12 Years a Slave

Full disclosure: I avoided this one on the big screen. Everything about the trailers and posters screamed “worthy but dull Oscar bait”. Finally approaching it in the context of Steve McQueen’s previous films, I’m still slightly of that opinion but it needs to be said: overall, ‘12 Years a Slave’ is one hell of a piece of filmmaking.

Based on the memoir by Solomon Northup, a freeborn black man who was Shanghai-ed and sold into slavery in 1841 – even his name was taken away: his slave name was “Platt” – ‘12 Years a Slave’ is in some respects a handsomely mounted epic (it’s the most Hollywood looking of McQueen’s films), and in others as much of an endurance test as anything crafted by Michael Haneke or Lars von Trier. Whereas, however, Haneke and von Trier (for me anyway) never quite avoid the sense that they’re staging unpalatable scenes for the sake of it, McQueen depicts every act of inhumanity – and there are many – with a profound and highly moral sense of purpose.

There’s a scholarly piece to be written on ’12 Years a Slave’ as a response to ‘Django Unchained’ – it’s draining where Tarantino’s film is cathartic; subdued where Tarantino is explosive; graphically horrible in its violence where Tarantino’s is over-the-top and soaked in pop culture aesthetic – and this is nowhere more evident in McQueen’s commitment to anti-narrative as opposed to the adherence of ‘Django Unchained’ to a cohesive story arc. At its most reductive, a synopsis of ‘12 Years a Slave’ would run like this: Solomon Northup (Chiwetel Ejiofor) is kidnapped and sold into slavery, first to Ford (Benedict Cumberbatch) then to the sadistic Epps (Michael Fassbender) under whose ownership his sufferings worsen. Eventually, via the intervention of abolitionist Bass (Brad Pitt), he is able to prove his freeborn status and return to his old life.

There are very few scenes that function around a narrative or dramatic dynamic – for the most part the film unfolds as Solomon suffers act of brutality then Solomon witnesses act of brutality then plantation owner acts despicably then overseer acts despicably, one after another building to cumulatively shattering depiction of what it is to lose one’s liberty, one’s family and even one’s name. The auction at which Solomon is sold to Ford is a case in point: ironically-named slave dealer Freeman (Paul Giamatti) lines up his wares, male and female, stark naked like sculptures in some bizarre art gallery of dark commerce. Narratively, it fulfils the simple purpose of transiting Solomon to Ford’s plantation. The scene itself, though, has an almost surreal quality; the gleaming skin of Freeman’s slaves and the slick dialogue he employs opens a contemporary point of reference: the oleaginous salesman steering the customer towards the most expensive model in the showroom.

Likewise most of the scenes of violence – be it beating or whipping – are not prefigured or built up to by the tempo and suspense of a scene: they simply erupt and then subside again, part of the fabric of the film; part of the daily life, McQueen acknowledges sadly, of the enslaved. The contrast of Ford and Epps gives the film its only hint of a structure: Act One – Solomon retains his dignity under a conservative owner; Act Two – Solomon undergoes almost total depersonalisation under a total bastard.

Deeming Ford “conservative” is relative concept. Superficially, he’s not monstrous and he responds well to Solomon’s transportation suggestions around his logging operation. However, he still fucking owns slaves and no matter how many readings he gives from the Bible and how light he is on the whip, there’s no getting away from this one simple fact. Moreover, he has no qualms at employing the loathsome Tibeats (Paul Dano) as overseer. Tibeats delights in setting teams of slaves to work while serenading them with the tactless ditty “Run, nigger, run” as a warning against escape attempts.

The inevitable conflict between Solomon and Tibeats sets the scene for one of the film’s most horrific yet mesmerising scenes. Beaten and hoisted from a tree, Solomon is compelled to stand on tip-toe, maintaining his balance, the slightest movement tightening the noose around his neck. In a long-shot that McQueen holds for a minute and a half – nothing compared to the 17-minute dialogue scene in ‘Hunger’, but excruciating and seemingly interminable while you’re watching it – as other characters weave in and out of frame behind Solomon, going about their daily business as if oblivious. It’s a scene about the banality of evil and the everyday complicities (in the interests of survival) of the oppressed.

