Aubrey MaloneThe Man and Le Mans (12A)
Steve McQueen was my mother’s favourite actor. She thought he had a “little boy lost” appeal – and of course he had, but he was also as tough as nails. By the late 1960s, he was one of Hollywood’s biggest box office draws. Sometimes that can be fatal. “Create a star,” said Jack Warner, “and you create a monster.”
McQueen’s ego was huge at this time. He said to his wife Neile – who contributes prolifically to this documentary about him – “Let’s create an empire”. Part of the empire was his own production company, Solar. He believed this would give him creative control over his career.
The first project he undertook with Solar was the motor racing project, Le Mans. Could a film which had cars as its main ‘characters’ be a hit? He mistakenly thought it could. The absence of a plot didn’t seem to bother him.
McQueen died of a rare form of lung cancer caused by asbestos poisoning in 1980. He was only 50. It was previously thought this was caused by him working with that substance when he was in the navy. This film suggests the source might have been the asbestos in his racing suit: a tragic irony.
Le Mans was blighted by other mishaps besides its lack of plot. There were two car accidents, one which caused the racing driver David Piper to lose a leg. Another involved McQueen and his co-star Louise Edlind, with whom he had an affair.
His success with movies –and women – was unique. He once said that in a previous era he would have been the second lead in movies rather than the star. This is probably true. He came along at a time when a “boy next door” look didn’t necessarily mean one malingered way down the credit list.
He had a minimalist style that epitomised the “don’t just do something, stand there” school of acting. An avowed enemy of dialogue, I remember reading once that he threw away ten pages of dialogue from a movie and replaced them with a grunt. In Le Mans he objected to saying the word “hello” to Edlind in a scene. (It was at this point the screenwriter knew he was in trouble with the movie. It was going millions over budget at the time.)
This documentary’s main appeal will be to those who, like McQueen, believe people have “umbilical” connections to their vehicles. It has a cult following today but it signalled the end of his would-be megalomaniac “empire”. And probably the end of his marriage as well.
From all these points of view it was a very expensive flop. Sometimes the thing we love most in life is the thing that destroys us. So it was with McQueen, the little boy lost from the wrong side of the tracks whose every dream came true on celluloid before he finally, as he puts it in the film’s endnote, “ran out of gas”.
Good ***