Le Mans: The Elusive Cool of Steve McQueen
After watching all the McQueen classics, I finally get it.
I was about 6 or 7 years old when my Dad showed me The Magnificent Seven, the American remake of Akira Kurosawa’s immortal The Seven Samurai which placed the story in the American West and replaced all the samurai with gunslingers and cowboys. Despite being an American remake of a beloved foreign classic, The Magnificent Seven has still enjoyed a merry reputation of its own. That’s largely thanks to the memorable and career-defining performances from many of the central seven actors.
The two leads were obviously Yul Brynner as seasoned gunfighter Chris Adams, hot off an Oscar-winning performance from The King and I. The other was up-and-coming television actor Steve McQueen as Brunner’s cool-headed right hand man. While McQueen was one of the more lightweight names in the cast at the start of production, he would end up becoming the biggest name from the cast and one of the most legendary movie stars ever produced by Hollywood. Dubbed “The King of Cool,” McQueen would go on to give iconic performances in pivotal genre films such as Bullitt, The Thomas Crown Affair, and perhaps most famous in The Great Escape, which is the film that catapulted him to A-Tier stardom.
That being said, I always preferred Brynner, even as a kid. It was clear that Brynner commanded the screen with an unusual bravado and swagger that wasn’t characteristic of leading men at the time. There was an intensity to Brynner that wasn’t to be found in a John Wayne performance( aside possibly from The Searchers), but there was a sincerity that wouldn’t be found in a Clint Eastwood Spaghetti Western. It was that dynamite combo that made him the obvious lead, and McQueen, for all his King-of-Coolness, just didn’t have that screen presence to rival that. And that’s an opinion I held about the man after watching many of his quintessential classics.
Sure, he was hip as Frank Bullitt. But he wasn’t Dirty Harry. He played a solid tormented prisoner in Papillion. But he wasn’t Cool Hand Luke. He made a great gangster-in-love-and-on-the-run in The Getaway. But he wasn’t Warren Beauty. And he made a fun sidekick to Yul Brynner. But he certainly wasn’t Yul Brynner. That’s put me on something of a lonely island among Film Bros, who all continue to champion McQueen as one of the definitive movie stars. And he certainly is. But he wasn’t one of the definitive actors of his generation, not to the degree that a Paul Newman or Sidney Poitier could be. And after years of being slightly underwhelmed by Steve McQueen media, and after hearing him being hyped up by the likes of Quentin Tarantino, I started to question my antipathy towards the man’s body of work.
Finally, I came to the conclusion that I was put off by the man’s elusive style. This is something that’s aided him, that’s added to the “Steve McQueen” mystique as Tarantino would call it. That stands to reason, it seems that there needs to be a certain element of “elusiveness” to maintain that mysticism. Paul Newman is one of my favorite actors, but I would concede that the man doesn’t have a mystique to his name because he gave himself so completely in all of his iconic roles. Even his most steely-eyed and charismatic performance as Cool Hand Luke resonates so well because of the moments of vulnerability that Newman offers. Watching him sing “Plastic Jesus” after the death of his mother, watching him get worn down by the prison guards after nearly escaping, moments that don’t undermine his charisma, but that give a keyhole view into the man’s psyche, into his soul. In those moments, there’s not a shred of vanity to Paul Newman, and he’s not concerned about whether these moments will add to his movie-star stock.
Steve McQueen always considered himself a movie star, and always approached every role like a movie star. The man was a notoriously selfish performer that would only work with an actor of his star caliber if meant the chance to upstage them, a la his dueling rivalry with Paul Newman that manifested into The Towering Inferno. Even early in his career, he developed a longstanding feud with Brunner on the set of “The Magnificent Seven” because the two couldn’t stop trying to one-up each other. That added to the dynamic of their on-screen chemistry, but if you treat every film set like a race, then eventually you’re going to come up short.
