By actual count, the most frequently repeated line in American movies is “Let’s get out of here.”
And the most oft-staged action sequence is definitely the chase. (“Cut to the chase,” of course, is ubiquitous Hollywood slang for “get to the good stuff.”)
Does that explain why major Hollywood studios twice have made movies of Jim Thompson’s 1958 paperback thriller “The Getaway,” first in 1972, in a Sam Peckinpah-directed version, starring, as fugitive bankrobber-spouses Doc and Carol McCoy, Steve McQueen and Ali MacGraw? And now, in 1994, in a remake directed by Australian-born Roger Donaldson, this time with Alec Baldwin and Kim Basinger?
Why re-ignite “The Getaway”? “Crime stories are favorites of mine,” says David Foster, who was producer on both versions, “and this is one of the best. . . . Besides, you couldn’t do the sexual element properly in 1972.” (As it turns out, most of the steamier 1994 sex scenes were excised by the MPAA ratings board. They will appear, unbowdlerized, only in the European prints.)
And what do the newer filmmakers think is the core of the story? “Trust,” says Donaldson. “Who do you trust?” Co-producer John Alan Simon concurs: “It’s a question. To commit a crime with other people, you have to trust them. But how can you? Why should you? It’s a matter of taking a leap of faith.”
Both movies of “The Getaway” show a stunning outlaw couple, an ex-con criminal genius and his steely nerved wife, fleeing toward the Mexican border with stolen loot. Pursuing them are the law and two separate sets of murderers: a brutal fellow robber and psychopath named Rudy who kidnaps a hapless veterinarian and his sex-crazed wife to aid his chase, and the cold-hearted business chums of corrupt bankroller Jack Benyon, killed by the McCoys.
None of these characters subscribes to any conventional morality we might recognize, except perhaps the poor veterinarian, who, driven crazy by his wife’s infidelity, winds up hanging himself.
That outsider slant is the special appeal of Thompson’s writing. He was, in many ways, a sad, isolated man. (You can see him, looking fragile and ill, playing Charlotte Rampling’s cuckolded husband in the 1975 movie of Raymond Chandler’s “Farewell, My Lovely.”) Neglected at the time because he wrote for cheap paperback houses like Fawcett’s Gold Medal Originals, cranking his novels out at a furious pace (“in one or two weeks,” according to Foster), known before that first “Getaway” primarily as Stanley Kubrick’s scenarist on “The Killing” and “Paths of Glory,” dying, as Simon says, “alcoholic and broke” in the late ’70s, Thompson has ascended to a kind of kingdom of fictional noir precisely because his books are so unguarded, so open, trenchant, unvarnished and unprettified. Like Dashiell Hammett in the ’20s and ’30s, Thompson wrote simply and starkly about the evil most other crime writers didn’t face.
In the ’50s, Thompson’s thrillers were seen as “dirty books” because the sexual content was undisguised and the characters unredeemed. In Thompson’s world, everybody is compromised, and Donaldson says he was attracted to “The Getaway” precisely because of the apparent “amorality . . . because the books don’t preach.” And Simon-who optioned Thompson’s “Nothing More Than Murder” in 1985 and went after “The Getaway” after a recent court case freeing literary rights to another late noir writer, Cornell Woolrich (“Rear Window”)-sees Thompson as a central writer of our time.
The differences between the two movies may come down to the difference in the two star teams and between directors Peckinpah and Donaldson. And that’s especially so, perhaps, because the same screenwriter, Walter Hill, worked on both adaptations. (Hill also was to direct the second until his longtime pet project “Geronimo” took him away.)
Peckinpah, like Thompson, was a heavy drinker, fascinated by tales of darkness and machismo. And, like Thompson, he was a brilliant artist, somewhat under-recognized, a man whose reputation has soared since his death.
According to Foster, who hired them and says he had a “father-son” relationship with Thompson (“Jim drank his lunch-two martinis”), both men were vulnerable, even fragile, underneath. Foster, who used the clout of his longtime publicity client and friend Steve McQueen to put the project together, recalls listening to the “thunk-thunk-thunk” as Peckinpah hurled Bowie knives at an old oak door for relaxation.
Yet the man nicknamed “Bloody Sam” for the furious violence he staged in his films was so terrified of financial failure that, at the time of “The Getaway,” he was living in a trailer on beachside property at Latigo Canyon, Calif., afraid to build a house lest he fall victim to another studio blacklist like the one he suffered in the ’60s after getting fired from “The Cincinnati Kid.” Foster won him over, partially, by writing on his script “M+O+N+E+Y,” which is what he said the movie would bring them both. (It did. “The Getaway” was the third-highest grosser of 1992, the biggest commercial hit of Peckinpah’s career.)
Peckinpah, who excelled at visions of warfare, bloodshed and hellish conflict, manufactured constant turbulence on his sets, Foster remembers. Most notable was an early blowup with McQueen, which began with a disagreement over a scene and escalated into a furious standoff, as neither would back down. Finally, after a night in which Foster claims he sweated away 10 pounds worrying, he drove with McQueen to a 6:30 a.m. meeting, intending to hash everything out. “Sam met us at the door, broke into a smile and said “Baby!” They hugged. And I went crazy, yelling at them both for putting me through it. They just laughed-and they never had another disagreement after that.”
That hair-trigger volatility may be Peckinpah’s main difference from Donaldson, a cool, composed, collected customer who tends to “listen to everybody” and slide off or finesse confrontations. Donaldson, unlike Peckinpah, is a master politician. It was he-and colleagues Ian Munes (“Came a Hot Friday”) and Geoff Murphy (“Utu”)-who sparked the New Zealand film revival of the 1980s that eventually produced writer and director Jane Campion. He considers her “Angel At My Table” and “The Piano” “superb.”
Ironies relating to the two “Getaways” abound. Both star an actor-actress team who are (were) a real-life romantic couple; both tandem stars got bad press, and both couples married after their separate “Getaways” wrapped.
In both films, according to Foster, because of the very public romantic lives of the leading couples, three scenes were especially troublesome: Carol killing Benyon after he mockingly tells Doc of their infidelity, the McCoys’ subsequent viscious argument, and their slapping session by the highway. And, in both cases, the actors had difficulty getting through the scenes.
When the second “Getaway” was shopped around the studios, the only major one that passed on it was Tri-Star, where it was rejected by Mike Medavoy, who, as Thompson’s agent, had sold Foster the novel rights back in the ’70s.
And there is the biggest irony of all: the ending. Both the 1972 and 1994 “Getaways” are classy, stunningly crafted, high-torque entertainments. But someday, somewhere, someone is going to make a movie of “The Getaway” in exactly the spirit in which it was written in 1958. It’ll be a “B” movie-trim, fast, dark and ruthless-moving with furious speed right toward Thompson’s bleakly sardonic climax: the “successful” escape by the McCoys into a Mexican “outlaw’s resort” called El Rey.
El Rey is a killing blind alley. There, your money is dribbled away on luxuries, the surrounding villages are hellholes of cannibalism, and the two escapees clink their glasses in mutual misery. One says: “To you! To you, my dear, and our successful getaway!” And the other answers: “And to you, my dear. And another such victory.”
Neither movie used that blood-freezing El Rey climax because neither group of filmmakers felt the audience could take it. No wonder. How can you reconcile a mass-audience movie built on “Let’s get out of here” with a story ending in Hell on Earth with no way out?
