The Steve McQueen Blog-a-thon

The Steve McQueen Blog-a-thon has ended. Many thanks to the event's contributors. There's lots of great reading here. Enjoy!

Day 4

The Blob (1958)
By Doniphon - The Long Voyage Home
Steve stutters, making up nonsense, eventually trailing off and laughing. But as he looks at the officer his dying laugh becomes something else, and even as Steve the character sets out to tell the aw shucks officer he'll never do "it" again, Steve the icon practically sneers. Those (goddamn soulful) eyes look out, that vein in his forehead we know emerges, and he seems to say, "I don't deserve this." It becomes clear; McQueen the star was McQueen the star long before he ever was one, and he ain't going to be doing this bullshit forever.

Bullitt Points on Steve McQueen
By Jason Bellamy - The Cooler
I expressed most of my Steve McQueen thoughts in my two previous submissions to the Steve McQueen Blog-a-thon: the “5 for the Day” piece at The House Next Door and the video essay “Steve McQueen: King of the Close-Up.” But here are a few more ruminations and ramblings related to the King of Cool.

Le Mans
By Tony Dayoub - Cinema Viewfinder
What's amazing about Le Mans, a film which was branded as McQueen's Folly even as it was being made, is how well it still holds up today. Racing films always seem so full of cinematic potential, speed being the most attractive factor. Yet with rare exception does it ever pan out. I'm speaking strictly from a cinephilic perspective since I am not qualified to render even the most basic opinion about auto racing or even cars (so this is your opportunity to take me to task in the comments section if you have a stronger argument). But contemporary auto racing films like Days of Thunder (1990), Driven (2001), even Pixar's Cars (2006) seem to place a priority on artificially raising tension through camera placement; if one's point-of-view resides amongst the vehicles jockeying for position, then one should get the feel for what it's like to be a driver in one of these competitions. It's just a bunch of horseshit, if you ask me.

The Sand Pebbles (1966) - Part 2 - The River Battle Sequence
By Hokahey - Little Worlds
Especially during the 1960s, the heyday of the widescreen historical epic, battle scenes were everywhere. But this one stands out. I like how it uses extreme long shots to establish the setting and the situation the San Pablo is in, and when it comes to the battle, close-ups are used sparingly for dramatic effect, and loosely framed medium to long shots capture the hand-to-hand combat, making the action clearer, unlike the claustrophobic, in-your-face framing of much of the battle action in films these days.

Day 3

For Steve
By Jay C. - Funny Farm
There's always this discussion on what people are actors and what people are stars. I'm no movie critic and McQueen's acting skills can be debated maybe, I don't know, I live in Holland and I can't remember him getting any big awards like an Oscar or anything at the time. Not that it matters, to me he is the real meaning of the word actor, more so than the word star, although he was that too, a big one.

The Kid's Break
By Jamie Yates - Chicago Ex-Patriate
When notes or conversations arise about Steve McQueen's beginnings, the first two names that understandably come up are The Blob and the television show Wanted: Dead or Alive. Further fame would come with his more memorable roles in the 1960s and 1970s, but a little-discussed aspect of his start is his first teaming with John Sturges in 1959's Never So Few. Perhaps the fact that this film doesn't garner much attention is because it's a movie weighed down with limitations and a generally poor script.

The McQueen Persona, Part II: The Imprisoned Free Spirit (The Great Escape & Papillon)
By Steven Santos - The Fine Cut
In Part 1 of this series (see Day 1), I discussed the one aspect of the McQueen Persona, the Righteous Rebel, in two of his films, Bullitt and An Enemy of the People. I had admitted that both films were both rather flawed films that were elevated by McQueen's performances, but never quite pushed him as far enough in challenging that aspect of his persona. As we take a look at a different aspect of the McQueen Persona, The Imprisoned Free Spirit, not only are both films much stronger, one of which I consider a genuine classic, but they do quite an effective job at building McQueen's image while almost cutting him back down to size in a way that few parts designed for movie stars rarely do these days.