It’s this incident that prompts Ford to sell Solomon to Epps, with the twofold result of forestalling any future problems with Tibeats and the discharging of a debt to Epps. There’s an immediate juxtaposition between the two plantation owners. Like Ford, Epps is introduced reading the Bible, but unlike Ford’s liberalism and gently improving teachings, Epps uses the good book to make a point about property and a man’s right to dispose of said in any way that pleases him. And it pleases Epps to whip, beat and rape his property. If Ford is a slave owner because he’s a businessman, Epps treats his slaves as pawns in an elaborate game of chess reimagined as hate-fucking with his wife (Sarah Poulson) as his opponent of choice. Epps has a particular fixation on Patsey (Lupita Nyong’o); Mrs Epps, predictably, hates her. The poor girl suffers at both of their hands.

This second half of the film is the most gruelling. Fassbender and Poulson conjure a vision of utter corruption on every level. Alongside Ejiofor and Nyong’o they give the best performances on offer here (though kudos to Giamatti: although his role is small, he shrugs off the mugging that has afflicted much of his recent work and re-engages with acting). McQueen defines degenerative influence of Epps so effectively that a scene where Epps manoeuvres Solomon into burning a letter that might set him from is as toe-curlingly unwatchable as an extended whipping, blood flecking from each blow.

It’s curious, then, given Epps’s sadistic streak and knowledge of Solomon’s earlier attempt to draw attention to his plight, that he sets Solomon to work with the outspoken Bass. The moment Bass delivers his big “white man’s guilt” speech – Pitt’s performance is the film’s weak spot – it’s inexplicable that Epps doesn’t drag Solomon away from him and set him back to work picking cotton. And there are a few other moments that don’t quite add up: the logistics, intricacies and expense of luring Solomon away from his family in the opening scenes seem economically at odds with what he’s sold for; Solomon pens his first, failed, letter in the grounds of Epps’s plantation, a candle guttering, a fire flickering away under a pot of home-made ink, without a single overseer getting suspicious and coming to investigate; Solomon returns after 12 years to the same well-appointed townhouse that his family have inexplicably managed to keep retain.

These are minor things, but there are enough of them to keep the film from greatness. The non-ageing of Solomon until the final scene is also curious, and doesn’t help the film’s tendency to unfurl from one incident to the next without establishing just how far into his 12-year indenture Solomon is at any given point. That Solomon is clean-shaven, neatly-coiffured and dressed in unsoiled clothes in every scene is, I assume, an aesthetic decision on McQueen’s part to accentuate the dignity and humanity that Solomon clings onto throughout his ordeal, but again a slightly false note is struck.

In comparison to ‘Hunger’ – still McQueen’s best film – and ‘Shame’, the director’s trademarks are present but muted, perhaps in accordance with the requirements of working with a larger cast and bigger budget (although, at $18million, said budget was loose change by Hollywood standards). Static takes are longer than usual for mainstream filmmaking, but there’s nothing that remotely equals the 17-minute Sands/Moran scene in ‘Hunger’ or the 10-minute restaurant scene in ‘Shame’. There’s one shot of the protagonist running, but it’s over in seconds and doesn’t carry the backstory of the young Bobby Sands in ‘Hunger’ or the immediacy of Brandon’s disruption from his carefully ordered life in ‘Shame’. There is none of the bleak palette that characterises the cinematography of either of these two films.

What there is, however, and what indelibly stamps ’12 Years a Slave’ with Steve McQueen’s authorial signature, is its intensely rigorous and purposeful examination of depersonalisation. As the prisoners in ‘Hunger’ are stripped and mistreated and broken down by a system hellbent on destroying them for political reasons, and as Brandon in ‘Shame’ ravages his body in increasingly frenzied and desperate and purposeless liaisons in order to repress any shred of emotion, so Solomon is variously forced to co-operate, endure, turn a blind eye or turn his back (his deliverance from Epps’s plantation while Patsey and the others needs must remain is terrible to watch); to do, in other words, what is necessary to survive. Even if he survives as a non-person, saddled with a name that isn’t his.

Shame

Picture the scene: an average Sunday morning at Agitation Towers, yours truly drinking coffee, eating toast, watching ‘Shame’ on DVD and becoming more intimately acquainted with Michael Fassbender than I’d anticipated. Five minutes in and the guy’s walking bare-ass naked around his aesthetically severe apartment. And not just bare-ass, either. There ought to be a separate screen credit for Fassbender Junior.

