The Western career of Steve McQueen
Vin
Steve McQueen is often thought
of as a Western actor and was inducted into the Hall of Great Western Performers in April 2007, yet
he only made three Western movies – four if you count Junior Bonner.
His being thought of as a Western character may be because he became
such a big star (probably the hottest property of the 60s) and his tough-guy
image made him a natural in Westerns – he just looked right.
He was quite good in oaters, in
fact, judging by the few parts he played, although perhaps not right up there
in the top rank. It could be that he came too late to Westerns: by the 1960s it
was a case of ‘the glory hath departed’. He missed the mighty Western era of
the 1950s.
The three movies were of course
The Magnificent Seven, Nevada Smith and Tom Horn.
The Magnificent Seven (United Artists,
1960) - click the link for a full review - is one of the liveliest and most fun
Westerns of all time, wonderfully written and directed as well as acted. As you know, McQueen played Yul Brynner’s
sidekick Vin. He had thirsted for the role of Chico and was annoyed that it
went to the young German Horst Buchholz, who ended up disliking him intensely,
and McQueen is well known for having hogged the camera with every bit of actor’s ‘business’
known to man. But he’s ineffably cool in it. He certainly has some great lines
and scenes, notably his first when he rides shotgun on the hearse. With the
camera on Brynner as he said his lines, McQueen beside him kept fiddling with his hat, looking
up at the sun, anything to catch the eye away from Yul. Brynner told him that if
he continued that, he (Brynner) would simply take off his hat. That’d soon stop
people looking at McQueen.
Trying to upstage
The Magnificent Seven, er, shot Steve
McQueen to fame and marked him out immediately as a Western actor of note. It
is in some ways surprising that he didn’t do more in the genre, although of
course Westerns were becoming less frequent and McQueen’s tough-guy persona
could appear instead driving race cars or as a hard-bitten cop (or in the case
of Bullitt, both). Steve was all for
doing the sequel Return of the Seven
but it is said that Brynner vetoed the idea.
Nevada Smith (Paramount, 1966),
which was produced and directed by Henry Hathaway and photographed by the great
Lucien Ballard, ought to have been better than it was. A straight revenge Western, it suffers from
implausibility and wooden acting. McQueen was 35 and blond yet trying to
play a sixteen-year-old half-breed Kiowa. The movie has a ponderous plot. It
was written by John Michael Hayes “based on the character in” the extraordinarily popular Harold Robbins novel (not
to say potboiler) The Carpetbaggers. Brian Keith is solid if
uninspiring as the traveling gunsmith who befriends McQueen and teaches him
to shoot after Karl Malden, Arthur Kennedy and Martin Landau have brutally
killed the boy’s parents. But the rest of the acting is pretty dire. Of course,
the cast are not helped by the corny dialogue. The worst is Karl Malden, never
a good Western actor, who hams it up embarrassingly badly. He is last seen
screaming hysterically at the top of his voice, a typical mode for Malden.
35, going on 16
There
are two women, a Kiowa saloon gal and a dusky Louisiana maid (Janet Margolin
and Suzanne Pleshette, respectively), but they are only there to help McQueen
find the next villain. In the case of la Margolin, it is difficult to judge in
which role she is less convincing, as Kiowa or saloon gal. Steve doesn’t seem to
show much interest in the girls anyway. Raf Vallone is an Italian priest who
gives McQueen an Old Testament to show him the error of vengeance and lead him
to peace ‘n’ love. That's going to help. None of these people convince. At least Strother Martin and
LQ Jones have (uncredited) microscopic bit parts so you can look forward to
spotting them (Strother in the tub).
Nevada
Alan Ladd, star of The Carpetbaggers, the movie, two years before, was scheduled to have played
in this prequel but his early death meant that McQueen got the part. McQueen
did a better job than Ladd would probably have done because Ladd was 17 years
older even than McQueen, so it is difficult to see how he would have played the ‘kid’
part. Furthermore, at least McQueen comes across as tough, which Ladd always
had difficulty doing in Westerns. But the character is one-dimensional anyway and
doesn’t develop beyond a cursory attempt to ‘age’ him. There’s little tension.
We are never in doubt that McQueen will get the bad guys. He duly does. It’s
pretty average as a Western and was certainly the worst of the three that
McQueen did. (There was, by the way, a TV version directed by Gordon Douglas in 1975 with Cliff Potts as Smith and Lorne Greene as Jonas Cord.)
