The Getaway (1972) and The Getaway (1994) Review

The Getaway has been adapted twice. Both versions are worth viewing for different reasons. The 8.5 rating is for the combined achievement. Sam Peckinpah directed the 1972 original with Steve McQueen and Ali MacGraw. Roger Donaldson directed the 1994 remake with Alec Baldwin and Kim Basinger. Both films are based on Jim Thompson’s 1958 noir novel. Walter Hill wrote the 1972 screenplay, and Amy Holden Jones reworked it for the 1994 remake. Both productions document a bank robbery’s aftermath and the resulting pursuit of the robbers by criminal associates who want their cut.

I enjoy both of these films, and I find myself wishing I could splice them together. The 1972 version has the swagger and the 1994 version has the better villains. What keeps both of them short of a 9 for me is the ending. Jim Thompson wrote something far nastier than either studio was willing to touch.

The Setup (Both Versions)

Doc McCoy is a professional thief serving a long prison sentence. His wife Carol is on the outside. Doc cuts a deal with criminal boss Jack Beynon. Beynon will arrange parole if Carol provides specific services.

Carol provides the services. Doc is paroled. Beynon assigns Doc to lead a bank robbery in a small Texas town. The crew is Doc, Carol, and two men chosen by Beynon: Rudy Butler and Frank Jackson.

The robbery succeeds. Jackson kills a guard during the robbery, and Rudy kills Jackson in the getaway car. Rudy then tries to kill Doc, and Doc shoots him and leaves him for dead. Doc and Carol take the money to the rendezvous with Beynon. Beynon attempts to take both the money and Carol. Carol shoots Beynon. Doc and Carol flee with the money. Rudy survives his wounds and pursues them with murderous intent.

The film documents the pursuit. Doc and Carol travel through Texas toward the Mexican border. Rudy follows. Beynon’s associates also pursue. Doc and Carol fight with each other about Carol’s deal with Beynon. They survive multiple confrontations. They reach the border. They escape into Mexico with the money. The plot is simple. The execution makes the difference between the two versions.

The 1972 Version

Sam Peckinpah directed the 1972 version after The Wild Bunch (1969), Straw Dogs (1971), and Junior Bonner (1972).

Peckinpah was at the height of his career. The Getaway was his largest commercial production to that point. The film made approximately $36 million on a $3.5 million budget. The commercial success exceeded the critical reception. Peckinpah-era critics treated the film as compromised by the McQueen-MacGraw star casting and by the studio’s commercial expectations.

The film is more direct than Peckinpah’s other major works. The Wild Bunch works with real thematic depth about violence and aging. Straw Dogs works with real thematic depth about civilization and primal violence.

The Getaway is straight-ahead crime thriller. Peckinpah was a craftsman across genres and could deliver commercial material when the production required it. The Getaway is one of his cleaner commercial productions.

The Peckinpah signatures are all here: slow-motion violence, multiple-camera coverage of the action and editing that cuts to rhythm over chronology. The robbery and the El Paso hotel shootout show the approach most clearly, and I think the hotel sequence is the reason the 1972 version still feels alive.

Peckinpah stages violence as choreography. You can spot the technique across his whole filmography, and I like it more than almost anybody’s cleaner coverage.

The McQueen-MacGraw Casting

Steve McQueen and Ali MacGraw began a relationship during production. MacGraw’s existing marriage to producer Robert Evans complicated the relationship. The on-set affair became public during filming. The resulting tabloid attention contributed to the film’s commercial success. McQueen and MacGraw married in 1973 after MacGraw’s divorce. They divorced in 1978.

The chemistry between the leads is visible in the film. McQueen and MacGraw are playing characters who are in difficult marriages that require constant negotiation between them. The audience reads the actual relationship between the actors as informing the on-screen relationship. The doubling produces an intimacy that pure performance work couldn’t have generated.

The personal relationship also hurt the production. MacGraw is the weak link, and I find her flat in scenes that need Carol to push back. McQueen was the more experienced actor and the dominant partner off screen, and the film tilts toward him. Walter Hill’s screenplay had given Carol equal dramatic stakes, and I’d love to see the version where she gets them.

The 1994 Version

Roger Donaldson directed the 1994 remake. Donaldson had been working in Hollywood since The Bounty (1984) and No Way Out (1987). His career was professional instead of auteur-driven. The Getaway remake fit his approach. He delivered competent execution of established material without imposing a personal style.

The casting was Alec Baldwin as Doc and Kim Basinger as Carol. Baldwin and Basinger were married at the time of filming. The marriage paralleled the McQueen-MacGraw situation, but the Baldwin-Basinger relationship was more stable than the earlier marriage had been. The on-screen chemistry is different from the 1972 version. Baldwin and Basinger play a more conventional movie-star couple than McQueen and MacGraw had played. The energy is less raw and more glossy.

The supporting cast is considerably stronger than the 1972 version’s, and it’s the main reason I’d defend the remake. James Woods plays Beynon with far more menace than Ben Johnson managed. Michael Madsen plays Rudy with the unsettling intensity he’d been building since Reservoir Dogs (1992), and I think he’s the scariest thing in either film. David Morse turns up as Jim Deer Jackson, and Jennifer Tilly plays Fran Carvey, the veterinarian’s wife Rudy abducts. That supporting work lifts the 1994 version above what its star casting would suggest.

