Steve McQueen: The Man and Le Mans (15.)
Directed by Gabriel Clarke and John McKenna.
Featuring Steve McQueen, Chad McQueen, David Piper, Derek Bell, Louise Edlind and Neile Adams. 102 mins.
The Le Mans 24 hour race is one of the world's greatest sporting spectacles – that nobody watches. Everybody's heard of it, nobody’s seen it; I guess there must be a satellite channel somewhere that shows it. It is though a name that conjures up a great deal of generalised heroic, nostalgic connotations; without anything specific. I think the name Steve McQueen has a similar effect; yes we've all seen The The Great Escape and The Magnificent Seven but overall that name carries a weight that transcends the specifics of the career. Prefab Sprout never made an album called Robert Redford. Le Mans takes us back to a time when motor sport was a nobler, purer endeavour, a blood sport taken on by tally ho, derring-do characters who'd light up a pipe afterwards to celebrate not having died today. The name Steve McQueen takes us back to perhaps the last era when movie stars were expected to bring more to their on screen heroics than an ability to pretend.*
The title perhaps suggests something a little grander than the reality: Le Mans refers to the film of that name, not the race itself. So this is basically a Making Of piece. Beyond that proviso, the film is exactly what the title promises: a study of the man and his film. At the end of the 60s Steve McQueen was the world’s biggest movie star, or at least there or thereabouts, and decided to make a film of his great passion: motor racing.
It is a classic Hollywood tale: the vanity project gone wrong. The problems are the usual ones of ego clashes, star tantrums, not having a finished script, going over budget and schedule and a filmmaker being unwilling to compromise on his vision. Le Mans was sabotaged by its star's refusal to make it dramatic. (McQueen was always keen to keep his lines to a minimum.) After filming footage of the actual Le Mans 24 race in 1970, the production spent months obsessively recreating the race, shooting hundreds of hours of footage with the same drivers, in the same cars, going round the same race track, day after day, week after week, month after month. Whenever the director, John (Magnificent Seven, Great Escape) Sturges tried to pin them down to a final script, a story, McQueen would blow him off – all he cared about was getting the racing right. Sturges wanted a drama, McQueen wanted to a documentary reproduction.
From what we see, the driving footage is indeed spectacular, while the off the track drama is more interesting than that in the film. But, unless you were already interested in the man or the sport, I'd say it isn’t for you. The film was made with the approval of his family, but even then it isn’t a particularly flattering portrayal. The son, the Mickey Rourke-like Chad McQueen, still hero worships him and his spurned and cheated upon ex-wife Neile Adams seems conciliatory, but you still get the sense that the King Of Cool didn't have much to offer off screen.
* I guess in theory this could apply to the Expendables crew – the Arnies, the Chucks, the Dolphs and the Jean Claudes, but the difference here is that Steve McQueen or Paul Newman were always primarily actors, just ones with a few more sides to his character. The Expendables are more gimmicks: like child stars or performing pets. Plus McQueen's vision of masculinity didn't require hours poncing around in a gym.
Directed by Gabriel Clarke and John McKenna.
Featuring Steve McQueen, Chad McQueen, David Piper, Derek Bell, Louise Edlind and Neile Adams. 102 mins.
The Le Mans 24 hour race is one of the world's greatest sporting spectacles – that nobody watches. Everybody's heard of it, nobody’s seen it; I guess there must be a satellite channel somewhere that shows it. It is though a name that conjures up a great deal of generalised heroic, nostalgic connotations; without anything specific. I think the name Steve McQueen has a similar effect; yes we've all seen The The Great Escape and The Magnificent Seven but overall that name carries a weight that transcends the specifics of the career. Prefab Sprout never made an album called Robert Redford. Le Mans takes us back to a time when motor sport was a nobler, purer endeavour, a blood sport taken on by tally ho, derring-do characters who'd light up a pipe afterwards to celebrate not having died today. The name Steve McQueen takes us back to perhaps the last era when movie stars were expected to bring more to their on screen heroics than an ability to pretend.*
The title perhaps suggests something a little grander than the reality: Le Mans refers to the film of that name, not the race itself. So this is basically a Making Of piece. Beyond that proviso, the film is exactly what the title promises: a study of the man and his film. At the end of the 60s Steve McQueen was the world’s biggest movie star, or at least there or thereabouts, and decided to make a film of his great passion: motor racing.
It is a classic Hollywood tale: the vanity project gone wrong. The problems are the usual ones of ego clashes, star tantrums, not having a finished script, going over budget and schedule and a filmmaker being unwilling to compromise on his vision. Le Mans was sabotaged by its star's refusal to make it dramatic. (McQueen was always keen to keep his lines to a minimum.) After filming footage of the actual Le Mans 24 race in 1970, the production spent months obsessively recreating the race, shooting hundreds of hours of footage with the same drivers, in the same cars, going round the same race track, day after day, week after week, month after month. Whenever the director, John (Magnificent Seven, Great Escape) Sturges tried to pin them down to a final script, a story, McQueen would blow him off – all he cared about was getting the racing right. Sturges wanted a drama, McQueen wanted to a documentary reproduction.
From what we see, the driving footage is indeed spectacular, while the off the track drama is more interesting than that in the film. But, unless you were already interested in the man or the sport, I'd say it isn’t for you. The film was made with the approval of his family, but even then it isn’t a particularly flattering portrayal. The son, the Mickey Rourke-like Chad McQueen, still hero worships him and his spurned and cheated upon ex-wife Neile Adams seems conciliatory, but you still get the sense that the King Of Cool didn't have much to offer off screen.
* I guess in theory this could apply to the Expendables crew – the Arnies, the Chucks, the Dolphs and the Jean Claudes, but the difference here is that Steve McQueen or Paul Newman were always primarily actors, just ones with a few more sides to his character. The Expendables are more gimmicks: like child stars or performing pets. Plus McQueen's vision of masculinity didn't require hours poncing around in a gym.
