JONATHAN BAUMBACH
(the bank managed by Beynon's brother - the authorities in this
film are all notably corrupt ), which puts him in further jeopardy.
Doc, although a professional bank robber - it seems a curiously
noble trade as McQueen performs it - is a decent man who believes
in keeping his deals in an otherwise-Jacobean world of seemingly end–
less betrayals. The main body of the movie deals with Doc and Carol's
flight toward the Mexican border, charged with a succession of nar–
row and violent escapes, reflective of the tension and distrust in their
relationship. Doc, who has sent his wife to Beynon in exchange for
his freedom (her sexual betrayal of him self-created ), holds against
her unforgivingly the very thing he has asked her by implication to do.
The turning point of
The Getaway
takes place in a barren land–
scape of burning garbage (Peckinpah's version of the fires of hell )
where the McCoys, filthy and degraded, come to what seems the
end of their partnership. Carol wants to separate, indicating that she
is through putting up with blame and distrust. The scene is extreme–
ly brief - this is an action film after all- and underplayed. "It's not
going to mean anything," Doc says, "unless we make it together."
In the cramped space of an abandoned Volkswagen, Doc risks trust–
ing Carol (puts his gun away), which is both a choice and a neces–
sity. "I chose you, not him," she says. They walk out of hell with
their arms around each other. Together, as a team - it is one of the
metaphors of the film - the McCoys are magically potent. The dan–
gers faced in a mythic landscape are one's private demons made mani–
fest. The essential getaway for Doc and Carol, Peckinpah lets us
know, is from self-imprisonment. External freedom follows as a
matter of course. The McCoys' coordination as a team is in significant
contrast to the deviousness and vicious self-concern of the other human
transactions in the film.
This thematic sypnopsis does limited justice to the achievement
of
The Getaway,
which has to do with cinema and not idea, but it
does suggest, I hope, that Peckinpah is not the violence-obsessed, neo–
Fascist primitive that a number of reviewers imagine him to
be.
A
personal moral code, which is not without some complication,
in–
{onus all of his work. His heroes are anarchists of necessity, renegades
against the world, defining personal integrity in their resistance to
corrupt and arbitrary authority.
The Getaway
ha<;
a strong sense of the relationship between
land-