Seeing The Great Escape (1963)
By Hokahey - Little Worlds
I was 11 years old, living in San Mateo, California, in a suburban home that had a small backyard with a lawn and a wooden shack used as a garden shed. The shack had a door, windows with glass, and a concrete floor with a hole in it. My two brothers and I, along with a couple of neighbor kids, pulled away more pieces of concrete and started digging straight down. Then we tunneled out under the foundation and the front wall. Surreptitiously, we dispersed the dirt in the backyard garden beds, sometimes holding handfuls in our hands, walking through the garden, and dropping them as we walked. A neighbor friend made a wooden tray that we filled with dirt and placed over the mouth of the tunnel to conceal it. Our secrecy fooled the German “guard” who sometimes looked over us from the kitchen window over the sink. (Well, she was my mother – but she really was German.)

Day 2

The Cincinnati Kid (1965)
By Adam Zanzie - Icebox Movies
Before Jewison came onboard, the end result was destined to be something completely different from what it is now. Peckinpah's original vision for The Cincinnati Kid was to shoot the film in black-and-white, and fill the story (in typical Peckinpah fashion) with visceral sequences of sex and violence. But Hollywood was not yet ready for Peckinpah's “fascists works of art” (as dubbed by Pauline Kael in her Straw Dogs review), and with Jewison replacing Peckinpah as director, Steve McQueen's next anti-heroic vehicle was about to become something more passive, less aggressive. Arguably, it ultimately became a better film.

Regarding The Getaway
By Steve Saragossi - The Screen Lounge
The Getaway is first and foremost an action thriller. That is what all concerned were endeavouring to produce and, on the basis of its box-office receipts and Steve McQueen’s return to the top of the superstar tree, they succeeded. But a closer examination of the text reveals subtleties not usually at work in such a genre-piece.

Day 1 - Essays:

5 for the Day: Steve McQueen
By Jason Bellamy - The House Next Door
McQueen's was a career that started too late — in 1958's The Blob, his first starring role on the big screen, the already-developing wrinkles in McQueen's forehead give away that he isn't the high schooler he's pretending to be — and that ended too soon. ... What follows here is a list of what I consider to be McQueen's five most essential performances.

The Getaway
By J.D. - Radiator Heaven
Steve McQueen brings his trademark cool and intensity to the role of Doc and is not afraid to play a relatively unlikable character. We don’t know what Doc was like before his prison stretch, only how he behaves once he gets out. McQueen plays him as someone who doesn’t suffer fools gladly. I find it interesting that two of his strongest performances came from back-to-back Peckinpah films: Junior Bonner and The Getaway. The former featured a very nuanced, introspective performance from McQueen, while this one is all on the surface as he plays an irredeemable criminal.

The Getaway
By Bryce Wilson – Things That Don’t Suck
The Getaway’s a strange movie to write about, a star at the height of his iconoclasm, a director in full possession of his incendiary talent, scripted by another badass filmmaker I’m quite fond of, coming from what is arguably the greatest novel from the greatest hardboiled novelist of all time. It’s a movie I wouldn’t hesitate to call a classic. And yet on some level I can’t help but find it unfulfilling.

Junior Bonner (1972)
By Kevin J. Olson - Decisions at Sundown
McQueen exudes cool throughout the film as Bonner (sunglasses and a cowboy hat have never looked so good on someone), a man who has spent his best years on the rodeo circuit, immersed in the ways of the Old West, but now that he has returned home he sees modernism and the counter culture of America in the 70's starting to creep into his home. He's a dying breed, and much like the way Faulkner wrote about Modernism penetrating the old South in "The Bear," so too does Peckinpah seem enamored with this theme of things never being the same.