‘Shame’ continues the cinema of body politic that ‘Hunger’ utilized. But here the focus is on internalization rather than institutionalization. Fassbender plays Brandon, an Irish-born New Yorker with a successful job (what he does is never really defined), a spacious apartment, an extensive vinyl collection (the first LP we hear him play is Bach’s Goldberg Variations) and a major addiction to sex that he sort-of controls by paying for hookers and watching online porn. At the office, his PC is carted off by the IT bods due to a virus, a subplot that plays out as predictably as you’d imagine (Brandon gets hauled in by his boss over the hard-drive content) only to peter out (there’s some vague suggestion that Brandon’s intern is left to shoulder the blame, not that we’re ever introduced to Brandon’s intern).

Brandon’s overtly buttoned-down lifestyle is disrupted when his needy, flaky and hectoring sister Sissy (Carey Mulligan) decamps to his apartment following a relationship meltdown. Sissy is a fucking annoying character, both for the way she’s written and Mulligan’s histrionic performance. I’ll admit to having found Mulligan curiously overrated ever since ‘An Education’, and the understated yet deeply committed performance that Fassbender gives here only shows up Mulligan’s weaknesses. Plus, her rendition of ‘New York, New York’ is so painful that it probably contravenes the Geneva Convention. What Sissy’s presence does – in terms of the very slender narrative (‘Shame’ is essentially a series of analytically staged vignettes, loosely strung together) – is dynamite Brandon out of the safety of his apartment, the four walls of which have thus far provided containment for his extracurricular activities.

No longer able to entertain hookers and dictate the mood and the staging of the encounter (“do it slowly”), he is forced to trawl bars and clubs. His emotionless façade erupts in anger coated with self-loathing when Sissy laughingly catches him masturbating. He black-bags his porn stash and laptop and leaves them for the garbage men. Even the orderliness of the apartment itself is violated: she blares disco music instead of his carefully tasteful vinyl; strews her possessions everywhere; provides a constant stream of verbiage that denies him quietness and solitude. Ultimately, she brings Brandon’s douchebag boss David (James Badge Dale) back to the apartment and “entertains” him.

It’s during this less than amenable period of flat-sharing that Brandon finds himself drawn to a colleague, Marianne (Nicole Beharie). Their awkward first date, in an upmarket restaurant, the waiter from hell flitting around them incessantly, is analogous to the 17-minute dialogue-across-the-table scene in ‘Hunger’, and is similarly placed in the film – almost exactly to the minute. But whereas ‘Hunger’ used its epic single-take dialogue scene to reveal Bobby Sands, the restaurant scene in ‘Shame’ is an exercise in watching Brandon conceal. It’s not until after they’ve left the eaterie that anything remotely answering to the description of natural conversation happens between them. Even then, Marianne is unsure about seeing him again. However, Brandon persuades her to a hotel the next day (on the firm’s time!) and things come to an abrupt and humiliating halt when he’s unable to perform.

Thus it is that the film earns its title. Embarrassed at his sister’s glimpse into his sexual obsessions and unable to connect with her emotionally; ashamed at his failing with Marianne; and disgusted at the despoiling of the sanctuary of his apartment by Sissy and David’s dalliance, he becomes reliant on self-debasement and increasingly depersonalised encounters into to achieve gratification. The last twenty minutes or so document a descent into complete emotional negation – he unspools explicit chat-up lines to a woman in a bar, earning himself a beating from her partner; he follows a rent boy into a gay club; he engages in the angriest and least erotic threesome in the history of cinema – until the resolution of Sissy’s own instabilities jolts him back into something like the real world.

At its best, ‘Shame’ rigorously and intelligently debates sexual dysfunctionalism and tries to define where the tipping point is when emotion is so persistently suppressed in favour of the purely physical. McQueen’s minimalist script, co-written with Abi Morgan, sometimes helps this debate by paring away peripheral details: Brandon’s job is a good example, in that for the film to work, we don’t really need to know what he does beyond the fact that he earns enough to rent a swish apartment and pay high-class hookers in cash, and therefore his office is generic, his work based conversations are generic, and whether he works in advertising, PR, HR, information, data analysis or graphic design I don’t know and don’t care. And I love the fact that the film recognises this non-requirement.

At the same time, though, the characters of David (who sleeps with Sissy despite being married and is therefore contrasted with Brandon in that both essentially pursue sexual encounters outside the relationship-based social norm) and Marianne (who represents said social norm) are integral to Brandon’s job, and the lack of consequences in Brandon’s PC being clogged with porn, not to mention Brandon and Marianne’s sneaking off to a hotel for nookie in the middle of a working day, also without consequence, strike small but niggling false notes. Likewise, the culmination of Sissy’s behavioural pattern lurches the film into melodrama, particularly a late-in-the-day suggestion of some kind of intuitive bond between them. Worst is McQueen’s depiction of the gay club, as breathlessly prurient and unabashedly clichéd as anything since Friedkin’s ‘Cruising’.

