The Getaway

“That’s the problem with this goddamn world, ain’t no morals.”

Background

With 'Junior Bonner' dying a death at the box office, Peckinpah was in need of a hit. He wasn't the only one. Steve McQueen hadn't starred in a substantial box office hit since 'Bullitt' in 1968. His production company, Solar, was in trouble. Peckinpah knuckled down, kept his drinking under control, and committed himself to delivering a professionally crafted, taut and exciting commercial product. It wouldn't be the last time he'd make a deliberate sop to the box office, but never again would he do so in such good faith. He would respond to 'The Killer Elite' with contempt, 'Convoy' with oblivion, and refer to 'The Osterman Weekend' as his first exploitation movie. 'The Getaway' was the most successful Peckinpah film thus far, even though reviews were generally lukewarm.

Synopsis

Professional thief Doc McCoy (McQueen) is doing hard time and not handling it well. He instructs his wife Carol (Ali MacGraw) to plead his case to Benyon (Ben Johnson), a corrupt official with the right connections to influence Doc's parole hearing. On his release, he undertakes a bank heist, roping in Carol along with hot-headed youngster Frank Jackson (Bo Hopkins) and unpredictable tough guy Rudy Butler (Al Lettieri). The robbery is executed efficiently, but Rudy proves a little too trigger happy. Rendezvousing to divide the takings, Rudy shoots Frank en route and intends to do the same for Doc. But Doc pre-empts him and leaves him for dead. Doc and Carol deliver Benyon's cut to his ranch. Benyon taunts Doc with the revelation that Carol secured his release through sexual favours, then instructs Carol to shoot Doc. Carol blows Benyon away instead. Doc and Carol, their relationship strained by the thankless slapping around that Doc doles out to her (never mind that he'd still be in clink otherwise), go on the lam. Meanwhile, an injured but vengeful Rudy forces henpecked vet Harold (Jack Dodson) and his free-spirited wife Fran (Sally Struthers) first to treat him and then to drive him to Mexico and a return engagement with Doc and Carol. Benyon's bereaved and brooding brother has the same idea and despatches a bunch of guys to go after Doc. All parties converge on the Loughlin Hotel on the outskirts of Mexico and gunplay ensues.

Analysis

There's a prevalent critical attitude that because Peckinpah approached 'The Getaway' as a solidly crafted slice of commercial entertainment, it is a lesser movie and can therefore be dismissed. And while there's no doubt it's a lesser piece of work than, say, 'Ride the High Country', 'The Wild Bunch', 'Straw Dogs' or 'Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid', it's facile to dismiss it on such tenuous grounds. True, Peckinpah made it because both he and McQueen needed a hit. True, he made it knowing full well it wasn't as thematically and aesthetically dense as much of his other work. True, he approached it as a craftsman rather than an artist. But it's still one hell of a damned good film. And it's not the only movie made with an agenda that has still managed to triumph over its less than artistic genesis: the Wachowski brothers made 'Bound' purely as a "proving" exercise to secure studio backing for 'The Matrix' - and for my money, 'Bound' remains the best thing they've done.

Although 'The Getaway' isn't amongst the best of Sam Peckinpah's work, it's still the best of the triumvirate of thrillers - the other two being 'The Killer Elite' and 'The Osterman Weekend' - which he made largely on the basis of commercial considerations (ie. make money for the studio = being allowed to make another film). It's worth noting that 'The Getaway' and 'The Killer Elite' followed productions which flopped (respectively, 'Junior Bonner' and 'Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia') while 'The Osterman Weekend' came after five years out of work post-'Convoy' (but that's another story).