Le Mans (1971)
By Vuk Radic - SeeItWith.Me
Steve McQueen's vision was simple: Create the best, most realistic movie about motorsports ever made. It was a story that began years before filming took place during the summer of 1970, and its aftermath impacted McQueen for the rest of his life. Le Mans was a huge project; 20,000 props, 26 high-performance racing cars with 52 drivers from seven countries, along with 350,000 French-speaking extras. And no finished script. There were few lines, even for a McQueen film, and no intelligible structure. "Cars," he told everyone. "We film the fucking cars." And from the very inception of the idea it was riddled with problems.

McQueen, Gleason, and a Couple of Guys Who Had It Coming
By Bill R. - The Kind of Face You Hate
There are a couple of things that happen during this fight that are a bit hard to swallow, but they gain a certain level of verisimilitude due to the clumsy brutality of everything else. It's strange to watch this moody little comedy, and then find yourself smack in the middle of a terrific, bone-crunching beatdown -- these guys are pounding the shit out of each other, and it makes them tired.

The McQueen Persona, Part 1: The Righteous Rebel (Bullitt & An Enemy of the People)
By Steven Santos – The Fine Cut
I never considered Steve McQueen the greatest actor, as much as I considered him a great presence. One has to look at today's "movie stars" to truly appreciate what McQueen brought to movies that were, for the most part, mostly memorable due to him. He seemed to have a mature, been around the block quality even in his early thirties, while many present-day actors are more pretty and boyish even when some of them are approaching forty. He may have been considered too cool, and, by turn, too unemotional by some, but he still represents to me more how men really are or perhaps should be. Maybe, these days, pop psychology has infected male characterizations so much that I prefer some of the mystery that McQueen's opaque performance style offers.

Non-Expressionism: The Gift of Steve McQueen
By Greg - Cinema Styles
I started going to the movies in the seventies and Steve McQueen was one of the first stars I got to know in current releases. When I saw his last film in the theatre, The Hunter, on opening weekend no less, so excited was I to see it, I felt I knew him well. I didn't. Even though I loved movies like The Blob, The Great Escape, Bullitt, Papillon and, yes, The Hunter, mediocre as it may be, I didn't fully understand Steve McQueen as an actor. I liked him and his movies but never felt he was doing the job I thought others were doing when it came to big screen acting. I certainly didn't think he was bad, I just never gave him much thought as an actor overall. But then, very recently in fact, I had a revelation.

The Sand Pebbles (1966) - Part 1
By Hokahey - Little Worlds
McQueen well deserved his nomination for his portrayal of Holman. He creates a simple soul who just wants to be left alone. In one scene straight from the wonderful novel by Richard McKenna, Holman actually talks to the ship’s engine he loves to work with. When he first arrives on the boat, he lovingly adjusts valves, wipes pipes, and declares. “Hello, engine. I’m Jake Holman.” This might be the type of language that works in a novel but should probably be left out of the film version, but McQueen puts touching believability into his delivery and it works.

Steve McQueen, an acting racer or a racing actor? Whatever ... He loved cars
By Vuk Radic - SeeItWith.Me
Steve McQueen really did have it all. He was supposedly smoking insane amounts of marijuana every day, wasn’t a stranger to mounds of cocaine, he was married three times and died at 50. Which takes on an ironical twist to another racing quote of his: “Racing is the most exciting thing there is. But unlike drugs, you get high with dignity.”

Steve McQueen and the Evolution of the Action Hero
By Clarence Ewing – GLI Press
McQueen’s heyday was mainly in the 1960s and '70s and he had all the tools to succeed in the era of Technicolor – the looks, the screen presence, and the persona. I don’t think I’m going out on a limb to declare that McQueen wasn’t the most spectacular thespian in the world, but neither were hundreds of other actors who came along before or after him. His screen presence was something that comes along a few times a decade, and his directors made full use of it.