Where ‘Shame’ really delivers, though, is in Fassbender’s performance. He’s beyond good, and the level of trust that must operate between him and McQueen can only be guessed (and marvelled) at! This is raw, physical acting; as demanding and – in every sense of the word – naked as anything in ‘Hunger’. Though the two films are intensely different, McQueen’s aesthetic provides correlation: the extended, dialogue-heavy single takes; scenes of his protagonists running; detailed attention to the rhythms and repetitions of his characters’ lives; a steely palette that mirrors the dehumanisation of prison in ‘Hunger’ and Brandon’s prison-of-the-self in ‘Shame’. And Michael Fassbender in career-defining roles. On the basis of these two films alone, McQueen/Fassbender rank equal to Scorsese/de Niro in the pantheon of director/actor partnerships.

Hunger

I was nine when Bobby Sands led the controversial hunger strikes in The Maze prison, Northern Ireland, and I remember the news coverage even if I was too young – and, let’s face it, too fucking English – to understand the wider concept. Not that the news reports I saw would have given me that: then, as now, the BBC covered the news the government told it to, with the bias the government determined.

‘Hunger’, the debut feature film by Turner Prize-winning visual artist Steve McQueen, burns with a righteous anger at the British government’s intervention in Ireland and its treatment of political prisoners. McQueen’s attention to detail, and his ability to communicate the rhythms, rituals and repetitions of prison life, is the basis for a steady and unflinching accretion of sound, image and an almost tactile immersion of his audience in the milieu depicted. The overall effect is shattering; draining. ‘Hunger’ is a film you don’t just watch; you undergo it. Anger at the system is palpable. Strange, then, to think that McQueen accepted a CBE just three years after he made this film.

‘Hunger’ shifts perspective twice before it focuses on Sands (Michael Fassbender), debates the ethics of his decision to go on hunger strike, and documents the physical – and ultimately terminal – repercussions. Early scenes are vignettes from prison warder Raymond Lohan (Stuart Graham)’s day-to-day life: the ritual of checking the street for attackers and the underside of his car for incendiary devices before he leaves for work; the worried face of his wife at the window; the tense drive to the Maze, his eyes riveted to the rearview mirror; a moment of inner torment in a washroom, Lohan immersing bruised hands in a sink full of cold water; a lunchbreak spent alone from the rambunctious conversation of his fellow guards. A particularly effective moment is a cigarette break, Lohan in shirt sleeves despite the snow that whirls about him. Flakes dissolve on his epaulettes. His head tilts back and his face loses focus. This is a man who is lost, whose job has gone beyond defining him and may well be destroying him.

Next, we’re thrust into the company of Davey Gillen (Brian Milligan); his introduction to the Maze is ritual humiliation: he’s compelled to strip naked, given a rough blanket and thrown into a cell with a similarly denuded Gerry Campbell (Liam McMahon). Dirty protest has obviously been the order of the day: the walls are smeared with excrement. McQueen’s camera unhurriedly inspects the filth. Coprophobes will spend much of the running time acquainting themselves with the fast-forward button. The food is as bad as the conditions; uneaten slop is left to solidify then molded into a sort of fence around the door so the decant contents of their shared piss-bucket floods the corridor and not their cell. McQueen stages two extended, wordless scenes in which sanitation staff undertake deep cleans. Prisons, it is implied, don’t just imprison the prisoners.

Finally, almost a third of the way into the movie, Sands takes centre stage and our first real introduction is as he – and his fellow prisoners – are dragged from their cells and beaten by police in riot gear and subjected to intrusive body searches that basically constitute institutionalized sexual violation. They’re hosed down and given haircuts that leave their scalps and foreheads gouged and bleeding. It’s an horrific scene that fills in the ellipses in the Lohan sequence and entirely changes our perception of him. It’s difficult to feel any sympathy when his careful system of checks and cautious behaviour fails him and, in the most grimly inappropriate of settings, he gets what’s coming.