'The Getaway' stands head and shoulders above Peckinpah's handful of other done-for-the-money projects. There are two reasons for this. One: Peckinpah's productive working relationship with McQueen meant he approached the material with some degree of enthusiasm. Two: 'The Getaway' is a western at heart. Beyond the obvious imagery - Benyon and his gang, the thief on the train and the old timer who helps Doc and Carol cross into Mexico all wear cowboy hats; Benyon's office walls are bedecked with bull horns - there are narrative parallels to 'The Wild Bunch'. Doc is released from prison by a corrupt official with his own agenda (cf. Deke Thornton and Harrigan). He masterminds a professionally executed robbery (cf. Pike Bishop). He makes a crossing into Mexico (cf. the Bunch). The only difference is that Doc's "bunch" fragment immediately after the robbery, distrust and betrayal prevalent instead of loyalty and honour. But it's only to be expected really; Pike and co. reach their Calvary in the America of 1913, having already outlived their times. Doc is imprisoned (even after Benyon's sprung him from his literal incarceration) in the America of 1972 - and that's one hell of a lot more soulless and mechanized a place than evening the gotterdammerung of the Old West described in 'The Wild Bunch'. In this respect, it's apposite that Doc is played by the same actor who portrayed Junior Bonner - although the hardened professional criminal and the saddle-sore rodeo rider are nothing alike in many respects, one thing can be said of them that denotes an essentially Peckinpahesque kinship: both had outlived their times while their grandfathers were still in the womb!

The America that Doc moves through - indeed, flees from - is ridden with things that threaten to incarcerate, betray or destroy him. And they're all mechanical or technological. The idea of technology as a malign influence permeates every frame of the movie. It starts with the incredibly well-crafted and viscerally realised eight-minute opening sequence depicting Doc's crack-up in prison. Huge steel bolts slam into place at the touch of a button, securing an entire row of cell doors. Machinery in the prison workshop clatters away interminably. Doc works a textile machine, yanking back the lever regulating the speed of the machine, then slamming it home; yanking it back and slamming it home. The machinery clatters and clanks away. Doc sits in his cell, painstakingly building a matchstick model of a bridge. He works the machine, yanking the lever back, slamming it home. He showers, eyes averted from the naked flesh of his fellow prisoners. He remembers making love with Carol. He tries to shake the memories from his mind. The machinery clatters away. He participates in a work gang, mounted guards cradling shotguns. He works the machine. The walls of the prison, the routines, the grey walls, the guards, the tight perameters of his cell, all press in on him. He works the machine that clatters and clanks away. Memories crowd him. His hands tighten around the model bridge, crushing it, pulping it back into the matchwood it was constructed from. Peckinpah's use of montage and editing are peerless. The psychological portrait he effects of Doc as a man almost destroyed by institutionalisation is immediate, shattering and unforgettable.

Even when Doc is released from prison, a bank of security monitors are framed mounted high on a wall behind him. They seem to peer over his shoulder, as if to remind him that he'll never be free. Later still, after Carol has shot Benyon and the couple go on the run, Doc fiddles with the car radio as they hightail across country. He wants to know if Benyon's made the news yet; do they have a head start or is the law already after them? The radio malfunctions. Technology, when it isn't busy imprisoning Doc, fails him when he needs it. Even later still, in an electrical goods store where he tries to buy a new radio, technology betrays him: a display model television suddenly flashes up his picture on a news bulletin. Doc snaps it off, but the shop assistant has already recognised him.

More so arguably than any of the westerns, 'The Getaway' emerges as an exegesis on technophobia. Steve Judd, Pike Bishop and Cable Hogue kick against the first appearances of technology; Doc is up against it at every twist and turn. Indeed, 'The Getaway' would perhaps emerge as a quintessential Peckinpah film but for two considerations: firstly, virtually everything that preceded it was a more definitive statement of Peckinpah the artist; and secondly, Walter Hill's screenplay (although a gritty enough bit of film writing considered on its own merits) constitutes a considerable watering down of the source material. Jim Thompson's novel is dark, cynical, embittered and basically fucking nasty bit of fiction. The Doc and Carol of the novel suffer the claustrophobic interment of a coffin-sized cave in which they have to wait out a manhunt for two days (claustrophobia is one of my bugbears and it took me three evenings to read this relatively short chapter), which leaves Carol close to losing her mind; later they are hidden by a farmer in crawlspace disguised as a dungheap; and finally they make it into Mexico and spend most of their take from the robbery buying sanctuary at El Rey where, as their funds run low and their relationship fragments, they start wondering how best to bump each other off.