Steve McQueen: King of the Close-Up (Video Essay)
By Jason Bellamy – The Cooler
Not quite 30 years removed from his death, McQueen tends to be remembered for his role in two of cinema’s most famous action sequences, in The Great Escape and Bullitt, and for his blazing blue eyes, his physical grace and his effortless swagger, which were the substance of several of his films. These were the ingredients that helped McQueen earn the honorary title “The King of Cool,” and rightfully so. But to come to the conclusion that McQueen’s success was simply the result of a handsome, athletic and naturally suave guy playing too-cool-for-school characters is to miss McQueen’s true cinematic gift: He was devastating in a close-up.

Day 1 - Photos:

Behind the Scenes With My Favorite Actors: Steve McQueen in Bullitt
By Jeremy Richey – Moon In The Gutter

Steve McQueen: 20 Never-Before-Seen Photos*
Photos by John Dominis - Life Magazine
(*Not technically a submission to the blog-a-thon, though LIFE was kind enough to email the link. Very cool!)

Steve McQueen's Women
By Vuk Radic - SeeItWith.Me

Steve McQueen Film Posters
By Vuk Radic - SeeItWith.Me

Steve McQueen's Cars
By Vuk Radic - SeeItWith.Me

Preamble:

The following isn’t an official contribution to the blog-a-thon, but it’s a wonderful place to start. Back in May 2009, Matt Zoller Seitz created the following video essay, which calls into question McQueen’s credentials as a leading man. If you’re a fan of McQueen, you might not agree with Seitz’s conclusion, but his arguments are almost impossible to refute. It's essential viewing.

Too Cool (Video Essay)
By Matt Zoller Seitz – L Magazine
This self-willed aura of confidence is the source of my own early admiration for McQueen. He was everything I wasn't — everything almost no one is; as much a cinematic demigod as Burt Lancaster, but humbler, more human scaled. Nevertheless, at some point second thoughts on McQueen took root in my mind and made it difficult to adore him uncritically, and made even his most acclaimed star turns feel unsatisfying. And at the risk of inviting a flood of angry email from dudes with subject headers along the lines of "Dear McQueen-hating pansy," I'll attempt to explain why.

Bullitt Points on Steve McQueen

I expressed most of my Steve McQueen thoughts in my two previous submissions to the Steve McQueen Blog-a-thon: the “5 for the Day” piece at The House Next Door and the video essay “Steve McQueen: King of the Close-Up.” But here are a few more ruminations and ramblings related to the King of Cool.

When The Great Escape Got Greater
The first Steve McQueen movie I ever saw was either The Great Escape or The Magnificent Seven. I saw both when I was about 10 or 11 and I loved them immediately. Although The Great Escape didn’t inspire me to dig a tunnel of my own, it opened up my mind to the possibility that “old movies” could be just as exciting as those made during my own lifetime (a novel concept at that age). Soon, I owned The Great Escape on VHS, and I spent my middle school, high school and even college years excitedly showing it to friends, many of whom hadn’t heard of the movie or McQueen. (It almost goes without saying that the movie was always a hit.) By the time I was 21, I must have seen The Great Escape two dozen times. Or so I thought.

It was around then that I got my first DVD player, and of course The Great Escape was among my initial DVDs. One afternoon I settled in to watch a movie I thought I knew by heart, only to find it thrillingly new. Until then, you see, I’d only seen The Great Escape in the standard pan-and-scan format of VHS. My DVD copy presented the film in its full (2.35:1) widescreen glory. What a difference it made! Now shots of Hilts speeding toward the Alps near the film’s conclusion were panoramically breathtaking. Now shots of the prisoners arriving at the camp in the film’s opening revealed more than a half-dozen trucks in a row instead of two or three. Most importantly, now, for the very first time, I knew the size of Hilts’ familiar cell in the cooler.

Stop reading. Look at the image that makes for the masthead here at The Cooler. That shot? I’ve only known that shot for a little over a decade. In pan-and-scan, we never saw Hilts’ entire cell in one shot. Instead, when Hilts tosses his baseball against the floor and walls of his cell, we’d get a shot of Hilts throwing the ball, then a cut to the ball hitting the wall, then a cut to Hilts catching the ball. Over and over again. Rinse and repeat. Consequentially, I always assumed that the cell was at least two times bigger than it actually is. The DVD-inspired renaissance of widescreen restored The Great Escape to its original glory. For me, there’s no better example of the ills of pan-and-scan than its perversion of Hilts in the cooler. Widescreen has never delighted me more.