And from Sands as piñata for the establishment to Sands as activist, fighter, martyr. McQueen gives us everything we need to know about Sands – his beliefs, his background, his politics, his discipline, the strength of his convictions – in a truly astounding 17-minute single take dialogue scene in which the camera doesn’t move a millimetre. The aesthetic is as stripped down as possible: one table, two chairs, Sands and his mentor/confessor Father Moran (Liam Cunningham) sitting opposite each other, the gunmetal blue smoke of cigarette after cigarette curling between them. 17 minutes during which they talk politics, religion, morality; two intensely gifted and naturally intuitive performers batting the dialogue between them. It’s a mesmerising scene, almost hypnotic except that it’s challenging, difficult, thought-provoking – cinema at its least attention-seeking and most intellectually powerful.

The final half hour of ‘Hunger’ charts Sands’s physical depletion, Fassbender rivalling Christian Bale’s extreme weight loss for ‘The Machinist’ and ‘Rescue Dawn’. Charts it against the painfully dignified vigil kept by his parents. Charts it against his memories of a childhood cross-country race (shades here of Tom Courtenay’s anti-establishment icon Colin Smith in ‘The Loneliness of the Long-Distance Runner’).

Following the brutal violence of the first third, and the rigorous debate of the mid-section, this final act is quieter but no less shattering. McQueen presents his protagonist’s emaciated body as the canvas upon which he layers in, one precise brush stroke at a time, a detailed and visceral portrait of political protest, human fragility and a principle followed through at the highest cost.

Steve McQueen fest on The Agitation of the Mind

By which I mean this Steve McQueen …

… not this Steve McQueen* …

… and by “fest” I mean the three features he’s directed so far. Over the next few days, I’ll be looking at the unflinching depictions of human behaviour on offer in ‘Hunger’, ‘Shame’ and ‘12 Years a Slave’. There will be intensity, there will be unexpected moments of beauty, there will be adult themes, and there will be Michael Fassbender.

There will be a lot of Michael Fassbender.


*Although a that Steve McQueen retrospective is something I need to do on this blog before much longer.

Steve McQueen blog-a-thon at The Cooler next month

Jason Bellamy at The Cooler is hosting a Steve McQueen blog-a-thon between 24-27 March.

McQueen is one of the genuine icons of American cinema, his minimalist acting style comparable to Clint Eastwood’s. McQueen’s characters probably emerge with a little more careworn humanity than Eastwood’s, though.

I’ve not decided which of McQueen’s films I’ll be looking at yet (I’ve already explored his two-film relationship with Sam Peckinpah in last year’s Peckinpah tribute), but there’s enough stone-cold classics on his CV to go at.

Head over to Jason’s blog if you want to sign up for the blog-a-thon; you’ll be in good company.

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.

Junior Bonner

"Some kinda motel cowboy."

Background

Peckinpah went straight from 'Straw Dogs' to 'Junior Bonner', marking the first and only time in his career he directed two films in the same year. Steve McQueen was already attached to star. The shoot was untroubled and Peckinpah's drinking - which had precipitated his hospitalisation during 'Straw Dogs' - was under control for the duration of the production. Although Peckinpah only went a day overschedule, he exceeded the $2.5 million budget by an extra $1 million. Ignorning both Peckinpah and McQueen's assertion that the film should open small, generate reviews and word of mouth and gradually find its audience, the studio gave it the kind of "opening weekend" release better suited to one of McQueen's action pictures. Despite some very good notices, it flopped. Nonetheless, the relationship between Peckinpah and McQueen remained strong and it was on the basis of 'Junior Bonner' that the actor offered Peckinpah directorial duties on 'The Getaway'.

Synopsis

Rodeo cowboy Junior Bonner (Steve McQueen) nurses a grudge and hell of a lot of bruises from an encounter with a Brahma bull of intemperate disposition named Sunshine. Returning to his home town of Prescott for a return engagement with said bovine, Junior is just in time to witness the house he grew up in demolished by bulldozers to make way for a new real estate development. The realtor: Junior's corpulent and money-obsessed brother Curly (Joe Don Baker). Curly tries to inveigle Junior into acting as a spokesman for his business, taunting him about how little he makes on the rodeo circuit. Junior also discovers Curly's condescending treatment of their father Ace (Robert Preston), struggles to reconcile his affection for the old man with his awkward and stilted relationship with his pragmatic mother (Ida Lupino), and ignores the taunts of his rodeo rival Red Terwilliger (Bill McKinney). There's a few things on Junior's mind, then, as the rodeo gets underway, a carnival atmosphere grips Prescott and Ace tries to talk Junior around to his latest hare-brained scheme: a new life on a ranch in Australia.