Hill's script imposes a happy ending, which is entirely understandable. Filming Thompson's ending as written would have resulted in a film so bleak it would have made Bergman's 'The Silence' look like a Mel Brooks production. Unfortunately, Hill's Doc-and-Carol-cross-into-Mexico-and-they're-still-in-love-awww-bless ending comes across as even more of a sop to audience expectations in the light of the relationship that developed between McQueen and MacGraw. Film critic Kim Newman expresses it perceptively: "the romantic teaming is so potent that Hill has to omit the novel's cynical last chapter, in which the characters are trapped in a Mexican hell-hole that swallows their personalities, although 'Alfredo Garcia' might be seen as a feature length elaboration of the Thompson sketch".

Newman's observation is freighted with implication. 'The Getaway' is an energetic and exciting slice of intelligently put-together mainstream entertainment; it's the last of an already small coterie of Peckinpah films to have a truly upbeat ending; and yet it points to the darker, blackly comic territory Peckinpah would explore, just two years later, with Warren Oates, Isela Vega and a fly-blown sack containing a severed head.

"A walk thing": creating The Wild Bunch's most iconic moment

Pike Bishop (William Holden) pulls his boots on in the dingy room of a whore young enough to be his daughter - hell, his granddaughter. The girl washes herself lethargically while her baby cries, unattended, in a crib nearby. Pike's face is twisted in self-disgust. He's thinking back to what he and the Bunch saw on their return to Agua Verde: their comrade Angel (Jaime Sanchez) being dragged along behind General Mapache (Emilio Fernandez)'s automobile, beaten and bloodied.

Pike tosses some coins on a table and exits the room. Next door, the Gorch brothers, Tector (Ben Johnson) and Lyle (Warren Oates), have been similarly engaged. "Let's go," Pike barks. A look passes between them. Understanding registers on Tector's face. Lyle blinks, momentarily uncertain, then his whiskery features harden. "Why not?" he replies.

Outside, Dutch Engstrom (Ernest Borgnine) is sitting against the brothel wall, whittling a stick. Whittling is probably the wrong word - he's going at it with a knife like it was Mapache himself. It was Dutch who was with Angel when Mapache's men captured him. Dutch who rode away and left him to his fate, there being no other course of action. Dutch more than any of them hurts at Mapache's torture of Angel. Dutch doesn't even attempt to assuage himself in the arms of whores; he simply sits and hacks away with his knife and waits.

When Pike and the Gorch brothers emerge, he and Dutch lock eyes. No word is spoken. Words aren't needed. Dutch slowly gets to his feet. He knows what's going to happen next. He's been willing it. He wants it.

The four men walk purposefully over to where their horses are hitched. They pull rifles out of saddle rolls, check pistols, thumb rounds into chambers.

It was at this point - as far as the script was concerned - that the action abruptly cut to the Bunch's arrival at the courtyard where Mapache and his dissolute revolutionaries are drinking and entertaining women. This, as far as the crew were aware, would be the next the thing they shot.

Peckinpah had other ideas.

Biographer David Weddle describes it best:

Assistant director Cliff Coleman ... began issuing marching orders for the next set-up ... but Peckinpah stopped him. "No, no, Cliff, wait ... I want to do a walk thing first."

"What do you mean, 'a walk thing'?"

Peckinpah growled something unintelligible, then began lining up Holden, Borgnine, Oates and Johnson to make a long walk through the outlying buildings with shotguns cradled in their arms ... Sam set up a group of drunken Mexican soldiers, playing guitars and singing, for the group to walk past. Coleman began layering in other extras ... "And all of a sudden, Jesus Christ," says Coleman, "the music's going and the camera's rolling and these fucking guys started to walk and everybody's going 'Wow, it's the real thing!' Nobody knew what Sam was going to do or what he wanted to do. Before you knew it, it built and it built and it built and it built until it became that scene."