Misspelled, With a Bullit
As I type this, I’m facing a poster for Bullitt, which is one of two Steve McQueen images among the five framed posters in my apartment (the other one shows McQueen as Virgil Hilts in The Great Escape). I bought the Bullitt poster at an outdoor sale when I was a student at Washington State University, and so I’ve had it for more than 12 years. But it was only about 10 years ago that I realized the poster’s flaw: Though the bold print atop the poster correctly touts “Steve McQueen as ‘Bullitt,’” the blurb underneath reads thusly: “Not many freaky cops like BULLIT around. You look at the Italian shoes and the turtleneck and you have to wonder. You listen to the official beefs about ‘personal misconduct,’ ‘disruptive influence,’ you figure he’s got to be up for trade. But when some rare Chicago blood starts spilling in San Francisco, they give BULLIT the mop. They weren’t exactly doing him a favor. But they’ve done a great big one for you.” OK, first of all: How cool is that blurb?! But, back to the point, how on earth did someone manage to drop a ‘T’ in Bullitt without anyone noticing? Oops.



Portrait of a Kung Fu Wannabe
In preparation for the blog-a-thon, I dusted off my copy of Marshall Terrill’s 1993 biography, Steve McQueen: Portrait of an American Rebel, which until recently had been boxed up with some other books I hadn’t touched since college. It’s a good book – personal and revelatory without seeming sensationalistic – and the process of rereading it reintroduced me to bits of trivia that I had forgotten. Perhaps my favorite forgotten factoid was this tidbit: McQueen was a pallbearer at Bruce Lee’s funeral. Surprised? So was I. The two (eventual) stars became connected when McQueen met Nikita Knatz, one of Lee’s training partners, on the set of The Thomas Crown Affair and asked (er, nagged) to get some martial arts training of his own. Soon, McQueen and Lee became companions. “Both men had what the other wanted,” James Coburn says in Terrill’s book. “It was two giant egos vying for something: stardom for Lee and street-fighting technique for McQueen.” When Lee got his first movie deal, he called himself the “Oriental Steve McQueen.” Lee then bragged to McQueen that he’d have a more worldwide audience. In response, McQueen sent an 8x10 glossy to Lee signed, “To Bruce, my favorite fan.” The two weren’t friendly rivals so much as rivals pretending to be friends. And although McQueen’s influence on Lee is difficult to pinpoint, Lee’s influence on McQueen is easy to spot. If you’ve ever wondered why Doc McCoy finishes off a butt-kicking in The Getaway with a rather goofy karate chop, now you know.



He Coulda Been a Defectah
There are several films that McQueen turned down because of a lack of interest or problematic preproduction, among them Dirty Harry, The French Connection, First Blood and even Close Encounters of the Third Kind. The one that’s most intriguing, though, is Apocalypse Now, given how easily it could have been a reality. McQueen was first offered the role of Willard, and then, after turning that down, the role of Kurtz. But McQueen intentionally priced himself out of the running, not wanting to spend so much time shooting in a foreign country, having already had a healthy dose of that for The Sand Pebbles. Francis Ford Coppola clearly wanted McQueen, and the project started roughly on time (though it famously didn’t finish that way). So had McQueen been more interested, he’d have been in that picture. The mind boggles trying to imagine if McQueen would have elevated the film’s twisted greatness, morphed it or neutralized it. McQueen as Kurtz is a strange but potentially interesting twist. It’s hard to picture, but not impossible. On the other hand, one doesn’t have to try very hard to imagine McQueen in The Bodyguard, which was originally conceived for him and Diana Ross.