Analysis

It was usually the case that Peckinpah responded to screenplays for their potential; he would then develop that potential, often by laborious re-writing or re-imagining. Often Peckinpah is credited as co-author and even in the cases of 'Ride the High Country' and 'The Ballad of Cable Hogue', where the original writers retain full credit, Peckinpah rewrote entire sections of dialogue, infusing these films with saddle-creased poetry. With Rosebrook's screenplay for 'Junior Bonner', however, nothing needed to be done. Peckinpah signed to direct after reading it once: it was a jewel of a script, in tune with the key themes and concerns that define Peckinpah’s work.

We have a hero schooled in the old way of doing things who resents the changing times: Junior's life is the road and the rodeo, he’s more at home outdoors or on horseback than anywhere else, he has a frontiersman’s tough but laconic attitude, and he balks at his brother’s entrepreneurial mindset. Same goes for Ace: he's a drifter and a dreamer, a man whose natural habitants are the saddle and barstool, and he has arguably less place in the modern world than his son.

We have technology as a destructive force: large machines destroy a homestead to make way for a land/property deal driven by a businessman's greed for profits – a nakedly Peckinpahesque subtext that, as we shall see, recurs explicitly in 'Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid'. When Junior sees the bulldozers ramming through the walls of his childhood home, Peckinpah intercuts the scene with shots of the house while it was still standing and close ups of its interior, harshly contrasting the warm, homely details (including, poignantly, a yellowing newspaper cutting about one of Junior's earlier rodeo successes) with scenes of impersonal destruction. Junior drives over, but he's prevented from getting any closer by a 'dozer driver who threatens to dump a load of gravel into Junior's open-top car if he doesn't back up and depart.

This is where the aesthetic of 'Junior Bonner' differs from any other Peckinpah film: where Steve Judd or Gil Westrum, Pike Bishop or Dutch Engstrom, Pat Garrett or Billy - hell, even Cable Hogue - would have filled their hand at that point and done something about it, Junior just sticks it in reverse, goes on his way and has to live with it.

There isn't a single shot fired in 'Junior Bonner', which makes it unique in Peckinpah's filmography. Even 'The Ballad of Cable Hogue' - which is essentially about love and redemption - has its hero blow a couple of recidivists away. It is completely non-violent: a bar-room brawl that breaks out towards the end is played for laughs, while the inevitable dust-up between Junior and Curly consists of exactly two punches being thrown. Junior hits Curly. Half an hour passes. Curly hits him back. End of.

Nor is the rivalry between Junior and Terwilliger in the same league as the compromised relationships between Pike Bishop and Deke Thornton or Pat and Billy. Indeed, Junior's chatting up of Red's girlfriend (apropos of which the brawl erupts; ironically, Junior ducks any involvement and uses the melee to cover his absconsion with the girl) is the only real dramatic development that this subplot engenders.

It never ceases to amaze me just how genial, laconic and unhurried 'Junior Bonner' is. But for the excitingly shot and edited rodeo sequences (DoP: the incomparable Lucien Ballad; editors: Frank Santillo and Robert Wolfe) and the colourful pangeant scenes, there would be no pace to the film at all. And yet it's as watchable and engaged as anything Peckinpah did. Why? Because the man was an actor's director and for an actor's director the character study is as dynamic and dramatic a thing to direct as the most full-on, visceral, cathartic scene. McQueen, who took the role in an attempt to move away from the action hero roles that define his screen persona, achieves in 'Junior Bonner' an acting style as minimalist and unfussy as that of Clint Eastwood. It's such a different side to McQueen and so refreshing to watch.

The rest of the cast do stellar work: Robert Preston is rogueish and irrepressible as Ace; he gives a performance that outshines anything else on his CV. Ida Lupino, no stranger to giving beautifully nuanced performances, brings a spiky vulnerability. Her scenes with Preston zing with acerbic wit. Peckinpah Irregulars Ben Johnson and Dub Taylor make every second of their supporting roles count. And Joe Don Baker, a scene-stealer in everything from 'Charley Varrick' to a couple of the Brosnan Bond movies, justifies every scene he steals by fleshing out Curly and making him more than just the profit-obsessed villain-by-default businessman. When he asks Junior to work for him, he makes no bones about being able to exploit his rodeo reputation to generate business ("big cowboy like you, sincere, genuine as a sunrise"); and yet the offer's motivated by a genuine desire to see Junior better himself, even if Curly's way of expressing it is misguided. "I'm working on my first million," he tells his brother. "You're still working on eight seconds."

It's Junior who gets there first, though. And what he does with the prize-money provides the most affirmative finale in Peckinpah's ouevre.