A walk thing. An inspired piece of improvisation. Iconography in motion.

PERSONAL FAVES: The Wild Bunch

"When you side with a man, you stay with him - and if you can't do that, you're like some animal. You're finished. We're finished!"




Background
The slow road out of his years in the wilderness following the 'Major Dundee' catastrophe and his firing from 'The Cincinnati Kid' began with his adaptation of 'Noon Wine' for the TV drama show 'ABC Stage 67'. Netting him Writers' Guild and Directors' Guild nominations and his best notices since 'Ride the High Country', he found himself in demand again. Head of production at Seven Arts, Kenneth Hyman was on a roll after the staggering success of 'The Dirty Dozen' and was looking to develop another action movie vehicle for Lee Marvin under the auspices of Warner Brothers. The project he had in mind was called 'The Diamond Story' and Peckinpah didn't think much of the script. Nonetheless, Hyman appointed producer Phil Feldman to work with Peckinpah. Neither of them cared much for 'The Diamond Story' and their attention was soon drawn to a couple of other scripts: 'The Wild Bunch' and 'The Ballad of Cable Hogue'.


It's entirely possible that Hyman would have called time on their extracurricular activities and ordered Peckinpah to knuckle down to 'The Diamond Story' but for one factor. 20th Century Fox had just paid half a million (an unprecedented amount for a script at that time) to William Goldman for 'Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid' and handed the reins to George Roy Hill. Industry buzz was high. There was probably no better time to make a western. Feldman saw 'The Wild Bunch' as a challenge to 'Butch and Sundance' at the box office. He was convinced it had blockbuster written all over it. 'The Diamond Story' was summarily abandoned and Feldman and Peckinpah threw themselves into 'The Wild Bunch'.


The production was suitably epic. Peckinpah, predictably, went overbudget. He exposed 330,000 feet of film, printing most of it so that he'd have an amorphous mass of material from which to work in the editing room. There were over 1,200 camera set-ups. Feldman didn't question any of Peckinpah's techniques. Their relationship was so good that their next project, 'The Ballad of the Cable Hogue', went into pre-production while editing work was still being completed on 'The Wild Bunch'. Things very quickly and irreversibly soured between them. While Peckinpah was scouting locations for 'Hogue', Feldman - pressured by the studio to bring 'The Wild Bunch' down to a two hour cut - caved in and, behind Peckinpah's back, snipped twenty minutes out. This was the last straw for Peckinpah - who already considered the 140 minute cut a compromise from his original three and a half hour version - and, true to form, kicked off very publically against Feldman and Warner Brothers, ending his association with both.

Synopsis

Grizzled outlaws Pike Bishop (William Holden), Dutch Engstrom (Ernest Borgnine) and the bunch ride into the town of Starbuck. Disguised as US army personnel, they storm into a railroad office and steal the payroll at gunpoint. Outside, under the nominal command of Pike's former partner Deke Thornton (Robert Ryan), a posse of bounty hunters are lying in wait for them. Deke entered into a bargain with railroad boss Harrigan (Albert Dekker) whereby he's bought his way out of jail in return for hunting down the bunch. A vicious shoot-out occurs and some of the bunch are killed. The surviving members head back to their rendezvous with Sykes (Edmond O'Brien) and divide the loot - only to realise they've been had. The money bags they risked their lives for are filled with washers. With Deke and the bounty hunters on their trail, they cross into Mexico where they stay briefly at youngest gang member Angel (Jaime Sanchez)'s village. The place is decimated; Angel's father has been killed by despotic Mexican general Mapache (Emilio Fernandez) while his girlfriend has gone off and whored herself at Mapache's hacienda. The bunch fetch up at Agua Verde where a rash decision on Angel's part precipitates an uneasy alliance with Mapache, who is being advised by a high ranking officer of the Imperial German army. The bunch are soon contracted by Mapache to rob a munitions train. The robbery is well-planned and executed, but they still have to face Mapache's treachery, the pursuing bounty hunters and the realisation of their own failings.

