{"id":3218,"date":"2005-06-18T10:59:37","date_gmt":"2005-06-18T14:59:37","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.sheilaomalley.com\/?p=3218"},"modified":"2022-10-09T17:33:58","modified_gmt":"2022-10-09T21:33:58","slug":"steve-mcqueen","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.sheilaomalley.com\/?p=3218","title":{"rendered":"Steve McQueen’s Inner Contradiction"},"content":{"rendered":"

A really interesting essay by Matt Feeney about Steve McQueen.<\/a> McQueen fans (and I am one of them): check it out. He is one of the most mysterious of movie stars – his appeal (at least in my opinion) goes under that strange and rare heading of “Magic”. Whatever it was about his face, and not just his face – but more importantly how the camera saw his face … whatever you want to call it, that alchemy was magic.<\/p>\n

Feeney describes perfectly, I think, where McQueen’s appeal comes from (because although he is, most certainly, an actor people LOVE … and many people list some of his movies as their favorite movies EVER) … his is an elusive talent. Even the directors who worked with him said that about him. He was mercurial, touchy, and completely relied upon spontanaiety. McQueen could not rehearse. He was a “first take- only take” kind of actor. After repetition, he lost the magic. This is not a criticism. It’s just something that is really interesting. Steve McQueen refused to even do ‘walk throughs” of the set before a day’s shooting. Some actors like to stroll around, try out the doors, walk through the space … just to get familiar. Like: if the set is supposed to represent their character’s kitchen – then of course the room should be familiar to you, right? You should know automatically that the door to the dining room swings in, not out, right? All that stuff. McQueen didn’t care about any of that stuff. He knew, instinctively, that his talent was mercurial, and … unreliable. So he kept himself, as much as he could, in a state of complete unknowingness – he relied on the spontaneity of the first time. As you can see from his performances, his instincts about himself were pretty much spot on. Directors who forced McQueen to rehearse got bad acting out of the guy. Best to just leave him alone.<\/p>\n

Mark Rydell (who directed On Golden Pond<\/i>) but also directed McQueen in … The Rievers<\/i>, I think – spoke at my school and talked extensively about working with the guy. How much McQueen tested directors, what a son of a bitch he could be, how difficult he could be, how broken he was … McQueen looked for a father figure in every single man he met, and he looked for one in Rydell. When Rydell made him do something he might not have wanted to do, he would throw a temper tantrum – as though he were a toddler, and Rydell were the “bad father”. He was really messed up and weirdly fragile, for all his tough-guy stuff, and riding around on a motorcycle. Rydell said something very interesting (and again: this is in no way a criticism): “Steve McQueen was not a great actor. But he was a great movie star. One of the greatest we have ever had.”<\/p>\n

You can teach someone how to be more a competent actor. But you can never teach anyone to have even a smidgeon of what Steve McQueen had. It’s innate. If you don’t have it? Learn to live without it and learn to work with what you got … because it cannot be taught, bought, borrowed or stolen.<\/p>\n

Feeney writes:<\/p>\n

McQueen cultivated his own mythology through a strenuously aloof style of acting that is not without its critics. David Thomson, for one, observes a certain “dullness” about McQueen. Perhaps, but it was an especially radiant sort of dullness. With McQueen, it’s hard to decide whether you hardly notice him, or you hardly notice that you never take your eyes off of him. He had one of the greatest of all movie faces, even though he wasn’t perfectly handsome. The broad masculine nose and deep leathery creases around his taut mouth didn’t connect to those scary blue eyes. What brought his features alive on-screen were his wide cheekbones and a narrow tapering chin\u0097the kind of triangular bonework more commonly associated with female beauty. Shot from certain high angles, McQueen could resemble an extremely macho elf. <\/p><\/blockquote>\n

He definitely had a face made to be in the movies!<\/p>\n

More on his craft:<\/p>\n

As an actor, McQueen seemed to emit no excess, no psychic surplus that might register as hamminess or irony. Yet he was a deeply insecure and conflicted man, and fanatically willful about his craft. Watching the laconic, slow-to-react title characters in The Cincinnati Kid (1965) and Bullitt (1968), it’s easy to imagine that the performance is just Steve McQueen showing up and acting like himself. But when Steve McQueen showed up and really acted like himself, it wasn’t pretty: He was a hothead and a paranoid, a grimly compulsive womanizer and a prolific druggie far ahead of his time (according to the biographer Christopher Sanford, McQueen was into LSD and peyote by the early ’60s and later became a serious cokehead). <\/p><\/blockquote>\n

McQueen is in the very short list of actors (Cary Grant, Humphrey Bogart, Gary Cooper) who, upon receiving any script, sat down and cut out most of his own lines. He knew that he could do more with a turn of his head than another actor could do with 10 explanatory lines. His power and magnetism lay not in his voice, or even in the PARTS he played … it lay in that face, and what it could convey, with absolutely no language.<\/p>\n

And here, I think, Feeney makes a genius point – genius:<\/p>\n

The raw inner core of soulfulness and vulnerability was there all along, and the great McQueen mystique\u0097the “cool” that was somehow so feverish, the poker face that was somehow so animated\u0097came from his half-successful effort to hide it.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

YES!!! A true movie star will always have secrets, and will never reveal everything. There is a mystery at the heart of Marilyn Monroe that keeps people coming back. Same with Cary Grant. Clark Gable. They do not wear their hearts on their sleeves. They are hiding things. Their success comes from the “half-successful efforts” to hide it.<\/p>\n

Perfect example: Cary Grant in Only Angels Have Wings<\/a><\/i>. I babbled about it ad nauseum here.<\/a> Geoff Carter has to be the crankiest leading man in all of cinematic history. He is a big CURMUDGEON. And yet … there are flashes … moments … momentary looks in his eyes (that great late-night scene with Jean Arthur) … when you see his loneliness. The sensitivity at the heart of this cranky macho guy. But he never makes a big deal out of it, and Cary Grant never EVER fetishizes his own emotions. EVER. (So many actors do that these days. They have a self-important aura around every feckin’ tear they shed. As though we should give them a goddamn medal for having a heart and a soul.) Cary Grant HID his emotions … and therefore, we loved him for it. Because we knew they were there anyway.<\/p>\n

Very human. REAL human beings don’t walk around showing us their emotions all the time. Or if they do? They probably should be institutionalized. Real human beings try to hide their vulnerability. Doesn’t mean we can’t see it all the same … but that’s not the point.<\/p>\n

McQueen had that cool aloof thing going on … but there’s a reason why he has such massive appeal to not only men but also women. There was something cracked underneath the exterior, something sweet, and in need of the female. But he would NEVER broadcast this, or fetishize it. He was too busy trying to HIDE that vulnerability, so we wouldn’t guess his weaknesses.<\/p>\n

This duality, this inner contradiction, is part of what makes a great movie star. He keeps us guessing. We want to get “in there” with him, but he never satisfies us completely.<\/p>\n

It’s deeee-lish.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

A really interesting essay by Matt Feeney about Steve McQueen. McQueen fans (and I am one of them): check it out. He is one of the most mysterious of movie stars – his appeal (at least in my opinion) goes … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[7],"tags":[460],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.sheilaomalley.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3218"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.sheilaomalley.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.sheilaomalley.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.sheilaomalley.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.sheilaomalley.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=3218"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/www.sheilaomalley.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3218\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":178518,"href":"https:\/\/www.sheilaomalley.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3218\/revisions\/178518"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.sheilaomalley.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=3218"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.sheilaomalley.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=3218"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.sheilaomalley.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=3218"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}