The Remake I’d Endorse
There are only two McQueen films that I consider sacred and untouchable as far as remakes are concerned: The Great Escape and The Magnificent Seven. Those films have a distinctive magic that I don’t think can be adequately duplicated or reimagined (so let's not try, Hollywood, OK?). On the other hand, the remake I would love to see would be Bullitt by Michael Mann. Mann certainly has the resume for it. He seems to be evoking Bullitt in Heat, both in terms of the way Vincent Hanna (Al Pacino), like Frank Bullitt, is losing himself to the darkness of his work and in regard to the film’s climactic shootout in and around airport runways. Also, in Miami Vice, Mann created a film that niftily blends high-caliber action with a sort of romantic-cool mood that takes precedence over a muddled and somewhat inconsequential plot. Sounds like Bullitt. I’m not sure who would star in the picture. Daniel Craig might have been perfect, but now he’s Bond. Matt Damon could have worked, but now he’s Bourne. So maybe one of the Miami Vice stars: Colin Farrell or Jamie Foxx. Or maybe a redefining role for Michael Fassbender, Ryan Gosling or Jeremy Renner. Damn. Heath Ledger might have worked, too.

Steve McQueen: King of the Close-Up

[I’m pleased to debut The Cooler’s first video essay as my contribution to the Steve McQueen Blog-a-thon. As usual, the video plays best if you let it completely buffer before watching. Click here to see it on Vimeo's site in a slightly larger, but not too large, size. A transcript of the narration is below.]

In his first starring role, on TV’s Wanted: Dead or Alive in 1958, and in his last starring role, in 1980’s The Hunter, Steve McQueen played bounty hunters. In between, McQueen played a host of characters who were on the run or behind bars – guys who had been to prison or seemed to be heading there. He played lawmen, too, and leaders, thrill-seekers and risk-takers. He played men of action – guys who always seemed to be cocked and ready. Not muscle men so much as tough guys. Not brave men, because they often seemed immune to fear, but determined ones. With rare exception, McQueen’s characters were strong, silent types, either intentionally or inevitably. Quiet strength was McQueen’s default setting.

Not quite 30 years removed from his death, McQueen tends to be remembered for his role in two of cinema’s most famous action sequences, in The Great Escape and Bullitt, and for his blazing blue eyes, his physical grace and his effortless swagger, which were the substance of several his films. These were the ingredients that helped McQueen earn the honorary title of “The King of Cool,” and rightfully so. But to come to the conclusion that McQueen’s success was simply the result of a handsome, athletic and naturally suave guy playing too-cool-for-school characters is to miss McQueen’s true cinematic gift: He was devastating in a close-up.

Of course, that wasn’t the extent of McQueen’s talent. McQueen was terrific behind the wheel of anything with four tires and he was even better on the seat of a motorcycle. He didn’t do all of his own stunts, of course, but his vehicular abilities allowed directors to get some magical shots that stuntmen couldn’t provide – shots that made action intimate. McQueen was also good on a horse – a skill that wouldn’t be worth much today – and he was terrific with props of all shapes and sizes. Guns. Food. Whatever. Even the engine of a ship. Give McQueen something to do and he was quietly captivating.

In other situations, McQueen seemed painfully out of his element. Thomas Crown Affair screenwriter Alan Trustman noted in Marshall Terrill’s 1993 biography Steve McQueen: Portrait of an American Rebel that when McQueen was uncomfortable “you could squirm watching him.” This is undoubtedly true. Many of McQueen’s particularly squirm-worthy moments came when the actor attempted to wear his heart on his sleeve. But that’s oversimplifying things. Given that McQueen was most comfortable when driving, manipulating a prop, or acting from the shoulders up, it should come as no surprise that he seemed least comfortable when forced to act with his entire body and with nothing in his hands. An apt example would be this scene from Nevada Smith, which Matt Zoller Seitz used to underscore McQueen’s limitations in his cogent 2009 video essay “Too Cool.” As McQueen squats down and looks at his character’s home in flames, he comes off less like a man distraught over the murder of his parents than like an actor who feels naked from the neck down and at a loss for what to do with his hands. It might be the most cringe-inducing moment in McQueen’s career. I mean, other than this one.

