The Getaway (1972): Peckinpah's Lovers on the Run

Sam Peckinpah made The Getaway (1972) in the middle of a run that had already produced The Wild Bunch and Straw Dogs, and on paper it looks like the odd one out — a clean commercial thriller, a Steve McQueen star vehicle, a straight chase to the border. It made a great deal of money and got dismissed for years as Peckinpah for hire. Watch it again and the dismissal falls apart. Underneath the momentum is one of the sourest, most clear-eyed films ever made about what a marriage survives, filmed by a director who understood better than anyone that violence and intimacy run on the same current.

A robber, a wife, and a debt

The engine is pure crime-fiction economy. Doc McCoy (McQueen) is rotting in a Texas prison when his wife Carol (Ali MacGraw) buys his parole from a corrupt local power broker, Jack Beynon (Ben Johnson). The price is a bank job Beynon has lined up, and a second price that Doc will spend the rest of the film unable to stop thinking about. Doc pulls the robbery with two men Beynon supplied, one of them a vicious operator named Rudy Butler (Al Lettieri), and the plan comes apart in the usual way, which is to say through greed and a double-cross. From there it is a straight run — Doc and Carol heading for the Mexican border with the money, the law behind them, and Rudy somewhere in the mirror.

The screenplay is by Walter Hill, early in a career that would define a certain kind of lean American action, adapting a novel by Jim Thompson, the great poet of American criminal despair. That pedigree matters. Thompson’s crime fiction is never really about the score; it is about the rot inside the people chasing it, and Hill and Peckinpah keep just enough of that rot to give the chase a floor of genuine dread. The bank job is dispatched with brisk professional interest — Peckinpah, like Kubrick before him, treats the heist as a matter of process — and then the film gets on with what it actually cares about, which is the two people in the car.

The marriage is the movie

The reason The Getaway endures is Peckinpah’s decision to make the McCoys’ relationship the true suspense line. Doc comes out of prison owing his freedom to whatever Carol did to secure it, and the not-knowing eats him. McQueen plays him as a coiled professional whose competence is total and whose trust is shot, and MacGraw plays Carol as a woman who did a hard thing for love and now has to live beside a man weighing her for it. The famous offscreen fact — McQueen and MacGraw fell for each other during filming and later married — bleeds into every scene of the two of them, a real and volatile chemistry that the camera keeps catching.

Peckinpah shoots their fights the way he shoots gunfire. A scene of the couple tearing strips off each other in a hotel room carries the same charge as a shootout, and that is the film’s central idea made visible: for these two, wounding and desire are the same muscle. It is a genuinely adult study of a marriage, disguised as a thriller so completely that plenty of viewers missed it. The plot keeps threatening to blow the pair apart, and each survival is also a small act of reconciliation, a decision to keep trusting a partner who has every reason to bolt.

Why it works: Peckinpah’s craft in a lower key

The showy Peckinpah signatures are here but rationed. The slow-motion violence, the multi-angle cutting that stretches a burst of gunfire into something almost ceremonial, arrives in bursts and then gets out of the way. What impresses on a revisit is the control. The opening prison sequence is a small masterclass — a montage of overlapping images and hard sound cuts that puts you inside Doc’s confinement and near-breakdown before a word of plot is spoken, the machinery of a factory floor cutting against the loop of a mind with nothing to do but grind. Peckinpah is telling you, in pure cinema, what caged competence feels like, so that when Doc gets out you already understand the pressure behind his calm.

Quincy Jones’s score does unexpected work too, threading harmonica and loose Texan blues through the pursuit so that the film feels sun-baked and roadworn rather than slick. And Al Lettieri, in a career that was tragically short, gives Rudy a genuinely frightening appetite. He is the film’s engine of menace and its most disturbing thread, dragging the chase into territory the McCoys never touch. Peckinpah stages the two couples — the McCoys running, Rudy and his hostages — as a grim mirror, and the mirror is where the film’s darkest argument lives, which is a matter for below the line.

