In pursuit of Steve McQueen

“I live for myself and I answer to nobody.”

“When I believe in something, I fight like hell for it.”

“I worked hard, and if you work hard you get the goodies.”

-- Steve McQueen

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Lean, sexy, tough and wild, Steve McQueen drove fast cars and motorcycles and lived life on the edge. His acting style was magnificently minimal -- even his appearance was pared down with his buzz-cut hair, jeans, turtlenecks and denim shirts and jackets.

“He was like one of the beautiful sports cars he loved to race,” says Dennis Bartok, programming manager for the American Cinematheque. “He had this beautiful exterior and this massive 440 cc engine under the hood, and when you hit the gas it was going to go, go, go.”

So it’s surprising that despite McQueen’s popularity -- which seems, if anything, to grow over the years -- there has never been a major retrospective of the actor’s work in Los Angeles. Beginning Thursday, the 22nd anniversary of his death at the age of 50 from complications due to cancer, the Cinematheque is celebrating his remarkable career with the four-day retrospective “Low Rider: The Super-Charged Cinema of Steve McQueen.”

The festival opens with “The Great Escape,” the 1963 World War II epic that made him a superstar, and continues with two of his hits from 1968, the thrilling detective flick “Bullitt” and the sophisticated “The Thomas Crown Affair”; the 1973 epic “Papillon,” in which he gives one of his best and most underrated performance as French convict Henri “Papillon” Charriere; the two 1972 films he made with director Sam Peckinpah, “The Getaway” and the lovely character study “Junior Bonner”; the seminal 1960 western “The Magnificent Seven”; the Norman Jewison-directed 1965 drama “The Cincinnati Kid,” in which he played an ambitious gambler; and Don Siegel’s sparse 1962 war drama, “Hell Is for Heroes.”

“He was maybe not the greatest actor who ever appeared in movies, but he had a charisma and a magnetism about him that registered so powerfully on the screen,” says Rick Jewell, associate dean of USC’s School of Cinema-Television. “When you think about his career, his big breakthrough films are ‘Magnificent Seven’ and ‘The Great Escape.’ They are both ensemble films in which he’s working with a number of very strong, in fact, powerful actors, and yet what you remember from those films more than anything else are the characters that he played in the film. Somehow he just leaped off the screen.”

McQueen, says Jewell, instinctively knew the way “for him to go was to underplay. Yet there was this kind of extraordinary energy that emanated out from him the camera recognized.... . He was like Garbo. He didn’t have to do anything. He just had to be there and embody those characters.”

Though many actors have aspired to be the next McQueen, no one has been able to fill his shoes. “He became a model for ‘I want to be like....’ ” says his former producing partner and friend, Bob Relyea. “I have seen so many attempts to imitate him, but they don’t work well. You can’t just go and have that look and have that posture and cut down the words that you use and have the same results.”

McQueen, says Bartok, has become the “archetype for a certain style of American male actor. You can see it in a lot of younger actors, like Paul Walker for example. Everybody says that about Matt Damon -- you can see certain McQueenisms in his performance.”

Bartok points out a perfect McQueen moment in “Papillon” in which his character is being transported with other prisons to the penal colony. “A couple of the other prisoners are talking about how bad it is,” relates Bartok. “McQueen is just listening and it’s a beautiful kind of case study of what makes a star. For any other star, the McQueen character would be the one asking the questions, but McQueen is different. He doesn’t need dialogue, but your eyes are on him the whole time.”

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Like Steve McQueen

All I need’s a fast machine

I’m gonna make it all right

Like Steve McQueen

Underneath your radar screen

You’ll never catch me tonight

-- Sheryl Crow

and John Shanks,

from the song

“Steve McQueen C’Mon, C’Mon”

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McQueen was the quintessential street kid who made good. Born in 1930 in Slater, Mo., he was abandoned as a child by his father and as a teenager spent time in a boys reform school in Chino. When he became a star, he continued to send clothes and money to the school. He spent time in the Marines during the late ‘40s and worked as a lumberjack, bartender, carnival barker and TV repairman before joining the Neighborhood Playhouse in 1952 to study acting. He worked in live television early in his career, most notably playing a young man on trial for murder in Reginald Rose’s drama “The Defender.”

In 1958, he starred in the cult classic sci-fi flick “The Blob” and landed the role of a bounty hunter in the TV western series “Wanted: Dead or Alive.” More movie roles followed in the late ‘50s. It was “The Magnificent Seven” (1960), in which he played a hired gun, that transformed him into a star.

He received his one and only Oscar nomination for his touching role as a engineer working on an American gunboat in 1920s China in Robert Wise’s 1966 film “The Sand Pebbles.” After “The Towering Inferno” in 1974, McQueen stayed off the screen for several years, returning in the late ‘70s in the ill-fated “An Enemy of the People,” based on Henrik Ibsen’s play, and two poorly received films, “Tom Horn” and “The Hunter,” which were released a few months prior to his death in 1980.

Not everyone admires McQueen’s style. Film critic Richard Schickel admits he is not a big fan: “He got more minimalist [during his career] so by the time he was doing ‘Sand Pebbles’ it was like, “Hello, Steve. Are you there?’ ”

McQueen, Schickel adds, “was sort of a necessary guy in the movies in the sense that he brought a certain amount of useful ‘60s kind of sprit to the movies. He was a cool guy. To me he sometimes projected too much sort of sullenness and withdrawal, but there was a lot of withdrawal in younger people at that time.”

The actor had a reputation for being very difficult on the set. Relyea, whose professional and personal association with McQueen ended after the 1971 film “Le Mans,” thought that knock on the actor was unfair.

“He felt that he knew his craft and had specific ideas about it,” says Relyea. . “He had his ideas of what he wanted to do ... and he had some very specific ideas of what kind of holster to use and what the hat would look like. He had a lot of questions, and he was prepared and he was professional.

“Sure he had his faults and moods. He had serious moods swings, but at the same time if I had a personal issue or a problem, he would be there in case he was needed. You can’t say that about a lot of your friends.”

The actor, says Relyea, also believed he was the reincarnation of Alexander the Great. “It was a little spooky because he resembled the old statues [of Alexander]. But he really believed it.”

Michael T. Marsden, professor of English and cultural studies at Eastern Kentucky University and co-editor of the Journal of Popular Film and Television, says if McQueen hadn’t died at a relatively young age, he wouldn’t have had the enduring appeal he has accrued over the decades. “You don’t see him in any other way except at his full powers,” says Marsden.

“He is that quintessential male hero and if he were to grow old, he would lose that. James Dean is always the perpetual teenager-young adult and McQueen is the perpetual adult male hero. He never got to be that golden age. He was always captured at the peak of his power.”

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‘Low Rider’

What: “Low Rider: The Super-Charged Cinema of Steve McQueen”

Where: Egyptian Theatre, 6712 Hollywood Blvd., Hollywood.

Thursday at 7:30 p.m.: “The Great Escape”

Friday at 7:30 p.m: “Bullitt,” with Bob Relyea and cinematographer William Fraker in person; “The Thomas Crown Affair”

Saturday at 5 p.m: “Papillon”

Saturday at 8:45 p.m.: “The Getaway” and “Junior Bonner”

Sunday at 3 p.m.: “The Magnificent Seven”

Sunday at 6:15 p.m.: The Cincinnati Kid” and “Hell Is for Heroes”

Price: $8

Contact: 323-466-FILM