Lastly,
at the end of McQueen’s career and very nearly at the end of his life, came Tom Horn (Warner Bros, 1980). Again, we
reviewed this picture at some length when looking at Tom Horn in fact and fiction, so click the link to read more. Here, we’ll just say that in the movie
poor McQueen looked terribly ill and in fact by the end of the film was
coughing blood and was diagnosed with a cancer associated with asbestos removal
(he had taken part in replacing asbestos-based insulation in a ship's engine
room during his time in the US Marines and this may have been the cause).
Tom Horn
In
my view, it was his best Western role. He was rather moving and more poignant
and understated than before. This could be, partly, because we know now as we watch it that he was soon
to die but I don’t think it’s only that. He portrays Horn’s stoic resolve very
well. He refuses to justify himself: a true Western hero does not stoop to do
that. He behaves as he thinks fit and if other people judge him harshly for it,
so be it. There’s a nobility there. I think Tom
Horn is an underrated film often panned by the critics but it is in fact a fine example of the late
Western. A lot of that is down to William Wiard’s direction and John A Alsonso’s
photography but much is also due to Steve McQueen’s very fine performance.
J.R. Bonner
We
should certainly mention Junior Bonner
(ABC/CRC, 1972), Sam Peckinpah’s film. Though some would not regard this as a
Western (it’s a modern rodeo picture), for me it is Western enough to rate
inclusion. Western or not, it was one of McQueen’s finest performances. He is outstanding
as the ‘motel cowboy’ on the slide down from the peak of his bronc-busting
career and he suits Peckinpah’s elegiac ‘end-of-the-West’ theme perfectly.
However, for many people, Steve McQueen’s Western standing is down not to any of the big-screen movies above but to his appearance in no fewer than 94 episodes of the black & white TV series Wanted: Dead or Alive. This CBS Western ran for three seasons from 1958 to 1961 and was enormously popular. McQueen was of course Josh Randall, the bounty hunter, in it. On TV, bounty hunters couldn't be ruthless exploiters; they had to be tough but fair and deep-down decent and that was how McQueen played it. The number of times he donated his bounty to worthy widows and children, it’s a wonder he made a living at all. Wanted was in fact a spin-off of an episode of Trackdown, a 1957/59 series in which McQueen appeared, twice (The Bounty Hunters and The Brothers) in 1958. Randall was famously armed with ‘the mare’s leg’ Winchester 1892 model cut-down rifle, which he could draw and fire with amazing speed. The series was actually well written, directed and acted and, if inevitably rather formulaic, is still quite good viewing today. French TV ran them all again last year in a long Wanted-athon and they were enjoyable. There is in fact now a colorized version but I haven’t seen that.
Josh Randall
The mare's leg
McQueen’s
first ever Western, aged 28, was also in a TV series. Earlier in 1958 he had
been billed second, after Dale Robertson, as the Texas gunfighter Bill Longley in a Tales of Wells Fargo story, Bill
Longley.
In
the ‘what-might-have-been’ department, it’s quite interesting that Steve
McQueen was considered first to play with Paul Newman in Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid (Fox, 1969) but withdrew,
typically, because of questions of who would get the top billing. One wonders,
of course, how different his Sundance would have been from Redford’s. Not that
either Redford or McQueen would have made it a good Western, though, because it
was weighed down too much by the poor writing and direction.
McQueen as Sundance?
Also interesting
is that that very good Australian Western Quigley Down Under (MGM, 1990) was written for McQueen. Now, Tom Selleck was
absolutely excellent in that but once you know that it was designed as a
McQueen vehicle, you can see Steve in the outback in chaps with that Tom
Horn-ish long gun.
McQueen as Quigley?
He
also turned down Marlon Brando’s role in The Missouri Breaks (United Artists, 1976). That was a great pity. He would have
been steely, whereas Brando was camp.
If only we'd had McQueen instead of Brando...
Before
his death, McQueen optioned two Walter Hill screenplays: one was the
non-Western The Driver and the other
was The Last Gun, a Western which so far
remains unfilmed.
Steve
McQueen died in Mexico in December 1980, aged only 50. He hadn’t starred in
many Westerns but he had done enough to be thought of as one of the leading
Western actors of his time.
Steve McQueen
1930 - 1980
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ReplyDeleteSteve McQueen was great in the Magnificent Seven. I was nine years old and I couldn't take my eyes of him. I am upset that Brynner didn't let him star in the second film. I have seen all of the westerns above many times mainly to see Steve in them; and yes Wanted Dead or Alive was an excellent show. I watch it on he internet today still and I wonder why they are not showing reruns on T.V. Steve's appeal was not just his acting or his star presence. He was one of those rare human beings in life that in spite of his failings really touched you .
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