McQueen’s biggest fault as an actor wasn’t so much that he couldn’t play emotion but that he couldn’t play his emotions to the back row. McQueen needed the camera to get close enough that he could emote with his face, subtly but intensely, charismatically, powerfully. Some filmmakers had no trouble identifying the money shot and put McQueen’s face to good use, particularly Norman Jewison, who directed McQueen in The Cincinnati Kid, the poker flick full of tight close-ups, and The Thomas Crown Affair, in which McQueen and Faye Dunaway turned a game of chess into steamy foreplay. Other directors used McQueen’s best angle as a tease, intentionally thwarting our ability to look directly into his eyes in order to enhance the emotional unease of the characters. A good example is this scene from Sam Peckinpah’s mostly macho The Getaway, in which McQueen’s Doc McCoy is intimidated by intimacy after years of imprisonment. Also of note is this scene from Baby, the Rain Must Fall, in which McQueen’s Henry Thomas, also recently out of the big house, and now trying to figure out how to support his wife and child, realizes his dreams of being a country music star are just that: dreams.

To call McQueen a limited actor is accurate, but to suggest that his silence is evidence of emptiness is to imply that emotions must be verbally articulated to be deep. Beyond Hollywood’s frustrating habit of bestowing awards to those who act most instead of best, even hardcore cinephiles fall into the trap of praising acting in situations when the screenwriting deserves the lion’s share of acclaim, confusing amazing roles with amazing performances. This is unavoidable, of course. At some point the two cannot be separated. And just like great talkers need great dialogue, great physical actors, like McQueen, need a director with enough sense to point a camera where the action is. Still, one of the reasons that McQueen is thought of as a purely physical actor is because so few screenwriters gave him anything interesting to say. The most quotable line of McQueen’s career might be this one from The Magnificent Seven: “We deal in lead, friend.” Trouble is, McQueen’s would-be catchphrase is merely the punctuation on a conversation between Yul Brynner and Eli Wallach. It’s the first of only two lines for McQueen in a 10-minute span. Given the film’s wealth of heroes, it’s all to easy to come away remembering the line but not the cowboy who said it. “We deal in lead, friend” is a cool line, sure. But what it isn’t as this: “Yippie-ki-yay, motherfucker” – an instant classic.

And that leads us here. Perhaps the most remarkable thing about McQueen is that he’s entirely inimitable – not in the general, “Oh, there’ll never be another one like him” kind of way, but in the sense that he’s truly impossible to impersonate. Given the right props, sure, you could mimic his actions, but other than that you couldn’t “do McQueen,” the way someone could do Jimmy Stewart, Marlon Brando or Humphrey Bogart. McQueen didn’t have a distinctive voice or an unforgettable line. Some actors had both. For this, McQueen deserves a share of the blame. Woefully uneducated, McQueen found dialogue a physical challenge and cut it wherever he could. On the set of The Towering Inferno, he regularly complained that the dialogue was “shit,” but when the screenwriter pressed him for a specific example McQueen confessed that there was nothing wrong with the dialogue itself, he just couldn’t say it. It was because of this, as much as anything, that on the set of The Getaway, McQueen would read the script and say, “Too many words, too many words. I’ll give you a close-up that’ll say a thousand words.”

You have to hand it to McQueen: his arithmetic was usually correct. But sometimes McQueen took silence to the extreme. In Le Mans, the racing film that was the actor’s passion project, McQueen doesn’t utter anything resembling traditional dialogue for more than 37 minutes. Upon the film’s release, Jay Cocks of Time Magazine wrote that McQueen didn’t play a part, he just posed for it. He was right. Then again, there were also instances when McQueen’s terse approach wound up making an otherwise forgettable line of dialogue surprisingly potent. One such instance comes late in The Towering Inferno, when McQueen’s fire chief learns that the only hope for extinguishing the blaze is for him to be airlifted to the top of the skyscraper to blow up some rooftop water tanks with plastic explosives. In that scene, and so many others, McQueen’s magic was the expansiveness of his minimalism. Few actors ever conveyed so much without saying anything at all. McQueen’s physical acting was so efficient, in fact, that in the rare case one of his characters verbally articulated his thoughts, the dialogue usually seemed unnecessarily redundant.

