America Had Steve McQueen. France Still Has Alain Delon.
Dead or Alive, France Wins.
I’ve tried to watch The Getaway. I really have. It’s got these painfully see-through entanglements at the film’s start (with Carol obviously sleeping with Benyon to spring Doc), that make me walk out of my own house while it’s playing.
I’d apply what Roger Ebert said about The Getaway (“it’s a big, glossy, impersonal mechanical toy,”) to nearly everything I’ve seen Steve McQueen do on screen.
Bullitt is a strong film, but it’s not clear to me that its success rests on the shoulders of McQueen’s black turtleneck. I could see any number of actors making that turn as Frank Bullitt shoot straight (worst name ever, by the way, for a neo-noir detective), including Eastwood, Newman, Lancaster, Redford, etc.
As for the original Thomas Crown Affair, it plays like a long-form episode of the Fox series 24 when compared to the Pierce Brosnan reboot (complete with ad nauseam split-screen misdirections of five men told “Go” at the same time from identical phone booths — or a Warhol fantasy of a thousand Crowns - playing polo - for no good reason).
And there’s that moment in The Towering Inferno (boasting one of the most impressive casts in Hollywood history) when McQueen - as Chief O’Halloran - steps onto the 138th floor of a burning building to order an evacuation.
Yes, he’s sufficiently blue collar and seems matter-of-fact enough to be convincing as the head of the SFFD.
But he’s always “blue collar” — and I don’t say that pejoratively. As Thomas Crown, McQueen looks like a guy who mistakenly wandered into a Savile Row tailor (Huntsman, perhaps) looking for his regular sales associate at Banana Republic
His nickname is “the king of cool,” mostly because of that 1968 Ford Mustang GT 390 Fastback that he rode hard and put away more valuable in Bullitt (it sold for nearly 4 million dollars in 2020), and that casual, effortless streetwear that became his - and everyone else’s - signature look (Mr. Porter, The Rake, GQ, and every conceivable men’s magazine has repeatedly curated some kind of “must-have-McQueen capsule wardrobe” over the years, and will again).
As with any long-term romantic relationship, watching a movie shouldn’t be hard to get through or difficult to endure.
Before writing this, I sat down to re-watch Thomas Crown. All the while I found myself fantasizing about Le Cercle Rouge (or 1970s The Red Circle), starring Alain Delon — France’s counterpoint to the highly-overrated McQueen.
Le Cercle Rouge? I’ve absorbed it dozens of times, and been absorbed in it. It’s in my bloodstream now. Thomas Crown is a tedious exercise in making its hero seem cool, rich, detached, hot to find his next thrill: it’s as if Elon Musk were cast as Estragon in Waiting for Godot.
One movie is a transfusion, the other a case of contact dermatitis.
For the purpose of maintaining a reasonably-focused argument, I won’t get into The Great Escape or The Cincinnati Kid — two McQueen films that are universally appreciated. This is really about two heist movies that got released two years apart, one of which is a masterpiece in terms of pacing, character development, and tone. The other is The Thomas Crown Affair.
Right now I’m watching the scene where Crown returns to his Boston Brahmin townhouse on Beacon Hill after overseeing the robbery from high above the city, dismisses his manservant for the night, and retires to his study to drink and endlessly guffaw on a hideous red, black and tan flannel plaid couch. That sound he makes? It’s a cross between a Beverly Hills Cop-era Eddie Murphy chortle, and a Billy Hayes Midnight Express sanitorium-prison cackle. And, inconceivably, McQueen does it again, just as open-mouthed and lunatic as before, when the arrestingly beautiful and stylish Vicki Anderson (Faye Dunaway) admits she suspects Crown of pulling the bank job.
In reserved contrast, Delon plays perennial convict Corey (in The Red Circle) like a virtuoso silent film star: not only are there no wasted words, there really aren’t any words at all.
Corey must only indicate through a smoldering, simmering, Hemingway iceberg method of telegraphing his intent or revealing an emotional underbelly. With Corey, silence is golden. For Crown, it’s the calm before the storm: his buttoned-up exterior unravels without warning in a near case of borderline personality disorder.
McQueen’s Crown is all talk and no direct action. He’s brimming with throwaway lines that the likes of real-life billionaires eat up like so much illegally imported caviar: “What else can we do on Sunday?”
The audience is supposed to be impressed by a titan of industry - who has also just stolen over two and a half million dollars - losing a few thousand bucks on a round of golf? Is Crown “absolutely mad” for wagering what he’d pay for a case of Châteauneuf-du-Pape?
And what about when his female accessory, Gwen, flippantly asks him after he crash-lands a glider-plane in the worst musical montage in cinematic history, “What do you have to worry about?”
His response is in perfect keeping with the recalcitrant child who inhabits the hand-me-down suit: “Who I want to be tomorrow.”
And that really does sound like the kind of revolving-door-existential-crisis that would appeal to - if not have helped form the identity of - someone like Elon Musk.
By 1970, when Le Cercle Rouge was released, McQueen had his “truly great performances” behind him. That’s not a direct quote, it’s more a paraphrased synthesis of what many critics - and all fanboys - believe (with Le Mans being the sole exception, as it came out a year later).
McQueen had 5 years on Delon, born just months after the Great Crash, so maybe their career timeline discrepancies get canceled-out because Delon’s work is still respectable in Two Men in Town, and Mr. Klein (1973 and 1976 respectively).
