Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #4512 in DVD
• Released on: 2005-07-18
• Rating: Suitable for 18 years and over
• Format: PAL
• Original language: English
• Number of discs: 1
• Running time: 118 minutes

Amazon.co.uk Review
This original version of The Getaway is much better than the 1994 remake starring Kim Basinger and husband Alec Baldwin, but this thriller from 1972 relies too heavily on the low-key star power of Steve McQueen and Ali MacGraw, and the stylish violence of director Sam Peckinpah, reduced here to a mechanical echo of his former glory. McQueen plays a bank robber whose wife (MacGraw) makes a deal with a Texas politician to have her husband released from prison in return for a percentage from their next big heist. But when the plan goes sour, the couple must flee to Mexico as fast as they can, with a variety of gun-wielding thugs on their trail. MacGraw was duly skewered at the time for her dubious acting ability, but the film still has a raw, unglamorous quality that lends a timeless spin to the familiar crooks-on-the-lam scenario. As always, Peckinpah rises to the occasion with some audacious scenes of action and suspense, including a memorable chase on a train that still grabs the viewer's attention. --Jeff Shannon

Synopsis
After the rugged rodeo drama JUNIOR BONNER, the impetuous Sam Peckinpah reteamed with Steve McQueen for this down-and-dirty heist picture. McQueen stars with his soon-to-be real-life bride Ali McGraw (with whom he fell in love during the film's production) as the beautiful, but dangerous, married couple Doc and Carol McCoy. After being released from prison--for reasons Doc would rather not acknowledge--Doc shacks up in a hotel with Carol to plot a small-town bank robbery. Of course, the heist doesn't go as smoothly as planned, resulting in an action-packed journey that sends the lovers on a reckless romp through the beautiful Texas landscape. Peckinpah's big screen adaptation of Jim Thompson's novel features the trademark qualities that helped to make him such an alternately reviled and revered figure: namely, his vision of a world in which even the good guys are bad guys. Lucien Ballard's gorgeous cinematography contrasts wonderfully with the gritty subject matter, lifting the potentially standard picture to a more artistic plateau. The chemistry between the incomparably cool McQueen and the magnetic McGraw also confirms THE GETAWAY's status as a defining film of the genre.

Customer Reviews

Peckinpah McQueen
This 1972 movie directed by Sam Peckinpah and starring Steve McQueen as Doc McCoy and Ali MacGraw as his wife gets played on my dvd player regularly when i get boozed up. It is essentially the tale of a recently-sprung convict who must perform a bank robbery to pay back a character named Beynon who has pulled strings to spring him from prison. Everything that can go wrong does go wrong in this perfect robbery so we have this genre film that never slows up.


The film (penned by Walter Hill), however, is also about a marriage, its ups and downs, what can go wrong, how a cuckolded husband handles his wife's infidelity. .etc. Certainly the best thing in the movie is McQueen's usual understated performance. While he is not Marlon Brando, he doesn't have to be. A man of few words, he acts with both his face and body. Initially I thought Ali MacGraw (famous in the 1970's) was going to be only mildly pretty with a great mane of hair, but she does rise to the occasion and is quite good as the wife who makes the sacrifice of adultery to get her husband out of jail. The scenes between this couple work and sometimes sizzle; the fact that they were having an affair off-screen during the filming of "The Getaway" probably didn't hurt either. (MacGraw left her husband Robert Evans and married McQueen soon after the completion of the movie.)



As we would expect from the director of the over-rated "Straw Dogs" and the brilliant "The Wild Bunch", The Getaway has enough violence for the most bloodthirsty viewer. This is, after all, a film about a bank robbery. On the other hand, McCoy appears to be a decent man if only left alone, if you disregard his profession. He only kills when absolutely necessary. The music, cinematography and the editing are second to none.


The amazing extras on this version are an audio commentary from DVD producer Nick Redman and authors Paul Seydor, Garner Simmons and David Weddle. Also a 'Virtual' audio commentary with 1973 radio recordings of Steve McQueen, Ali MacGraw and Sam Peckinpah discussing the movie.

Sam's the man!
Trevor Willsmer's superb review pretty much says it all. I found it as enjoyable as watching "The Getaway" itself. It is one film which i find myself coming back to, time and time again. (Like the overwhelming majority of Sam Peckinpah's work, i suppose.)

"The Getaway" is another truly great Sam Peckinpah film, right from its brilliant opening title sequence. (Almost as good as that of "The Wild Bunch") It's also a real treat because it features so much action, and Sam Peckinpah was one of the greatest directors of action sequences ever to have worked in the film industry. The climactic shoot-out in Dub Taylor's hotel is utterly monumental, although its brutal savagery still shocks even to this day.

And Steve McQueen delivers, for me, one of his very finest screen performances. Not exactly the greatest actor of his generation, but he has an absolutely unbelievable charisma in his role of Doc McCoy. He is totally credible in his depiction of a gun-toting master-criminal. Ali MacGraw also turns in a very good performance as his long-suffering wife.

I may already have seen this film on numerous occasions, but i just know that i'm going to have to buy a copy to have and to hold.

Getting away with it
One of the many things that gives 1972's The Getaway the edge over its now almost-forgotten remake is that, unlike Alec Baldwin, Steve McQueen doesn't act like a movie star - he is a movie star. From the days when cool was what you were, not what you wore or owned, the plot itself is nothing special: Steve McQueen's bank robber is sprung from jail to pull a job with wife Ali MacGraw and has to hightail it to Mexico with both the relentless double-crossing Al Lettieri and numerous Texas mobsters in hot pursuit. Like most chase thrillers, you've seen it before: it's what Peckinpah does with it that counts, and Peckinpah does plenty. Most of Peckinpah's usual trademarks can be found in the margins, from children's fascination with violence to the Hellfire and brimstone preacher whose radio sermon goes unheard, and the action scenes are superbly staged - especially the hotel shootout and the lovingly filmed shooting up of a police car - but just as importantly he keeps a clear focus on his characters. The film's emotional terrain is as harsh as the barren landscape the ensuing chase is set against, with the odds on McQueen and MacGraw's marriage making it just as touch-and-go as whether they will make it across the border in one piece, their road to possible marital redemption through ordeal mirrored with the fast-track to Hell that hostage couple Sally Struthers and Jack Dodson take chauffeuring Lettieri's perverse wounded animal on their trail.

It's probably Sam Peckinpah's last truly successful film before self-indulgence, laziness and too much booze and drugs took their toll on his work. True, it's a purely commercial piece that has none of the personal passion that drove The Wild Bunch or The Ballad of Cable Hogue, but it's put together with a level of genuine artistry that's way above the norm for the genre: the editing of the first twenty minutes alone, with its freeze-frames and non-linear structure, is remarkably adventurous and successful. Both perfectly representing the state of mind and frustration and disorientation of McQueen's character in a way that is both complex and yet entirely accessible and transforming what could have been bog-standard exposition into something much more memorable, it's strikingly effective. Far more entertaining than it has any right to be.

(On an incidental note, although Walter Hill claimed that little of his screenplay made it to the screen (the bleak ending of Jim Thompson's novel is replaced by a much sweeter and more optimistic one), it's interesting to note how much of the film he would rework in his own The Driver, from the destruction of a car in a key setpiece to the train sequence with a very (un)lucky bagman.)

Warners' 2.35:1 widescreen DVD is a good transfer, with a brief 'virtual commentary' by Peckinpah and the two stars drawn from radio interviews, a full-length commentary byPeckinpah biographers and the film's strikingly awful original theatrical trailer.