The Getaway

Doc McCoy, sprung from prison by a deal his wife made, pays for it with a bank robbery. The job goes wrong and the couple runs across Texas for the Mexican border. Sam Peckinpah directed. Steve McQueen and Ali MacGraw star. He was not the first choice. Peter Bogdanovich was hired first and left when Warner Bros. offered him another film. The novelist Jim Thompson adapted his own 1958 book before being replaced by Walter Hill. The disagreement was about the ending: McQueen found Thompson's surreal Mexican town too bleak. McQueen's First Artists contract gave him final cut. Peckinpah resented it and said McQueen picked shots that made him look good rather than shots that served the film. The fight over the music happened in public. After a preview McQueen replaced Jerry Fielding's score with Quincy Jones's harmonica-led, jazzier work. Peckinpah took out a full-page advertisement in Daily Variety to object. McQueen and MacGraw began an affair during the shoot. The first reviews were poor, calling it aimless and a big, glossy, impersonal mechanical toy. It still became the eighth-highest-grossing picture of 1972, taking 36.7 million dollars domestically on a 3.3 million budget. Rotten Tomatoes now sits at 84 percent. Who it is for: viewers who like seventies crime films and Peckinpah's sense of cutting. Who it is not for: anyone looking for depth in the couple's relationship. The film keeps them moving and leaves the psychology outside.