GETAWAY, THE - HD DVD review

If imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, then the 1994 remake of "The Getaway" with Alec Baldwin and Kim Basinger would have undoubtedly flattered Sam Peckinpah, Steve McQueen, and Ali MacGraw. I'm sure if Peckinpah and McQueen were still alive, though, they wouldn't have felt threatened by the imitation; the newer movie doesn't hold a candle to their 1972 original.

By 1972, McQueen had become one of the biggest movie stars in Hollywood, and what better a vehicle to showcase his talents as an action hero, an expert driver, and a romantic lead than "The Getaway." After all, "The Great Escape" and "Bullitt" had proved the actor's worth on wheels, and to exploit that angle, Walter Hill's screenplay for "The Getaway" (based on Jim Thompson's novel) gives McQueen plenty of chances for car chases.

What's more, as Carter "Doc" McCoy, McQueen gets to strut his best antihero stuff, as an ex-con bank robber on the lam from the good guys--the police--and the bad guys--former associates--with a pretty girl (MacGraw) by his side. It was a role tailor-made for the actor. While McQueen's character is as cool as ever, Peckinpah's movie is both a sensitive character study and a violent roller-coaster ride typical of the man who brought us "Straw Dogs" and "The Wild Bunch."

Things begin with Doc's release from a Texas prison, where he's spent four years of a ten-year sentence for armed robbery. An influential rancher and hoodlum named Jack Beynon (Ben Johnson) secures his freedom because he wants Doc to mastermind a bank heist for him. The idea is that Doc will head it up, and Beynon's own thugs will assist him. Doc, with the help of his wife, Carol (Ali MacGraw), plans the robbery well enough, but there's no accounting for the stupidity of Beynon's men.

Things go wrong, Beynon's men screw up, and it isn't long before everybody is chasing Doc and Carol, like more of Beynon's men, one of the bank robbers, the police, a con man, a garbage truck, and a kid with a squirt gun.

Like any old-time Western--a genre Peckinpah enjoyed updating and reinventing--"The Getaway" ends in a big shoot-out, so there's no questioning that this is an action movie. Still, you'll find a good deal of character interaction along the way, some of it fun, some of it illuminating, some of it tedious. Make no mistake, though: This is a Peckinpah picture, so expect the violence to be more realistic than in most previous Hollywood movies. Today, we take blood and guts for granted in action and adventure movies, but it was directors like Peckinpah who began the trend toward greater realism. He practically started the sights of blood-soaked bodies, slow-motion deaths, and the like. Nevertheless, the violence is not excessive, especially by recent standards; indeed, one might say it is almost quaint by comparison to some of our more contemporary films.

McQueen and MacGraw are the star attractions, and they work well enough together, their dialogue intentionally terse, often seeming improvisational for better verisimilitude. Maybe it doesn't always make for the smoothest exchanges, and it's easy enough to mistake their sometimes admittedly awkward conversations as simply bad acting. But one gets used to it--used to the uneasy pauses and the flat intonations--and then one slowly begins to recognize it as the way most people actually talk.

Peckinpah moves the story along in proper action-film fashion, although the script tends at times to dawdle unnecessarily in too many of the character relationships, especially in the iffy romance between Doc and his wife, neither of whom seems entirely to trust the other. But, fortunately, Peckinpah surrounded McQueen with the best supporting cast the actor had known since his early days in "The Magnificent Seven" and "The Great Escape."

Longtime Westerner Ben Johnson is solid as the villainous Jack Beynon, ever so respectable on the outside yet thoroughly corrupt on the inside. Slim Pickins is a delight as a crafty old cowboy. And Sally Struthers, known to most audiences of the early 1970s for her role in television's "All in the Family," probably shocked a few people with her portrayal here of an airheaded, sexually frustrated young woman who becomes one of the baddies' more-than-willing hostages, with Jack Dodson as her straightlaced, and boring, veterinarian husband.

But it's Al Lettieri who practically steals the show from McQueen. Lettieri plays Rudy Butler, one of the people Beynon hires to assist Doc in the robbery. He's a treacherous devil with a mind of his own, a real creep, and tough as nails--the villain who refuses to die. You may remember Lettieri as Virgil "The Turk" Sollozzo in "The Godfather." Lettieri had a great time in 1972, and it's a shame he died relatively young, just a few years after he made this movie. He was one of Hollywood's most memorable bad guys.

Anyway, the location shooting in Texas and Quincy Jones's easygoing, jazz-inflected musical score further contribute to the movie's flavor, making Peckinpah's "The Getaway" a standout treat in the genre.

Video:
On the keep case Warner Bros. label the HD-DVD video as "16x9 1.85:1." It's not. The disc preserves most of the film's original 2.35:1 Todd-AO 35 aspect ratio in dimensions that measure approximately 2.20:1 across my screen.

WB's video engineers apparently made a new, high-definition master of "The Getaway" at about the same time made a new master for McQueen's "Bullitt," with both of them looking too dark to admit as much detail as one would like. As with "Bullitt," the filmmakers shot most of "The Getaway" on location, so that may have been partly responsible for the dusky tone. Peckinpah appears to have filmed many of the indoor scenes in natural lighting, and then in outdoor shots he was plagued by a number of overcast days. Nevertheless, most of the movie comes off well enough, slightly better than "Bullitt" does. The 1080 resolution is, as usual, excellent, and when the image is good, it is very, very good, with sparkling whites and intensely deep blacks setting off the rest of the colors, and no actual transfer defects to be seen. Still, a few scenes are softer and fuzzier than others (by HD standards), and you do have to get used to the picture not being quite as brightly lit as you may like.

Audio:
The sound is Dolby Digital Plus 1.0 monaural. Right away, that may scare off a few folks. Don't let it; it's good mono. Indeed, except in a few places where it gets a little too carried away in the upper midrange, it sounds pretty decent. While the dynamic and frequency responses may seem limited by today's measure and there are no surrounds to envelop us in the proceedings, you can't really complain about the audio clarity. The DD+ reproduction is maybe a little bright, but it probably conveys the soundtrack as well as anyone has ever heard it.

Extras:
Foremost among the bonus items we find an audio commentary hosted by Nick Redmon and including analyses of the movie and the director from Peckinpah biographers and authorities Paul Seydor, Garner Simmons, and David Weddle. It can get a bit dry and overly analytical, but for the most part offers a wealth of information. After that is a new, thirty-minute featurette, "Main Title 1M1 Jerry Fielding, Sam Peckinpah and The Getaway," about the movie's score that almost was, with reminiscences about the composer and the director from his family and acquaintances. Then there is a virtual reel-one commentary by Steve McQueen, Ali MacGraw, and Sam Peckinpah; the reel-four bank robbery sequence with an alternate Jerry Fielding score; and Fielding's alternate score for the whole movie (Fielding had done the score for Peckinpah and McQueen's previous movie together, "Junior Bonner").

The bonus items wrap up with a Sam Peckinpah movie trailer gallery that includes "Ride the High Country" (1962), "The Wild Bunch" (1969), "The Ballad of Cable Hogue" (1970), "The Getaway" (1972), and "Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid" (1973). In addition, there are thirty-three scene selections (but no chapter insert); English, French, and Spanish spoken languages; and English, French, and Spanish subtitles, with English captions for the hearing impaired. As always, Warner Bros. also include bookmarks, a zoom-and-pan feature, an indicator of elapsed time, and an Elite Red HD case.

Parting Thoughts:
"The Getaway" scores a triple play: It's a good character examination, a good relationship study, and a good action flick. It's hard to imagine why anybody would want to watch the newer Baldwin/Basinger version when the original is so readily available, and on HD-DVD.