Steve McQueen - Marc Eliot [98]
It is not difficult to understand why Faulkner, who was facing his own mortality, wrote The Reivers, a story of the old South, or his old South, seen through the eyes of a little boy. What is difficult to understand is why, despite the business advantages, Steve allowed himself to play what was, in effect, a minor and completely forgettable supporting role in it. After a string of rough, tough leading men, he looked a bit puffy on-screen, with a shaggy top and cheap, baggy clothes. The film became a tour without the force, and the film’s 111 minutes felt much longer.
During filming, Steve fought, at times bitterly, with his director. Most on-set didn’t know about the history between the two, and some thought the bad feelings were because Rydell had unknowingly made a pass at one of Steve’s many starlet girlfriends who populated the set, but more likely it was an overall expression of frustration with how difficult it was for Steve to be playing an utterly wrong character in an utterly wrong film.
If Steve had initially tried to convince himself that he could use The Reivers to show that he was a “real,” or Method, actor, not just a type or a personality, the film proved that, in fact, he couldn’t. Boon Hogganbeck is completely superfluous in the canon of Steve’s career characters. Steve’s money shot was always a combination of his sexual intensity and virile manliness. Both were wasted here on an affable character who wasn’t too bright, very strong, or at all sexual, in a film that resembled nothing so much as an episode of the future TV series The Waltons (so much so that Will Geer, who played the patriarch in the film, would go on to do the same in that series in 1972 about small-town life seen through the eyes of a young boy, itself adapted from a different movie).
Things came to a head between Rydell and Steve when, during a break in filming due to an injury to Mitch Vogel while filming the horse race, Steve asked, as had now become his habit, that he see the dailies. Rydell objected, Steve insisted, they were run, and Steve exploded. He wanted Rydell fired, blaming him for the shortcomings in what he saw as his own meandering performance. Steve went so far as to call Bill Paley, the head of CBS, which owned Cinema Center, to have Rydell fired. Steve wanted some loyalty displayed by Paley, for whose network Wanted: Dead or Alive had made a lot of money.
Paley, though, had known and liked Rydell from the live TV days, and Rydell had made a lot of money for the network. Paley believed in his talent and refused to let him go. That did it for Steve, who often would not leave his trailer to shoot a scene when Rydell wanted him and who finished the picture holding a grudge against both Paley and Rydell that he never let go. Steve and Rydell would never work together on another picture, which suited the director just fine. In truth, they were a bad mix: Rydell’s style of moviemaking was not compatible with Steve’s Method intensity, turning Steve bland instead of keeping him cool.
Later on, Rydell put the blame for the film’s commercial failure squarely on Steve’s acting. Recalling an incident when Steve wouldn’t leave the trailer and come to the set, Rydell said, “He wanted to feel that nothing could happen without him. He needed to feel that.… He was an entirely instinctive actor. He never learned his lines and after one, or at the most two, takes, he wasn’t any good.… I eventually solved the problem by leaving McQueen in his dressing room and standing in for him for about nine takes and then I’d bring him out, if he’d