The Getaway (First Artists, Foster-Brower Productions, Solar Productions, National General Pictures, Tatiana Films, 1972)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2023 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

The third film on our TCM program last night was The Getaway, made in 1972 and directed by the notorious Sam Peckinpah from a script by Walter Hill based on a novel by Jim Thompson. Jim Thompson is one of those pulp-fiction writers with a cult reputation; I’ve read three of his books, The Killer Inside Me (about a sheriff in Texas’s border country who’s really a psychopathic serial killer), Savage Night and The Grifters, and he was a particular favorite of director Stanley Kubrick. Kubrick used Thompson as a writer on two of his important early films, The Killing and Paths of Glory, and for years expressed the desire to film The Killer Inside Me but never did. Since Thompson’s death in 1977 he’s acquired a cult following and a number of his books have been filmed – The Getaway was remade in 1994 with another real-life couple, Alec Baldwin and Kim Basinger, and The Grifters (with its mother-son crime duo) has also been filmed. The Getaway starts in a Texas prison, where Doc McCoy (Steve McQueen) is serving a sentence for a crime that remains carefully unspecified. He’s having a parole hearing after four years but a member of the parole board talks the others out of releasing him. His wife Carol (Ali McGraw) goes to see local attorney and fixer Jack Beynon (Ben Johnson) and arranges for him to use his influence to get Doc sprung – the implication is she’s had to have sex with Beynon in return for his assistance, and that becomes a significant plot point later. When Beynon’s ministrations work and Doc is free, it becomes apparent that he’s expected to be what amounts to the field commander for a bank robbery Beynon has planned for a local bank in Nowhere, Texas (actually “Beacon City”) which handles payrolls for one of the local oil companies – and it’s a legitimate surprise that Carol McCoy turns out not to be an innocent victim of her husband’s criminal career but a full-fledged participant.

She attends all the meetings to plan the robbery and questions Beynon’s plans for the caper and his recruitment of accomplices. The film is 40 minutes over before the robbery occurs – and goes awry almost immediately thanks to the hot-headedness of one of the accomplices Beynon has foisted on Doc and Carol – Frank Jackson (Bo Hopkins), who saw a bank guard go for a gun on the floor and shot him to death, whereupon another of the McCoys’ unwanted accomplices, Rudy Butler (Al Letteri), shoots him. With the blood of two people on his hands and therefore facing a murder rap himself despite his careful planning to ensure his minions could rob the bank without bloodshed, Beynon is not a happy camper. Neither is Rudy; Doc McCoy is so pissed off at him for shooting Jackson that McCoy shoots him, though Rudy’s life is saved by the bulletproof vest Doc urged on him but which he said he wouldn’t wear. The rest of the film consists of the titular getaway and the three groups of people who are at cross purposes as they hunt each other down: the McCoys (who are carrying a valise containing the $500,000 they supposedly stole from the bank, though I asked my husband Charles if the valise we see on screen could possibly contain that much cash, and he said probably not; if it had been tightly wrapped and hadn’t been opened since the U.S. Mint made it, there was an outside chance, but not with money that had already been in circulation: movies which feature large amounts of cash in containers too small to contain them are a pet peeve of Charles’s the way having people cast as biological relatives who doesn’t look at all alike is one of mine), Beynon’s associates and Rudy along with the two people he’s taken as hostages, Dr. Harold Clinton (Jack Dodson) and his wife Fran (Sally Struthers, who’s actually quite good in the role, a far cry from the ditzy comic parts in All in the Family and other TV shows that made her reputation). Rudy insists on having sex with Fran in full view of her hapless husband, whom he’s tied to a chair so he can’t help but watch, and ultimately the good doctor hangs himself in an adjoining room in their hotel suite.

Ultimately Doc and Carol McCoy hide out in a dumpster, and there’s a bizarre scene in which both they and the satchel containing the loot are nearly buried alive under mounds of garbage and come close to being compacted in the dump truck (how James Bond!). Later they escape and hitch a ride from another garbage-truck driver (though this one drives a considerably smaller and less threateningly mechanized vehicle), “Cowboy,” played by Slim Pickens, His schtick is familiar to anyone who’s seen his great turn as the pilot in Dr. Strangelove 18 years earlier, but he’s still a delight and a breath of fresh air. Ultimately the McCoys buy Cowboy’s truck for $30,000 from the bank loot and go off together in the sunset – the sort of ending you could get away with once the Production Code Administration yielded to the ratings board and you no longer were covered by the iron stricture that criminals had to be punished for their crimes. After we watched The Getaway Charles asked me where on Sam Peckinpah’s violence schedule it rated on a scale of 10, and I said, “3 ½ to 4.” There are two sequences – the actual bank robbery about 40 minutes into the two-hour film and the big shootout at the end – that feature the sort of bloodbaths in slow motion that had become Peckinpah’s big trademark, but overall The Getaway is surprisingly boring, especially given its director’s reputation. Peckinpah was pissed off when scenes he had shot of violence in slow motion for his 1965 film Major Dundee were cut out by the studio, Columbia, and as a result another director, Arthur Penn, got the reputation for being the first director to film a shoot-out in slow motion in the 1967 film Bonnie and Clyde. I told that anecdote to Charles after we’d seen The Getaway, and he seemed to think it was a strange and insufferable distinction to want to have in one’s personal work history!