Steve_McQueen: 'A_man's_man'

The following post is part of one of my MA essays under the title: Masculinity; from Classical Hollywood, to Steve McQueen: the 'real-life hero' and his legacy.

Unlike other stars of his era, Steve McQueen was the ‘real-life’ new type of hero, who never attempted to hide his origins (Church Gibson, 2004). The quote below illustrates this clearly: ‘...Brando [was] more of a made actor. McQueen, he was the kind of a self-made actor. Steve never took a job he could never do’ (Jonshon cited in Terrill, 2010:412). McQueen’s childhood and the series of events that followed his life during his adolesence affected, not only his career as an actor, but also the rest of his life. According to Terrill (2010:viii), ‘McQueen’s style goes beyond method acting. He didn’t have to get inside his character’s heads for he had already lived the parts’. Through his roles, McQueen personified a kind of anti-hero and managed, even nowadays, to identify with a great number of men, whatever age and class origins.

The Thomas Crown Affair (Jewison, 1968) is probably the only film where McQueen abandoned his casual, working-class clothes for be-spoke tailored suits and expensive accessories. It is interesting to point out that, the writer Allan Trustman created the role of Thomas Crown, with Sean Connery (who already performed as James Bond) in mind. When Connery rejected the role, no one could imagine McQueen being a successful Boston millionaire, playing polo and golf, smoking cigars, drinking brandy and looking comfortable in his tailored three-piece suits (Terrill, 2010). According to Terrill (2010:146), ‘The Thomas Crown Affair was the only film that Steve ever had to fight for … [that] wanted to do it very badly.’ Later, McQueen revealed that his intense desire to play Thomas Crown was due to the fact that ‘[Crown was] All of these things that Steve wasn’t’ (McQueen cited in Terrill, 2010:148). 

The film’s story portrayed the life of Thomas Crown (Steve McQueen), an attractive Boston millionaire, whose life has run out of challenges and, in order to avoid his boredom, he plans and executes an intelligent bank robbery. The FBI and detective Eddie Malone (Paul Burke) are incapable of solving the case, till Vicky Anderson (Faye Dunaway), the stylish insurance investigator, appears and takes the situation under her own control. Ignoring police methods, Anderson identifies Crown as the above suspicion person behind the robbery. Vicky, using her charm and her mind, decides to confront Crown, by telling him clearly that she knows what he has done. Crown, neither accepts nor denies Vicky’s assumptions; rather, he enjoys her presence in his life and begins an intellectual game with her, which results to a game of romance. The two fall in love and as the weeks go by, Crown, in order to test Vicky’s loyalty, stages another bank robbery. Anderson has to decide if she can ignore her feelings and act as a professional. She, finally, counters him an ambush that leads to an ambiguous and unpredicted harsh ending. 

Despite the overpromising cast, the pioneering, but distracting, split screen techniques and the more than 30 Dunaway’s fashionable, although unnecessary, costume changes, the film didn’t receive the anticipated reviews. According to Saturday Review, ‘Although Jewison insists that his picture is making an important statement about immorality in high places, his message is easily lost in the profusion of peek-a-boo costumes’ (Knight, 1968). Similarly, in Films in Review, Ellen Fitzpatrick McHugh critiques Jewison’s choice to use the ‘anti-hero’ Steve McQueen in the role of a millionaire who will put down ‘the (capitalist) system’, as well as, Dunaway in the place of the female ‘anti-heroine’ investigator, in order to create an ‘anti-film’ (1968:455). McQueen worked insistently in order to embody Thomas Crown, although the overall aesthetic result was more of a ‘parody’ of his predictable roles, and as a result McQueen looks much more relaxed when he wears his leisure outfits. Terrill argues (2010:150) that, ‘Steve [McQueen] felt more pressure on Thomas Crown than ever before. He was never comfortable in a suit and tie, but for the film, he wore one in almost every scene’.

Crown’s clothes and his body posture, when he plays either golf or polo and when he drives his personal plane or his dragster car over the sand dunes, inherently make him look happier and closer to McQueen’s real life. Through the role of Thomas Crown, McQueen not only gave such a lasting value to the Persol sunglasses, but he also made them an essential piece for every stylish man. 

