The Getaway (1972)

	Directed by: Sam Peckinpah	COUNTRY USA GENRE Action/Crime NORWEGIAN TITLE - RUNNING TIME 122 minutes
	Produced by: David Foster Mitchell Brower
	Written by (based on the novel by Jim Thompson): Walter Hill

Cast includes:
CHARACTER	ACTOR/ACTRESS	RATING
Doc McCoy	Steve McQueen
Carol McCoy	Ali MacGraw	½
Jack Benyon	Ben Johnson	½
Fran Clinton	Sally Struthers	½
Rudy	Al Lettieri	½
Cowboy	Slim Pickens

Review

Moody and morose film showing Peckinpah in retreat, trying to urbanize the western, making it jazzy and chic. Steve McQueen is the instrument, but he's an inane camera fixture, going through the motions technically, but remaining an abandoned representative. That abandonment is also the centre of Peckinpah's themes here, in which he demonstrates that the gritty 1970s have removed all the fun from the once flourishing Texas bank robber on the run to Mexico. He then spends oceans of time mourning the loss. In the process, The Getaway is supposed to be tense and intriguing, yet is so only in small segments. Peckinpah nevertheless shows his class from time to time. There is a steaming eroticism early on, as McQueen and MacGraw sweat it up together, and Peckinpah follows up with fast, fancy cross-cutting that gives the film style if not substance. In search of the latter, writer Walter Hill turns to the nasty and bizarre, such as the romance between Al Lettieri and Sally Struthers. Although it attracts interest, it remains an impassive observation. With the McCoy couple, Peckinpah tries a little harder, but the material is mediocre, and MacGraw is desolately out of her depth. Remade, for some reason, in 1994 with Alec Baldwin and Kim Basinger.