The Comparative Approach

Neither version is definitive. The 1972 version has Peckinpah’s directorial signature and McQueen’s iconic star presence but suffers from MacGraw’s limited performance and a glossy 1970s sheen that’s aged unevenly. The 1994 version has stronger supporting performances and a more contemporary visual tone but lacks the directorial personality that gave the 1972 version its edge.

The Walter Hill screenplay anchors both versions. Hill wrote the 1972 screenplay, and Amy Holden Jones revised it for the 1994 production. The structural choices remain consistent across both films. The bank robbery in the second act. The Beynon double-cross.

The Rudy pursuit. The veterinarian abduction subplot. The Mexican border resolution. The same screenplay produced different films because the directors made different choices about execution and tone.

Audiences who watch both versions get a complete picture of what the Jim Thompson source material can support. The 1972 version is the rawer interpretation. The 1994 version is the polished interpretation. The combined viewing produces material neither film alone delivers. The 8.5 rating reflects the combined achievement instead of either film individually.

The Jim Thompson Source

Jim Thompson wrote The Getaway in 1958. The novel is one of his strongest works in a career that included The Killer Inside Me, A Hell of a Woman, Pop. 1280, and dozens of other novels. Thompson worked in the noir tradition but pushed the form to extremes most genre writers avoided.

His protagonists are typically damaged in ways the genre conventions couldn’t accommodate. His novels usually end darker than the genre formula prescribed.

Each Getaway film softens the source material. Thompson’s novel ends with Doc and Carol crossing into Mexico to discover the country has a special legal system that traps fugitive Americans permanently. They reach a place called “El Rey” which is a kind of hell for criminals. They lose their money. They lose each other. They lose themselves. The novel ending is one of the darkest in noir fiction.

Both films stop before the El Rey sequence.

Doc and Carol cross into Mexico with their money. The films treat the crossing as escape. The novel treated the crossing as the beginning of a different and worse imprisonment. The choice to stop short of the novel ending is the films’ largest deviation from the source. The films are more commercially accessible than the novel. The novel is more thematically honest than the films.

The Walter Hill Screenplay

Walter Hill wrote the 1972 screenplay, and the 1994 version reworks it. The 1972 version was his second produced screenplay after Hickey & Boggs (1972). Hill went on to direct The Driver (1978), The Warriors (1979), 48 Hrs. (1982), Streets of Fire (1984), and other productions. His own directorial career worked in the same crime-thriller tone as The Getaway screenplay. The connection between his screenwriting work and his directorial work is direct.

Hill’s structural approach is recognizably his own. The plot moves through clean dramatic beats with minimal exposition. The dialogue is efficient. The action sequences are choreographed with specific tactical detail. The characterization happens through behavior instead of through self-disclosure. The audience receives the story through accumulated incident instead of through extended dramatic scenes. The approach has been influential. Many later crime thrillers work in the Hill tone.

The 1994 revision tightened some elements of the 1972 version. The pacing is faster. The supporting characters are more developed. The dialogue is more contemporary. The structural changes didn’t damage the original work. They updated the work for a 1990s audience. Both versions of the screenplay are professional craft. Neither is dramatically better than the other.

The Action Sequences

The robbery sequence in both versions is the films’ first major set piece. The 1972 version uses Peckinpah’s choreographed slow-motion approach. The 1994 version uses Donaldson’s more conventional action coverage. Both versions deliver the same plot beats. The execution feels considerably different. Audiences who watch both in sequence can study how different directors handle the same scripted material.

The hotel shootout in the 1972 version is the film’s most discussed sequence. Doc takes on Beynon’s men through the halls, stairwell and elevator of an El Paso hotel. The choreography is careful. Peckinpah uses multiple camera angles and editing patterns that exceed normal action coverage. The sequence works both as genre execution and as Peckinpah’s signature work. The 1994 version handles the same material more conventionally and produces a less distinctive sequence.

The garbage truck sequence in both versions is the films’ most extended action set piece. Doc and Carol hide in a garbage truck after their car is destroyed. They survive being dumped into the trash. They emerge from the garbage covered in filth. The sequence is structurally identical in both versions. The 1972 version is grittier. The 1994 version is more visually polished. Both versions deliver the same beats with different production aesthetics.

The Ending (Both Versions)

Both films close with Doc and Carol crossing into Mexico. They’ve killed Rudy in the final confrontation. They have the money. They’re free of the criminal associates who had been pursuing them. The films cut to black with them riding into Mexico together.

The ending is the films’ largest deviation from Thompson’s novel, and it’s where both of them lose me a little.

The novel continues into El Rey, where Doc and Carol discover that Mexico has trapped them for good. The films stop at the border and give the audience a victory, while the novel reader got the start of a damnation. I understand the commercial logic, and I still wish one of these directors had the nerve to shoot Thompson’s ending.

Craft: Two Complementary Achievements

Is The Getaway (1972) and The Getaway worth watching?

An 8.5, and I’d watch them as a pair.

The 1972 film gives you Peckinpah and McQueen at full strength, the 1994 film gives you Woods and Madsen, and Walter Hill’s screenplay holds both together. The half point I hold back is for the ending they share, which throws away the darkest thing Thompson wrote. That loss of nerve is the whole gap between these films and a 9.

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