Hearts and Bones October 11, 2006
Posted by John Hodson in : Action / Adventure / Thriller, Film & DVD Reviews, Westerns , trackbackIt’s slightly odd that Steve McQueen followed up Le Mans with another film that has a documentary feel to it, Junior Bonner. Both films take realistic looks at real sporting events, with huge amounts of footage shot both during the famous French 24 hours race, and the oldest rodeo in the world, at Prescott, Arizona. And you can write the plots of each on the back of a fag packet (actually the ‘plot’ of Le Mans, is virtually contained within the title.)
But that’s where the similarity ends. It’s as if Peckinpah had seen McQueen’s personal and very, very expensive racing movie and decided he’d show him just how it could and should be done.
If Le Mans is about anything at all, it’s about a racing driver doing what most racing drivers do at some time in their lives; confronting his fears, coming to terms with a past failure. Ostensibly, Junior Bonner’s main plot-line - not the theme it must be pointed out - is precisely the same, but while we know absolutely nothing about the characters at the of Le Mans - and frankly could care less - Peckinpah lays out the life of a family about whom we come to care very much indeed.
Le Mans (1971)
By the time negotiations for Le Mans began, Steve McQueen, a ‘petrol head’ since his teens, was a true Hollywood superstar, his place in the firmament having been cemented by Peter Yates’ thrilling Bullitt. He could pick and choose his roles, practically name his own price, and thus had at his disposal the best damned toy box in the world.
Fulfilling a dream, he choose to make a film about motorsport; the American race scene had already been covered (by Paul Newman at the Indianapolis 500 in 1969’s Winning), as had the Grand Prix circuit in John Frankenheimer’s eponymous 1966 film (McQueen was courted for the part that eventually went to Jim Garner); so the day / night race at Le Mans it was.
Jointly produced by McQueen’s company Solar and Cinema Center 100, the movie making arm of CBS (who ploughed a vast $6m into the project, which included $750,000 for the star, plus points). Nothing was too good for McQueen who demanded, and got, total control. Can you hear any alarm bells yet, gentle reader?
The best racing drivers in the world were hired, not simply to give the race scenes an adrenalin fuelled vérité, but also, one suspects, so that McQueen could join their company for a while, get behind the wheel and actually become one of these tarmacadam gladiators. The stuff of fantasy…or a recipe for disaster.
It was at this point that the wheels started to come off…
Director John Sturges had a vision of a tragic love story with Le Mans simply as the backdrop. McQueen demanded that the focus of the film be on the track. One of them had to go, and with Sturges went much of his footage, which the star deemed unusable. In came hired gun Lee H. Katzin (largely a TV director) at the helm, but it was McQueen calling the shots. Reshooting meant the budget ballooned and there was also the little problem of the script. Which wasn’t quite finished…
CBS smelt trouble, shut down production and even considered paying off McQueen and bringing in a more pliable name. $1.5m over budget and two months late they completed the film; McQueen was involved in two horrendous smashes (from which he walked away), former F1 driver David Piper wasn’t so lucky, losing part of a leg (he’s thanked ‘for his sacrifice’ in the end credits). Not long after the film’s release in the States, McQueen went bankrupt and Solar virtually ceased to function as a production company. No, it wasn’t a happy time for the man who was - is - the very essence of cool.
So what do we have? In the end, we have a film with almost no narrative and the fact that it’s some 37 minutes in before we hear a line of intelligible dialogue tells its own story. McQueen’s Michael Delaney arrives at Le Mans staring moodily at the repaired Armco barrier where, the previous year, his car had been involved in an accident that lead to the death of a young Italian driver.
The driver’s widow Lisa Belgetti (Elsa Anderson) is back again, having hitched her wagon to another racer. Delaney and Belgetti are joined by tragedy and…well, there’s not much ‘and’, just the glimmers of the love story Sturges wanted. The rest is just racing, and it’s on the track that Le Mans excels with some terrific footage.
