The Getaway (1972)

If you watch as many movies as I do, it colors the way you experience other films. Whether you’d want to or not you make connections, start guessing how the story will unfold and you hope that you will be surprised. Especially when watching older films you notice the impact of modern films on what you’ve come to expect. The biggest difference usually is the tempo, which is much slower with longer shots. Different techniques are used as well. The Getaway has moments that are typical for the seventies. You immediately notice this at the start of the film, where the only thing you hear is the annoying sound of a machine, played against imagery which stops with a freeze frame. Blood looks different (more like red paint). These are probably things a modern audience won’t appreciate anymore, but I love the nostalgic factor of them.

Doc McCoy (Steve McQueen) is in prison, but manages to get out early if he agrees to take part in a bank robbery. Together with his wife Carol (Ali MacGraw) and two other men they prepare for it, but during execution not everything goes according to plan. Doc and Carol decide to try to reach Mexico, while being chased by both the mastermind behind the robbery (and his men) and the police.

As I stated this movie has a real seventies atmosphere, which you also see in the way women are treated. They mostly are object of lust (the wife of a veterinarian who has been kidnapped suddenly offers her body to the kidnapper, Carol uses her body to get Doc out of prison) and they are hit several times. Of course sex and lust still sell today, but the way it is done here is very different. Still Carol is a character which does a lot of things you’d normally see men execute. She’s a skilled criminal and behind the wheel she’s even better than her husband.

The thing which this movie succeeds in doing is never losing the thrill of it all. Whenever all seems to be going ok for the “Bonnie & Clyde” like couple something happens which they quickly have to respond to. This happens various times without it feeling unnatural, which results in a lot of action and tense moments. I now have seen various Steve McQueen movies and think that as an actor he always seems to play the same role (that of an action hero). I initially had a different image of him.

Even though The Getaway was remade in 1994 (which I didn’t see), I would imagine this movie being remade as an action movie starring Jason Statham, with Jordana Brewster (who kind of looks like Ali MacGraw) as his wife. It would be an entertaining Fast en Furious/The Bank Job/Transporter hybrid film. This original movie, which is about two hours, is well worth watching if you like “bankheist gone wrong” and action movies.