Steve McQueen is fast and furious but ultimately a little sad

McQueen looking thoughtful in Le Mans (1971)

At the height of his fame Steve McQueen – no, not the artist, the real one – was probably the world’s biggest movie star. He was also the world’s coolest human being which, given that his contemporaries included Paul Newman, Lee Marvin, and James Garner, was no mean feat.

Buoyed by the success of Bullitt and The Thomas Crown Affair, McQueen chose to indulge his real passion; motor racing. The result, Le Mans, released in 1971 was a financial and critical flop which put a serious dent in the careers of almost everyone associated with it. The putative screenwriter Alan Trustman, for example, never worked again even though he was the man who almost more than anyone had made McQueen a star.

The problem with Le Mans was galloping hubris. McQueen wanted to recreate the racing car experience in the hope that audiences would share his adrenaline thrill. The problem was that they didn’t have a script, or at least not one that McQueen liked, and he would abide by no one’s decision but his own. They spent days and days filming race sequences with no story on which to hang them. Big name talent – like The Magnificent Seven and The Great Escape director John Sturges – came and went and still there was no movie.

In the end, faced with massive overages, the studio stepped in. They insisted that McQueen pick a script, any script, and film something approaching a story. The result, racing sequences apart, was predictably uninspiring. Also, and this is never mentioned in the film, the final film was nowhere near as good as Paul Newman’s racing opus Winning which had been released while McQueen was pratting about in France.

Disappointingly much the same can be said for Steve McQueen: The Man and Le Mans. Apart from a catchy title this documentary doesn’t really have a raison d’etre, what it has is a million feet of unedited and unseen footage from the original. So directors Gabriel Clarke and John McKenna have taken this and indulged in a bit of myth-making. There are few real insights – not intentional ones anyway - just lots and lots of cars going round and round with shots of McQueen looking thoughtful and gazing into the middle distance. The result is fine for petrol heads and movie geeks but not much I would suspect for the rest of the audience.

I yield to no one in my admiration of McQueen. I grew up watching his films. He was one of the heroes of my childhood and early youth but even then I always suspected that behind that cool reserve lay not very much. That appears to have been the case. Audiences loved McQueen but none quite so much as he loved himself and that self-regard led to a deep insecurity. In the end he appears to have needed to be loved and told how great he was and, of course, his indecision was final.

Clarke and McKenna seem to have caught the bug. McQueen gets a free pass on the womanising, the abusive relationships, the bullying of staff, almost killing a co-star, and ending the career of a promising driver. Yet when his then wife Neile Adams admits to a spot of romantic retaliation we are told that poor Steve was devastated. It’s a very one-eyed approach that ignores all of the contradictions of McQueen’s life.

I said that there were no intentional insights, but for me the real story of the film is happening in the background. As you’d expect there are lots of archive images of McQueen in his pomp and invariably, just at the corner of the frame, is a sad-looking small boy. This is Chad, his son, who appears to be desperately seeking his father’s approval but can never quite get to be centre stage

In this film we see Chad McQueen again. A full grown man so desperate to follow in his father’s footsteps that he has suffered devastating injuries from a crash in the sort of race his father used to do. Almost forty years on, he’s still going ‘Look at me, Dad’, and that for me was the bittersweet takeaway from this film.