Another casual piece that McQueen manages to turn into a fashionable cloth is the zip-up track-suit top, which he wears during his plane flight. 

Last of all, McQueen’s several appearances in orange color (the toweling robe and the shirt) underlined his sense of fashion and illuminated even more his masculine characteristics. 

Throughout his career as an actor, Steve McQueen, almost intrinsically and without much effort, managed not only to become a fashion icon, but also to create a diachronic style, which appeals to nearly anyone who wants to call himself ‘well-dressed’. While he was alive, several brands used him and his movies in order to promote their products. For example, TAG Heur is one of the most famous brands that has connected its name with McQueen, by providing him the blue-faced Monaco chronograph that he wears in the film Le Mans (Katzin, 1971). 

It is also interesting to mention that, the French department store Le Printempts wanted to turn a whole floor into ‘Steve McQueen’s ranch’, in order to promote a great number of American products, such as boots, hats and Levi’s denim-wear. During the years that followed after his death, McQueen’s image has been repeatedly used by a large number of companies and, even nowadays, continues to attract consumers. In 1993, GAP used, amongst others, McQueen’s iconic figure in her campaign in order to promote its range of khaki trousers.

In 2005, TAG Heur used McQueen’s image again so as to sell the Monaco watch and, in order to ‘celebrate’ McQueen’s 75^th birthday, launched the Monaco Vintage Limited Edition. 

More recently, in 2010 Persol re-issued the foldaway retro-cool tortoiseshell 714 model that McQueen wore in The Thomas Crown Affair, as a part of the Steve McQueen Collection. In the same way, Barbour created The Barbour Steve McQueen collection ‘to pay homage to one of the famous wearers of the international jacket’ (Barbour, 2010). 

In terms of catwalk fashion, in his fall 2011 Ready-to-Wear collection Giorgio Armani printed McQueen’s face on one of his dresses. Before him, Dolce & Cabana, in their spring 2008 Ready-to-Wear collection, had stamped McQueen’s face on their t-shirts.  

In the intervening years after his death, quite a lot of Hollywood actors tried to become ‘the next Steve McQueen’. During the 1980s and early 1990s, Mickey Rourke and Kevin Costner, through a series of movies, attempted to resemble McQueen’s famous roles. Brad Pitt, especially in the early stages of his career, studied McQueen’s on and off-screen iconic looks and tried to emulate them. More recently, Russell Crowe, through films such as L.A. Confidential (Hanson, 1997) and Cinderella Man (Howard, 2005), has managed to draw several comparisons to McQueen’s image. Daniel Craig, almost inescapably as the incumbent James Bond, echoes a ‘new’ Steve McQueen, not only as the action movie star who prefers to operate himself lots of his films’ stunts (as McQueen preferred to do), but also due to his personal style in his off-screen appearances.

In the film Drive (Nicolas Winding Refn, 2011), Ryan Gosling’s looks as the Driver were, according to the costume designer Erin Benach, ‘…very inspired by Steve McQueen’ (cited in Franklin, 2011).

Steve McQueen was ‘a man ahead of his time’ (Terill, 2010: ix). ‘[He] wielded power when it came to the opposite sex and cut a wide swath through the female population’; ‘[he was] a man’s man, a ladies’ man, the original bad boy’ (Terill, 2010: ix) and it is for this reason that men still identify with McQueen. Potentially, each man has ‘a Steve McQueen’ inside him and by studying his movies and his style he can imitate his looks and arouse his ‘hidden’ masculinity. Mulvey (1975 cited in Neale 1993: 11) points out that: ‘As the spectator identifies with the main male protagonist, he projects his look on to that of his like, his screen surrogate’. In the same way, men recognize in McQueen what they would like to become. McQueen was the real working-class boy, who preferred riding his motorcycles, than being a movie star; the every day man who achieved stardom without abandoning his origins, his rebellious lifestyle and his addictive habits. He managed to combine all the features that constitute a prototype for masculinity; an iconic and diachronic look which appeals, today more than ever before, to a great number of men, and particularly, to those ones who want to be perceived as ‘cool’.

For your information the above essay got a B+, and from now on i can confess that i am literally in love with Steve._