The Getaway

After seeing it last night, what struck me immediately about Sam Peckinpah's The Getaway (1972) -- based on the 1959 Jim Thompson novel -- is how much it seems like a hip melding of Ridley Scott's Thelma & Louise (1991) and the Coen brothers' No Country for Old Men (2007), only with a "happier ending."

The cast is a fun crew, especially Steve McQueen, Ali MacGraw, Ben Jonson, Al Lettieri, Sally Struthers, Bo Hopkins, Richard Bright, Slim Pickens and Dub Taylor. MacGraw and Struthers even sizzle at times. The film involves a lot of chases through Texas, holing up, fleeing, roadblocks and shootouts, but also some clever character interaction. Pretty cool, with Quincy Jones soundtrack.

In The Getaway, Steve McQueen looks a little sickly, though only in his early forties. Not too surprising, I suppose, since he later died of stomach cancer at fifty. In the meantime, he married Ali MacGraw. During production, Sam Peckinpah slipped over the border to Juarez and married Joie Gould (Before and after, he was "divorced, re-married, re-divorced three times" to Begoña Palacios. Source: Hollywood.com). Peckinpah died in 1984, four years after Steve McQueen, at age fifty-nine. Al Lettieri (of The Godfather fame) died at forty-seven of a heart attack in 1975. Call it the curse of The Getaway . . .

Today's Rune: Fertility.