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Everybody Knows That Steve McQueen, born 3.24.30, was one of the coolest actors of the sixties and seventies. They say he had a pretty tough childhood and worked a string of dead-end jobs until he won the lead in television's Wanted: Dead or Alive, which opened with him firing his short-barrel gun straight at the camera (homage to Edwin S. Porter?) Then he began to show up on movie screens, soon playing smooth, tough, secretly vulnerable, loners. In The Sand Pebbles he became a Bogart for our time, a caring, conflicted stand-alone guy. When Bullit came out in 1968, the NY Times said, "McQueen simply gets better all the time." A whole generation learned some things about kissing from The Thomas Crown Affair. In real life he loved speed in professional race cars and motorcycles. |
If you rode your bike over to the far side of the field in the park out behind our house, you'd notice that the whole expanse tilted down, toward the shed and the swings. It could pass - in a boy's imagination - for a hill. Back then, nobody rode their bikes on grass because it was just too slow, so I had never thought about it - until the day I saw The Great Escape. You remember the scene: the rich green, rolling hills of the German countryside right along the Swiss border, laced with a storm of impossibly dense barbed wire - the certain end of one man's wild ride toward freedom. I didn't have the barbed wire, but I had the space. I didn't have the motorcycle, but I had this old Schwinn. A passerby would have seen a kid pedalling hard across the field, blind to what was really going on. Steve McQueen's audacious nerve had taken possesion of this lumpy 13 year old and was hurtling him down, down towards a spectacular defeat. I miss that part of my kidhood, that utterly unselfconscious imaginative romp, kicked into high gear by a movie. McQueen had provided just what I needed at the moment, even though I didn't know I needed it. We had been warned about the possibly dangerous effects of movies upon our virtue. I remember the day I was down in the basement acting out John Wayne's part from the trailer for McClintock, "Somebody oughta hit you, but I won't...I won't...the hell I won't." Dad overheard that one, and I heard from Dad. He thought that violent movies would make us violent...or at least rude. He was not happy that my older brother was interested in James Bond. What would he ever think of me and my fascination with McQueen's cool rebel? All the while, though, these guys were just doing what movie stars have always done: fueling daydreams, stoking the imagination, proposing other ways of being in The World (any world beyond Joliet), helping us to pass some time. I was born too late for James Dean, but Steve was not such a bad second. I felt the loss when he died in 1980. |