The Getaway

Coming off the critical and commercial flop Junior Bonner, director Sam Peckinpah and star Steve McQueen were in desperate need of a hit movie. McQueen was offered this adaptation of a tough, gritty Jim Thompson novel and invited his pal Sam on board when first-choice director Peter Bogdanovich quit. The result was a smash hit that funded Peckinpah's remaining career, broke up McQueen and co-star Ali MacGraw's marriages when they fell for one another and produced an effective, occasionally inspired thriller that remains a cult favourite.

McQueen plays Doc McCoy, incarcerated in Texas for armed robbery and slowly getting ground down by the oppressive prison system. Surprisingly, he makes parole. It's only later he discovers that his wife Carol (MacGraw) has made a deal to get him out by sleeping with corrupt lawman Jack Beynon (Johnson), in return for another deal. McCoy will join up with two other criminals, including the unpredictable Rudy Butler (Lettieri), to commit another bank robbery. When the heist goes awry, the McCoys find themselves trying to outrun not just Beynon and the law, but wild card Rudy - and maybe even one another - on their way to potential salvation in Mexico.

Thompson's original plot, here adapted and tidied up into a more moral, acceptable tale by then-newcomer Walter Hill, corkscrews through double-cross after double-cross, all the while maintaining a ruthlessly streamlined momentum. Yet Peckinpah allows a surprising degree of lateral diversions into the film, constructing several sequences that play out in their own idiosyncratic rhythm and time-frame, even including at one point a flash forward sequence. The disjointed prison-set opening is a case in point, flitting between the automated routine of convict life, deer grazing on the outside and even weaving in some tender flashback scenes between McCoy and Carol, while the soundtrack thrums incessantly with machine buzz. Later on, while McQueen and MacGraw bicker towards the border, Rudy's encounter with a pliant veterinarian and his sexually frustrated wife is allowed equal screen time, giving the smoldering Lettieri - perhaps best known as Sollozo in The Godfather - the chance to make a big impression.

Don't look for believable plotting or genuine psychological development here; the pleasures are in the rugged elegance of Peckinpah's images, in McQueen's minimalist cool (here at its most captivating), and in some tense, fairly brutal set-pieces. Sadly MacGraw is something of a one-dimensional letdown - one can only imagine what a Jane Fonda or Ellen Burstyn might have brought to a potentially fascinating part.