Whatever else you might think - and critics hated it - Le Mans does have what is undoubtedly some of the finest racing footage captured on film. It puts the viewer right in the centre of the action, particularly in the pivotal crash sequence which is beautifully staged and edited, breathtaking in its violence, and sheer daring; remember folks - no CGI. But, ultimately, it’s not enough. The action is exciting only in a superficial way; we simply don’t really care whether Michael wins, gets the girl, or dies in the attempt. It’s somehow a little too dry and dusty, like old bones. Not enough meat, too little flesh.
What is fascinating however, is that, today some 35 years after seeing it for the first time, it can be viewed as a wonderful period piece, a beautiful snapshot of time and place. With it’s shots of the crowds - watching, waiting, under canvas in the forests - it’s a time capsule, from the fashions and hairstyles, to the brutish cars, even the people look different, inhabitants of a very different planet. Pale and wan, badly fed, badly groomed; 36 years ago and it might as well be a 100.
It easily conjures smells of spilt petrol and greasy lukewarm burgers, hot rubber, cold petit déjeuner, summer rain and the dregs of last night’s Bordeaux glugged as a morning pick me up. It’s this documentary aspect of Le Mans that means, for me at least, that the film is getting to be a better viewing experience with age.
In both R1 and R2, Le Mans comes barebones, but it does have the benefit of a very nice transfer by Paramount, with good strong, vibrant colours and decent sound. Not up to the standard of Warners recent Grand Prix, but still acceptable.
What is the point of this story?
What information pertains?
The thought that life could be better
Is woven indelibly into our hearts and our brains.
Paul Simon
Junior Bonner (1972)
Junior Bonner also failed to set the box office on fire, but having almost worked with McQueen on The Cincinnati Kid, Sam Peckinpah - fired from that film after only a few days - and Steve set to work together again, ultimately coming up with a film that stands today as amongst the best in both their filmographies. In fact, they enjoyed the experience that much that it was a matter of months before they were both back before the cameras again in a film that put both of their careers back on track. Huzzah!
Ironically one of the reasons Junior Bonner failed at the box office was that it was marketed as some kind of all-action cowboy flick, and failed signally to meet those expectations. While The Getaway, which satisfied both wrong-headed critics and audiences that here was a ‘typical’ outing from ‘Bloody Sam’, was the huge hit that both Sam and Steve needed. But it was far from being representative of Peckinpah, who knew what was was needed of him and completed the film with a consummate professionalism. You want action flick? You got it…
It was the artist, not just the artisan, then that chaired Junior Bonner, getting the most out of a slight story and the most out of Steve McQueen, one of the most charismatic stars of the past half century, and a man who could dictate to the camera a page of dialogue with a single look.
The film starts with fading rodeo star Junior ‘JR’ Bonner, riding old Sunshine; never was there more contrarily named animal. He’s a Herculian black bull from Hell, two tons of snorting, bucking, stomping, plain ornery beefsteak. JR straps himself to the back of this beast, his bête noir, and his job is to stay there for eight seconds. Eight long seconds.
After picking himself up out of the sawdust and nursing a couple of cracked ribs, JR decides that he’ll ride ol’ Sunshine again, at his home town Rodeo at Prescott, and he’ll beat him. Or to hell with it. Once back in town, JR’s appearance gradually brings the disparate Bonner clan back together one last time - while waiting in the ring is Sunshine, as mean and moody as ever.
This is a modern day western, but it’s suffused with that ‘end of trail’ melancholy that Peckinpah did so well. McQueen is perfection itself as JR, grimacing as he straps up those ribs, walking, shoulders slumping, back to a battered old convertible that, like its owner, has seen better days.
We know exactly the territory we’re in within minutes of the opening, JR pitching up at his dad’s tar-paper shack, finding it abandoned, along with the framed photos of ‘Ace’ Bonner’s own glory rodeo days. Both Ace and his boy are men out of their time, a fact underlined when Peckinpah has JR staring down a gigantic earth mover on the road outside, and having to back down in the face of this, this…progress. As he tries to find his way out of a maze of construction workers and machinery, JR looks on helplessly as Ace’s home is ripped apart and flattened by predatory ‘dozers, seeming for all the world like jackals at the carcass of a lion.
