PARTISAN REVIEW
441
beyond superficial identification (which is an aspect of the director's
Brechtian intention ) and the film is visually banal,
State of Siege
has
only its dialectic and melodramatic pace to sustain our interest.
As
dialectician, Costa-Gavras is neither Brecht nor Godard. Symptomatic
of the film's strategy is a scene where Santore's children get on a
school bus and the camera pauses significantly on the "American
School" sign on the window.
State of Siege
offers from time to time
something to look at - its justification as a movie - but very little,
really nothing, for the eye to see. Our interest in this movie is im–
personal and ideological, a displacement of what really concerns us
in the privacy of our lives.
2. The Getaway
Unlike
Stage of Siege,
Sam Peckinpah's
The Getaway
is a low–
minded project, a heist-and-escape genre flick, punctuated with vio–
lent killings, and is in every way, except in terms of social usefulness,
superior to the Costa-Gavras. The differences I'm talking about are
not solely differences of technical skill. One director makes didactic
films of admirable intention; the other, no matter how banal the
project, films of personal vision. Like Hawkes and Ford before him,
Peckinpah has learned to define himself within and against the limita–
tions of conventional material.
The Getaway
is exciting not because
of, or not alone because of, cinematic stunts (like the spectacular chase
scenes in
Bullitt
and
The French Connection),
but primarily through
economy and intensity of image.
The Getaway
opens with a shot like a tableau of a deer in re–
pose, just outside the walls of a prison. Like Bresson's
A Man Escaped
with which
it
shares, surprisingly, certain thematic preoccupations,
the title of Peckinpah's film gives away the outcome.
The Getaway
is about the physical and spiritual process of getting free. In an ex–
traordinary opening passage, Peckinpah details what it is for Doc
McCoy (Steve McQueen ) to be trapped in prison, unable to get a
parole because he is being blackballed by a member of the parole
board, Beynon, who wants something from him in exchange for his
freedom. Doc capitulates, sending his wife Carol (Ali MacGraw ) to
tell Beynon that he'll accept his terms, exchanging one kind of im–
prisonment for another.
Doc's freed om is predicated on the robbing of a bank for Beynon