Again, I had maintained all of these thoughts about The King of Cool for a good while. That is, until I saw Le Man McQueen’s pseudo-docudrama about Europe’s most legendary sports racing event. It was not a film I was inclined to check out because car chases are the drum solos of action movies, and I don’t ever need to hear another drum solo for as long as I live.
But I was finally intrigued after hearing some behind-the-scenes factoids about the film, namely that Steve McQueen feuded with the director Lee H. Katzin, but not for the sake of his ego: because he wanted Le Mans to be an unorthodox racing picture that took nods from European arthouse cinema, which hadn’t yet seeped into the mainstream.
That didn’t sound like the Steve McQueen I knew. Or the one I “thought” I knew. I’d been wrong before. After all, I hated Neil Young the first time I heard him(go easy, I was twelve). So I finally checked it out, and… I got it.
I’m not about to say that Le Mans is McQueen’s greatest performance or his greatest film. Both would probably be far from the truth. But this was the first film that got to the heart of the Steve McQueen persona that everyone else appeared to love. Papillion certainly had the actor display more vulnerability than any other role, but McQueen brought his cool streak to a character that was in no way his own. We had not yet had a property character study of the King of Cool, that ever-confident and never-shaken commodore of all things hip and bad-ass.
Le Mans isn’t exactly a “character study” because it doesn’t devote itself to peeling back McQueen’s layers, it’s so focused on automobile photography. But it still manages to place in the driver’s seat with McQueen like no film before, giving McQueen’s typical performance a brooding edge that was missing from flicks like “Bullitt.”
People have often called Le Mans a feature-length version of the legendary car-chase scene from Bullitt. Easy to see why, there’s literally not a word of spoken dialogue until the 40-minute mark because the camera’s too busy lingering on the racing cars. But that comparison undermines the psychological element that lies in the subtext of Le Mans, or the emotional context.
McQueen plays famous racing driver Michael Delaney, who’s facing off against an equally talented German rival years after nearly dying in a fatal car crash. There’s not a single line of dialogue, that I can remember, which is devoted to this car crash or how it’s affected Delaney’s mental state. But McQueen’s close-ups do all the taking, and his inimitable screen presence becomes not the star of the show, but the emotional engine driving the whole piece.
But rather uniquely to his filmography, McQueen isn’t the star of the show and he’s fine with it. He forfeits his stardom to the sport of racing, much like how Delaney(spoiler alert) forfeits his victory to one of his rivals at the end. Le Mans isn’t a racing picture in that it’s “about” racing, it is racing. Both McQueen’s rivalries and his inner struggle as all told through the never-ending race, making it something of a precedent to the equally action-driven Mad Max Fury Road.
Though it has to be said, Fury Road is a loud experience, a parade of madness with an electric guitar that shoots fire. Le Man is a shockingly quiet movie, a move that seemed to stun critics but has given it a true arthouse quality. McQueen famously battled with the director in order to prevent this from becoming a typical racing picture, because he had such a love for the sport that he wanted to give it an on-screen reverence, distinguishing it from anything close to a typical Hollywood spectacle.
But make no mistake, Le Mans is spectacular, even all these years later. No, it can’t compete with the special effects of a Fast and Furious sequel, but the artistic flair and haunting use of silence give more weight to the car crashes than I can remember from any car-chase set piece of recent years.
It’s not McQueen’s most multi-dimensional picture, and that’s something that could hold it back for many audience members. That’s why it didn’t resonate with audiences at the time, that and the left-of-center mise-en-scene. But it was the first time I felt that McQueen cared more about something in one of his films than himself, or his status as a movie star. As McQueen says in the film, in one of the few spoken lines he has, that “racing… is life.”
McQueen’s love for driving and cars had been on display all throughout his career, most notably in Bullitt. And he wasn’t just an enthusiast, he had real street cred as a racer and actually was one of the stunt drivers for Le Mans So it makes sense that this is the first film that I had seen where his sense of passion was palpable on screen. For that alone, it’s one of his most endearing roles and one of his few movies that genuinely comes across as a labor of love.