Made during the burst of frenetic activity that followed Sam Peckinpah’s rehabilitation after The Wild Bunch, The Getaway continued his association with Steve McQueen, begun on Junior Bonner. Although Jim Thompson wrote a script from his own novel, this was discarded in favour of one by the rising writer Walter Hill, while the original score by Peckinpah’s regular collaborator, Jerry Fielding, was also discarded in favour of a jazz-inflected one from Quincy Jones, chosen by McQueen. Then at the height of his success, McQueen’s box-office appeal was further boosted by his wife being played by Ali McGraw, fresh from her success in the very different genre of Goodbye Columbus and Love Story (and soon to become his actual wife after an affair that began during the film’s production). Initially met with scepticism by critics, for the predictability of its ‘heist-goes-wrong’ plotting, the film seems to have aged well as both vintage Peckinpah and vintage McQueen, no doubt aided by the crisp photography of the Texas locations by Peckinpah’s regular cinematographer Lucien Ballard, here to be savoured in a vintage Technicolor print. As a more recent reviewer noted, describing it as “the flipside to Junior Bonner”, The Getaway “is as much about the seedy side of the American southwest in the early ’70s as it is about stolen money or crumbling relationships”.

Ian Christie