail of the Lonesome Pine, 1936; Rawhide, 1951; North to Alaska, 1960; and The Sons of Katie Elder, 1965, to name a few). Hathaway was a straightforward, uncomplicated director able to spin a credible yarn. His unspectacular track record made him eager to direct one big movie before his career rode off into the sunset. Levine, always looking for ways to cut costs, liked Hathaway’s price (or in this instance, what he was willing to take) and felt he could well handle the action of the story. To film it, Levine hired cinematographer Lucien Ballard, another Hollywood veteran whose career stretched back all the way to the silent era. Ballard had most recently been nominated for an Oscar for his work on Hall Bartlett’s 1963 The Caretakers.
The actors drew their gritty against-the-wind