The Thomas Crown Affair is a movie about (sort of) American exceptionalism. From its beginning we witness one man outmaneuver five others in a criminal context, then extract above-market value for an office building in a corporate setting, and so on. McQueen’s Crown outbids Ms. Anderson - his antagonist - at a charity auction only to gift-wrap the painting for her in victory. Even when losing at golf he’s the one who has pushed the terms and conditions for the wager to its extremes. The man pilots his own aircraft.
His constant need for reinvention - (“Who I want to be tomorrow”) - suggests a kind of faux-self-determinism that we Americans lap up. It’s what the self-help movement is predicated upon: I can will myself into anything or anyone.
Delon’s Corey gets his hands dirty. He climbs the rope. He cuts the glass. When it’s time to break into the jewelry store, violate the safe, and face the wrath of law enforcement, where would Thomas Crown be?
Maybe Norman Jewison’s Thomas Crown is a meta-commentary on the upper-classes: they get others to do their bidding for them.
Maybe it’s not a heist movie at all, but a classic suspense genre film. We know who did it. The question is: will they figure it out — and make it stick in court?
Le Cercle Rouge is not the story of one man’s journey for meaning, purpose and self- actualization, but five: Corey, Vogel, Mattei, Rico and Jansen.
Corey and Vogel are second-story men (jewel thieves) who have just been released from prison. Mobster Rico is responsible for Corey’s time-served (and in the interim steals his girl). Mattei is the lawman who rides a pale horse, and unleashes his men on the French countryside to retrieve the escape-artist Vogel (who spectacularly busted out his train’s sleeper-car window to not so much abscond, but evaporate). Jansen is battling fierce demons who take the form of alcohol-withdrawal-apparitions seeping out of Louis Vuitton trunks and seamless closet doors at night.
Jansen is the disgraced drunk ex-cop and would-be-marksman who’s trying to get his “steady” back; Mattei the Commissaire who can’t retire with legacy intact before locking up his fugitive; Corey the silent martyr, living not for revenge but for the love of the woman in his safeguarded photograph; Vogel a dark-hearted man existing solely to penetrate the impenetrable; and Rico, further retreating into the chiaroscuro, afraid of Corey’s resolve, talents, and quiet fury.
In the end, Rico may be a side-character, but he’s far more nuanced than McQueen’s Crown.
If you think about the 1968 Thomas Crown Affair, led by McQueen, it’s visually cluttered, needlessly noisy, and over-engineered.
If you reflect on 1970’s Le Cercle Rouge, (mostly) held together by Delon, it’s sporadically jazzy (some radio diegesis), features an enthralling night-club revue sequence, leans heavy on alarm sounds, but is otherwise a quiet, thoughtful film that lets Delon be Delon.
And who is Corey’s Delon?
He kills one of Rico’s men in a pool hall because he has to; engineers the (second) most significant stage of Vogel’s escape plan (leaving the trunk of his car unlatched in a diner parking lot — anticipating exactly where and when Vogel will emerge from the primordial ooze); and - in an act that punctuates his unwillingness to accept a one-dimensional girlfriend any longer - trades the old photo of actress Anna Douking for the bills in Rico’s safe. I’ve come back for her. You can have the memento. I want the real thing (but I’ll take the money you owe me in the meantime).
There’s a lot of glibness to Thomas Crown: the cemetery scene with the garland of flowers serving as misdirection, explaining away his affair to Vicki as she was just a way of putting you in touch with yourself; and - well - everything else.
About 90 minutes in, with McQueen and Dunaway nearly indistinguishable in a teak-paneled, steamy sauna scene that is mostly a tight two-shot and some close-ups of splayed limbs and a gaudy gold medallion on a chain around Crown’s neck, I realized why Quentin Tarantino had cast Damian Lewis as McQueen in the dreary Once Upon a Time in Hollywood.
Having consumed every moment of Homeland (twice through) and Billions (once so far), I see so much of McQueen in Lewis, whether playing Sgt. Nicholas Brody or hedge-funder Bobby Axelrod.
But if Lewis had been in that sauna with Carrie Mathison or Wendy Rhoades, I would have felt something. Lewis has vulnerability and can go to places inside himself that McQueen would need a sherpa to find, or perhaps a fracking specialist.
His portrayal of Brody requires more Delon than McQueen — a molten lava cake, not a donut hole. Brody is a closeted terrorist, whose real ideology is buried so deep that he has to wade through the bile and locked-awayness of eight years to get to the truth of who he was. Axelrod is a 9/11 opportunist who did it for the right reasons, but he’s a capitalist who must pretend that making money is a sacrilege (when around his wife’s family and friends), but de rigueur in the presence of his crew.
Lewis - in that sauna - would have shown the weight of betrayal. His disappointment in Vicki choosing the law over the lad. The heartbreak of letting Ms. Anderson in, for the first intimate relationship of his adult life, only to have to share her with G-men, the Boston PD, and well-placed photographers.
We feel Corey’s heartbreak at the brink of Rico’s apartment safe, the photo of his ex-girl he’d held fast to in prison left as a placeholder.
We needed that to bubble up from somewhere inside Thomas Crown, at some point, during his raucous, Technicolor, disjointed affair.
Instead, in the immediate aftermath of the sauna scene and rejected telephone plea deal, we get McQueen in his red dune buggy, alone, smoking a cigar, donning his best Chris-Evans-worthy cable-knit sweater, some strings playing - ominously - over the visuals. Looking far away — perhaps seeking what he couldn’t manufacture.
It’s what Delon, or Lewis, wouldn’t need to make the emotional impact of a scene take hold in the viewer’s gut.
When I first saw Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, I found Lewis’ “take” on McQueen underwhelming and static. Now I realize that he got it just right.