Analysis

Broadly speaking, the key themes of Peckinpah's work are:

1) Times change, yet Peckinpah's heroes - men of a certain era, men of a certain mindset - would rather die than change with them.

2) Technology encroaches, its results only ever destructive.
3) Loyalty, honour and codes of conduct are thrown into harsh relief - and tested sorely - by the inherently compromised morality of his protagonists.

4) How men behave, interact, are defined by their actions and - sometimes - redeem themselves.

Just as broadly speaking, the most recurrent visual motifs in his films are: mirrors (as early as the 'The Deadly Companions' there's a shot of a gunslinger pumping a bullet into his own reflection, an image revisited with shattering clarity of purpose in 'Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid'), children bearing witness to or emulating the worst of adult behaviour (in almost every film: here it's a bunch of giggling children watching red ants swarm over a scorpion before heaping kindling over insects and arachnid alike and burning the lot), and automobiles as avatars for the death of the Old West (first glimpsed almost running Steve Judd over in 'Ride the High Country' and later a threat to Cable Hogue's business in Peckinpah's 'Wild Bunch' follow-up).

Not only are all of these present in 'The Wild Bunch' - along with his stylistic trademarks of slo-mo and freeze frames - but they synthesize perfectly into a vital, intense and immediate statement of who Peckinpah was as an artist, as a filmmaker and as a man. Re-reading these last few paragraphs, I've used the word "men" a lot, and probably opened myself up to the kind of criticism that dogged Peckinpah throughout his life and is still applied by commentators unable (or unwilling) to look into his films with the depth they demand. It's such an easy thing to do to label Peckinpah "macho", to say that he made films about men that were shot through (pardon the pun) with an aesthetic of violence. It's easy to say that because - on an incredibly superficial level - it's true. But Peckinpah, for all the gunfire and the blood squibs, was a director of anti-violence. What gives his films their psychological complexity - and what continues to render his work difficult for some people - is that he incorporated the anti-violence, the bloody and infinitely painful messiness of it, into a powerfully realised iconography that challenged the audiences' reactions. Michael Haneke works towards a similar end - but without the acutely observed degree of characterisation that makes even the most minor characters in a Peckinpah movie spring to life, and with a coolly cerebral European approach that establishes an intellectual distance between the screen and the audience - and scoops critical plaudits.

Peckinpah made films about men, but he wasn't afraid to show their failings. Pike fucks up: it's his complacency which leads to Deke's arrest which in turn leads to his deal with Harrigan; backstory reveals that it was his complacency in his affair with a married woman that got her killed; and it's his complacency in dealing with the handover of munitions to Mapache following the train robbery that sees Angel - already antagonistic towards Mapache - sent with Dutch to trade the last batch of rifles. Mapache accuses Angel of stealing a case of rifles and takes him prisoner. A grim, guilt-ridden Dutch rides out of Agua Verde alone, leaving Angel to his rival's brutal ministrations. At least two of these mistakes lead to a testing of the friendship between Pike and Dutch. Take their altercation after Deke's men open fire on a defenceless Sykes:

Dutch: Damn that Deke Thornton to hell!

Pike: What would you do in his place? He gave his word.

Dutch: Gave his word to a railroad!

Pike: It's his word!

Dutch: That ain't what counts - it's who you give it to!

This mirrors an earlier contretemps between a disgusted Thornton, surveying the aftermath of the protracted gunfight in Starbuck, and a brutally pragmatic Harrigan:

Thornton: Tell me, Mr Harrigan, how does it feel gettin' paid for it? Gettin' paid to sit back and hire your killings with the law's arms around you? How does it feel to be so goddamn right?