In a way, it’s silly to criticize McQueen for so often playing to his strengths, but there’s at least one film that suggests he didn’t have to be quite so narrow, 1962’s often overlooked The War Lover, in which McQueen plays a womanizing hotshot pilot in World War II. In so many ways, it’s still the typical McQueen role: cocky, intense and tough. But in The Water Lover, McQueen is a little more emotionally vulnerable than normal, even when his character is on the attack. This is the film to recommend to anyone who insists that McQueen could only pose. And yet it’s impossible to overlook the way McQueen dazzles most in a close-up, his blue eyes blazing, even in black-and-white, flashing that visceral coiled intensity that’s so rarely duplicated.

Most actors who try to be as super-cool as McQueen come off like frauds. Every now and then, though, someone recaptures the silent swagger that was the essence of McQueen. Jeremy Renner’s Oscar-nominated portrayal in The Hurt Locker is evidence that McQueen’s brand of acting can be as potent as ever. Two of the film’s most powerful scenes are ones in which Renner doesn’t say a word. But just because McQueen’s acting style has endured doesn’t mean that it would have aged well with him as his star faded and he moved on to smaller supporting roles. Alas, we we’ll never know. McQueen was a top-of-the-marquee star until he died, all too soon, in 1980 at the age of 50 from complications due to cancer.

In a career just over two decades long, McQueen produced a collection of exhilarating films and performances, many of which are still cherished three decades after his death. And though it’s true that the most memorable thing that a McQueen character ever did was something McQueen didn’t do himself – stuntman Bud Ekin’s famous motorcycle jump in The Great Escape – it’s also true that McQueen thoroughly dominated the screen in a way that few other actors have before or since. He was “The King of Cool,” the king of the close-up, and his honorary reign continues.

Announcing the Steve McQueen Blog-a-thon

[March 23 Update: The Steve McQueen McQueen Blog-a-thon is under way here.]

For almost two years now, I’ve posted my cinema ruminations under an iconic image of Steve McQueen from The Great Escape. And yet, despite this blog’s branding, I’ve done very little writing about the King of Cool. With The Cooler just days away from the start of its third year, this must be remedied. And so today I’m announcing that I will host the Steve McQueen Blog-a-thon beginning on what would have been McQueen’s 80th birthday, March 24, and running through March 27.

I have some posts in mind, but I make this announcement now with the hope that other bloggers will take part in this effort. Traditionally, blog-a-thons are built around a genre or director – but rarely an actor or actress. So let’s remedy that, too. Submissions to the Steve McQueen blog-a-thon must meet only one criterion: they must somehow touch on Steve McQueen. If you’d like to write about the actor’s overall film career, go for it. If you’d like to discuss his lasting impact in pop culture, go for it. But bloggers should also feel welcome to write standard reviews of films in which McQueen appears. McQueen needn’t be the focus of your essay. He just needs to be the thread lacing together what I hope will be a wildly diverse group of submissions. (Likewise, please feel no pressure to bow at McQueen’s altar. If you’d like to rant about his limited range or whatever else, please do so.)

Per usual, post your contribution on your blog and send me the link via e-mail or in the comments section the week of the blog-a-thon. If you don’t have a blog and would like to contribute, e-mail me your contribution and I’ll post it here at The Cooler.

Please take part! I'm more excited to see what my fellow bloggers will submit than I am to post my own pieces.

In the meantime, if you wouldn’t mind spreading the word, I’d appreciate it.