We never find out exactly why Ace (Robert Preston), and Ellie (the excellent Ida Lupino) parted; we don’t need to. Ace has always been a dreamer, a ‘good times just around the corner’ guy, who can’t keep a dollar, or his dick, in his jeans. He needs just one more grubstake, enough to get him to Australia where the streets are awash with gold just dying to leap out of the dusty earth into his hands. One last dream.
Ace’s youngest son, Curly Bonner (Joe Don Baker) and his joyless, pinched-up shrew of a wife, sure won’t be the ones to provide it. They slapped $15,000 into Ace’s sweaty hands for his dirty little spread, not the full market value, but then, Ace was in debt up to his bandana and Curly was on hand with the greenbacks. No more from Curly; thanks to that little deal, he’s heavy into real estate and as he tells JR, he’s on his way to his first million ‘while you’re still trying to get to eight seconds.’
Ace tries to stick JR for the dough; Junior has to tell daddy he’s ‘busted’. That first meeting in God knows how long between father and son is beautifully done; Ace signs himself out of the local hospital, steals JR’s horse to join the Rodeo parade through Main Street, and JR catches up with him. They gallop through the parade, whoopin’ and hollerin’, Sam editing the scene with the touch of a master, before he gets them to the railroad station - father and son.
Curly might be like his mom, intelligent, ambitious, but the apple that is JR didn’t fall far from the tree that is Ace. Peckinpah has them split, figuratively, and literally by the tracks, when Ace realises his last chance has been lost. Wordlessly, he draws them back together as Ace sees in JR what he once was, and Junior sees what’s coming up for him.
If elegiac westerns are largely about decay and death, and how we cope with those twin inevitable, inexorable shadows, then Junior Bonner deals with them on two levels. JR is not a ‘has been’, he’s a ‘never really was’, and he’s got one last chance to prove to nobody other than himself that he’s still capable of looking the world right in the eye and spitting in it. He’s at ‘that’ age, not that old, not that young, it’s all just a state of mind.
Ace, with 20 or so years on his kid, has the same dream, that vision of all old men, of riding into the sunset head held high. Somewhere out there Ace will make it. He knows it, all he needs is a chance. One last chance to make it big. And who can deny him that?
Peckinpah is said to have put much of himself into the film, and in particular his relationship with his own father. He mostly kept his own demons at bay throughout the shooting, only hitting the bottle towards the end of the schedule; he needed to be fully focused. It might sound as if it’s a heavy, somewhat miserable slice of cinema, and if I’ve given you, dear reader, that impression I apologise wholeheartedly for my ham-fisted prose. It is in fact a beautifully acted and directed piece, at it’s core a joyful film and tremendously life affirming. Above all, a very human story with a great big heart - Peckinpah does great ‘human’.
The rodeo scenes are choreographed and seamlessly edited with Peckinpah’s customary precision, the comedy punch-up has a Fordian charm, the whole has an air of romance, of genuine affection for the characters, for place and for family. Even the minor roles are wonderfully played, some of the good folks of Prescott getting in on the act (not to mention the Peckinpah offspring). On screen are ‘real’ people we can all identify with, even the grasping Curly and the delusional, but eternally charming Ace.
I’ve mentioned it before, but nowhere better than associated with this film to bring it up again; I believe that Sam Peckinpah was the true successor to John Ford. It’s a crying shame Hollywood didn’t appreciate the fact when he was alive.
If you’re considering buying Junior Bonner on DVD for goodness sake don’t purchase the UK R2 which is a pan and scan travesty. The R1, like all the ABC catalogue films presented by MGM, might be non-anamorphic, but it’s in OAR ’scope, quite a decent if not stellar transfer and has the benefit of a commentary track from the guys who shall be forever known as ‘The Peckinpah Posse’ - Paul Seydor, Garner Simmons and David Weddle, moderated by Nick Redman…and very informative it is too.
*Oh, before I forget; those Paul Simon lyrics? Well, obviously they don’t feature in either of the films. But Hearts and Bones has been buzzing about my head recently, and, well, those words seem so right…let’s dedicate it to Ace Bonner shall we?
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