Harrigan: Good.

Thornton: You dirty son of a bitch!

Peckinpah said of 'The Wild Bunch': "I wasn't trying to make an epic, I was trying to tell a simple story about bad men in changing times. 'The Wild Bunch' is simply about what happens when killers go to Mexico. The strange thing is that you feel a great sense of loss when these killers reach the end of the line." When Peckinpah says "simple story", he means simple in terms of its plot. Psychologically and subtextually, it's fucking complex. He's right: his characters are killers; remorseless ones and not scared of death themselves. Suspecting that Mapache's second-in-command Herrara (Alfonso Arau) will attempt to shanghai the munitions from them off the robbery, they rig up the wagon with dynamite and call Herrara's bluff by light the fuse. He backs down, but the scene is played out with such steely resolve that there's no doubt Pike and co. would rather blow themselves to hell than back down. When they reach the end of the line, it's not just because Thornton's men have kept them trapped in Agua Verde. When they - SPOILER ALERT - go out in a hail of bullets after a protracted gun battle against vastly stronger numbers, it's not just because of what happened to Angel. They have reached the end of the line in that they have outlived their times; the world has moved on and there is no place for them in the new scheme of things. 'The Wild Bunch' is Peckinpah's first western to be set in the twentieth century, not the 1860s. 'The Ballad of Cable Hogue', set in the early 1900s, continued the theme while the prologue to 'Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid' sees Garrett as a bitter old man in 1909 before flashing back to the main body of the action in 1881. 'The Wild Bunch', though, is Peckinpah's most explicit j' accuse of the social, political and technological upheavals that destroyed the Old West and buried the frontier spirit. 'The Wild Bunch' takes place in 1913.

"These days are closing fast," Pike muses, early on, "we gotta start thinking beyond our guns." The point is rammed home when the Bunch encounter Mapache's automobile. They summarily label it an "ugly damned thing", only for Sykes (ironically the oldest of the group) to prove the most cognizant of changing technology: "I hear they got one of those things up north that can fly." Tector Gorch (Ben Johnson) mocks him: "You damned old fool, that's a balloon." Pike sets the record straight: "No, the old man's right. They've got motors, wings, go sixty miles in less than an hour. Gonna use them in the war, they say." One year before the Great War, the atrocity that - to quote Wilfred Owen - "slew ... half the seed of Europe one by one." Pike Bishop and the Bunch in this world? Hell no, they'd rather die first, a decision borne out when the one remaining survivor of the Bunch, Sykes, throws in his lot with the men from Angel's village. "Ain't the way it used to be," he muses, in a line which pretty much sums up Peckinpah's worldview and his directorial ethos, "but it'll do." But - and this is the masterstroke - before these kiilers, these bad men, reach the end of the line, Peckinpah gives them their humanity. The sojourn in Angel's village allows us to see them variously relaxing, larking about and reminiscing. When Pike, midway through a reflective conversation with the village elder, breaks off to watch the Tector and Lyle (Warren Oates) playing a game of cat's cradle with one of the village girls, laughing innocently and exhibiting none of their usual lasciviousness towards anyone female, he remarks "Now that I find hard to believe." In a line that is key to any heartfelt appreciation of the film, the elder replies: "Not so hard. We all dream of being a child again, even the worst of us. Perhaps the worst most of all."

We all dream of being a child again, even the worst of us. Perhaps the worst most of all. I'll put that line up against all the criticism that's ever been levelled at Peckinpah that he was nothing but a director of violence. Paul Seydor states in his magnificent book 'The Westerner Films - A Reconsideration' that is "impossible not to recognize in [Peckinpah] the wounded romantic, the tragic idealist, the agonizer believer". And it is impossible, in my opinion, to watch 'The Wild Bunch' and not be utterly convinced that, in his finest moments as a filmmaker, Sam Peckinpah entered his house justified.