Where it sits in the crime canon

The Getaway is best understood inside the 1970s American crime cycle that stripped the gangster of glamour and looked hard at the people underneath. Its Jim Thompson source ties it directly to The Killing, which Thompson co-wrote for Kubrick — the same fatalist sensibility, the same certainty that a perfect plan is a machine for exposing human weakness, only here the plan is dispatched fast so the weakness has room to breathe. Set it beside The Friends of Eddie Coyle and you get two halves of the decade’s thesis: Peckinpah keeps the movie-star momentum and the possibility of escape, while Eddie Coyle strips even that away.

It also looks forward. The professionalised, deromanticised criminal that Michael Mann would build a career on starts here in embryo; watch Doc’s clipped, tool-checking competence and you are a short step from the world of Thief. And within this season’s trio of 1970s crime revisits, The Getaway is the propulsive one — the film with somewhere to go — set against the static dread of Mikey and Nicky and the sly survival comedy of Charley Varrick. Three directors, three temperaments, one decade that let the crime film be all of these things at once.

The verdict

The Getaway is a better film than its reputation as a slick McQueen hit ever allowed. It works completely as a chase — taut, sun-scorched, gripping — and it works on a second level as a study of a marriage that keeps choosing itself under fire, which is a stranger and more durable thing for a thriller to be about. Peckinpah tuned his instincts to a commercial pitch and lost none of their darkness in the process. It is the film to reach for when you want a heist picture with a beating human problem at the centre.

Where to watch: seek the original 1972 Peckinpah version and give the 1994 Alec Baldwin and Kim Basinger remake a wide berth; it copies the plot beat for beat and finds none of the current running under it. Everything below assumes you have seen the McCoys reach the border.

Spoilers below

The double-cross plays out with grim tidiness. Rudy kills the third robber after the job and turns on Doc, who shoots him and leaves him for dead — except Rudy has worn a vest, and he peels himself off the ground to become the film’s shadow. That survival is the hinge of the whole second half, and it lets Peckinpah run his cruellest sequence: Rudy takes a veterinarian and his wife hostage, and the wife (Sally Struthers) attaches herself to her captor with a giddy, humiliating eagerness that drives her husband to suicide. It is a genuinely upsetting stretch, and Peckinpah means it to be, because it is the McCoys’ relationship rendered as nightmare. Doc and Carol also survive on trust tested past reason; Rudy and the vet’s wife show you the same dynamic gone rancid, appetite without loyalty, and the parallel makes the McCoys’ fidelity feel hard-won rather than sentimental.

Carol’s own reckoning is the film’s key admission. What she did to free Doc was sleep with Beynon, and when Beynon resurfaces to reclaim his investment it is Carol, not Doc, who shoots him. She has been carrying the guilt and the agency both, and the film hands her the trigger, which is Peckinpah being fairer to her than his reputation would predict. The marriage cannot heal until this is dragged into the open, and Peckinpah drags it.

The border itself is reached by the most famous set-piece: a con man swaps Carol’s satchel of money in a train-station locker gambit, sending Doc on a furious chase, and then the couple end up hiding from the law inside a garbage truck, riding the compactor down among the filth with the loot. It is Peckinpah’s bleakest joke — the money and the lovers churned together in the trash — and the image is the whole film in miniature. They come out of it filthy and intact. After a final shootout clears the last of Beynon’s men and Rudy, an old Texan (Slim Pickens) drives the pair across into Mexico for the price of his truck, and they go grinning into the sun. Thompson’s novel ends its criminals in a Mexican purgatory called El Rey, a bought paradise that curdles into damnation; Peckinpah keeps the escape and drops the punishment. Whether that is a softening or a mercy is the film’s last, deliberate ambiguity. These two have wounded each other past what most marriages carry, and Peckinpah lets them drive off anyway, together, which from him counts as something close to romance.