Trailer
Plot summary
In a Texas prison, Carter "Doc" McCoy is serving ten years for armed robbery and has just been refused parole. When his wife Carol visits, he sends her to Jack Beynon, a member of the parole board and a San Antonio businessman, to bargain for his freedom. Beynon can deliver the release, but he wants something in return: Doc is to plan a bank robbery in Texas and pull it off alongside two of Beynon's men, Rudy Butler and Frank Jackson. Doc agrees. Parole is granted, and he leaves prison committed to the job Beynon has set up for him.
Cast
Did you know?!Facts and trivia about The Getaway (1972)
Can contain spoilers, watch the movie first.
- McQueen's contract with First Artists gave him final cut privileges on The Getaway, and Richard Bright said he chose takes that “made him look good”. Peckinpah was upset: “He chose all these Playboy shots of himself. He's playing it safe with these pretty-boy shots.”
- After the film's second preview screening, McQueen was unhappy with the music and used his clout to hire Quincy Jones to rescore it, with harmonica solos by Toots Thielemans. Peckinpah responded by taking out a full-page ad in Daily Variety containing a letter thanking Fielding for his work.
- Peckinpah and McQueen got into occasional heated arguments during filming. Peckinpah recalled that on the first day of rehearsal in San Marcos, “Steve and I had been discussing some point on which we disagreed, so he picked up this bottle of champagne and threw it at me. I saw it coming and ducked.”
- Jim Thompson was hired by Foster and McQueen to adapt his own novel and worked on the screenplay for four months, keeping the borderline surrealistic ending featuring El Rey, an imaginary Mexican town filled with criminals. McQueen objected to the depressing ending, and Thompson was replaced by screenwriter Walter Hill.
- McQueen and MacGraw began an affair during production; she eventually left her husband, Evans, and became McQueen's second wife, while Foster worried that their relationship could hurt the film by causing a scandal.
- As soon as Peckinpah came on to direct he wanted Stella Stevens, with whom he had worked on The Ballad of Cable Hogue, with Angie Dickinson and Dyan Cannon as possible alternatives; Foster instead suggested Ali MacGraw, much in demand after the commercial success of Love Story.
- Peckinpah originally wanted Jack Palance for the role of villain Rudy Butler but could not afford his salary. Hill recommended Richard Bright, who had worked with McQueen fourteen years earlier but did not have the threatening physique McQueen pictured, so Peckinpah cast him as the con man instead.
- The Laughlin Hotel in El Paso, where the climactic scenes were shot, was demolished in 2013 along with City Hall to make way for Southwest University Park, and the curved framework of the Abraham Chavez Theatre can be seen under construction nearby in the film.
