Steve McQueen - The Essence of Laid Back Cool

Watching a Steve McQueen movie always reminds me of that cool kid in high school - the one that made you feel like a kid even though you were the same age. No matter what anyone said or did, the cool kid was never impressed. Even if he was impressed he wasn’t impressed. It’s interesting then that Marshall Terrill’s 1994 biography of Steve McQueen (Steve McQueen: Portrait of an American Rebel) describes an actor rather at odds with the character associated with his films. McQueen the actor is revealed to be insecure and highly competitive, clashing with directors for control and intimidating his fellow actors to be the center of every scene. On the screen, however, in films like Bullit, The Getaway and The Great Escape, McQueen is the essence of laid back cool.

Not a studied or self-aware attitude but as Roger Ebert has likened it, a “can’t help it, just born with it” cool. As he says in his Great Movies piece on Bullitt,"Stars like McQueen, Bogart, Wayne or Newman aren't primarily actors, but presences. They have a myth, a personal legend they've built up in our minds during many movies, and when they try to play against that image it usually looks phony." This myth or personae is the key to McQueen’s success as an actor and is the main reason to see most of the films recently released in two McQueen collections: The Essential Steve McQueen (Bullitt two-disc special edition, The Getaway deluxe edition, The Cincinnati Kid, Papillon, Tom Horn, Never So Few) and The Steve McQueen Collection (The Great Escape, Junior Bonner, The Magnificent Seven, The Thomas Crown Affair).

Most of these films would be nothing without McQueen (as The Onion recently pointed out in its review of the set, Bullit is "essentially a 45-minute TV show stretched to two hours" that we are persuaded to watch because of McQueen and a car chase). The value then of these films are the minimalism of McQueen’s performances. As Matt Feeney of Slate suggests, McQueen was perhaps the only action star to not be highly exaggerated like those who preceded him (John Wayne) or self aware like those who followed him (Bruce Willis). Indeed, the least successful of his films (at least in these two collections) are those in which McQueen attempted to show himself acting (Papillon and The Thomas Crown Affair).

The reason the personae preserved by these films is important is because it provides a snapshot of a kind of un-ironic cool that hasn’t really been seen since McQueen stopped making films. Clint Eastwood is perhaps the only star to come close to the image McQueen conveyed but his is closer to the authoritarian Wayne than the rebellious, impossible to be impressed McQueen. It's difficult to imagine McQueen playing a fascist vigilante like Dirty Harry, for example. And unlike McQueen, current film stars like Bruce Willis or Nicholas Cage are required to be in on the joke (though Russell Crowe seems to be making a claim to some of McQueen’s image). McQueen’s shoes remain unfilled (and his films consequently fascinating) because his kind of cool can no longer be accommodated by movies which require the main character to know along with us that he’s in a movie.

If McQueen had lived longer (he died in 1980 at age 50) it would have been interesting to see whether or not he would have sacrificed this defining personae to become a character actor (like Paul Newman) or if he would have simply retired as some of his colleagues suggest he would have. Newman had more range as an actor and displayed more vulnerability but his early work (in films like The Long Hot Summer, Cool Hand Luke, Hud and Harper) shows a personae similar to McQueen’s (which is why perhaps McQueen, of all his fellow actors, was most obsessed with beating Newman in terms of prominence and box office). In Harper, for example, Newman plays a self-described “new kind” of detective who displays the too cool for school outlook of McQueen:

Harper: “Keep the change.”
Bartender: “There isn’t any.”
Harper: “Keep it anyway.”

It’s instructive to examine the early career of an actor whose image was very much like McQueen’s to wonder if McQueen would have taken a similar path had he had the opportunity to do so. Leading men face a crossroads when they get to a certain age - continue on as a character actor (like Newman or Redford) or hang it up (like Cary Grant)? Newman was able to shift from leading man to supporting actor and produced late career masterpieces like The Verdict, The Color of Money and Nobody’s Fool. McQueen had retired once already (after the disastrous, barely released Enemy of the People) and came out of it to do The Hunter and Tom Horn, so it's difficult to imagine him simply retiring completely had he lived longer. McQueen would have only been 75 this year and its intriguing to think what he might have done with a director like Scorsese or if he would have had a movie like The Verdict in him.

On the other hand, much of McQueen’s status as an icon is dependent upon the image that he was able to establish while relatively young. Similarly to James Dean, premature death closed off further development but in doing so immortalized the image that was conveyed prior to death. The quiet cool epitomized by McQueen in his films is as unique as the image conveyed by Bruce Lee in his films prior to his too-early death: inseparable from the era in which they were produced and unimaginable without the personalities who produced them. The films of the two McQueen collections are fine reminders of this.