#12 – “DOC” CARTER & CAROL MCCOY from The Getaway. Like Kurosawa with The Seven Samurai, Sam Peckinpah’s go-to film seems to be The Wild Bunch. Others call upon Straw Dogs or Pat Garrett & Billy the Kid as the best Bloody Sam outing. But for me, it’s The Getaway where marriage counseling is swapped out for a bank robbery and a chase to the Mexican border. Tom Cruise may be right: screw traditional psychiatry. 

At first, I was going to just induct McQueen’s character into the list, but if the last seven years has taught me anything, marriage is a partnership. In her own way, Ali MacGraw’s Carol is just as cut-throat as her husband: she sleeps with a corrupt businessman to get her man out of prison then shoots him dead to rights.

I watched The Getaway several times on the Channel 5 afternoon movie when I’d get home from school, and it probably cemented (or at least intrigued) my interest in badass cinema. This was a movie where business partners double cross one another without blinking an eye, where all you can hope to see in another human being is disappointment, where wives often betray their husbands (I remember vividly the scene where the veterinarian hangs himself, humiliated that his wife is enjoying sleeping with Al Lettieri — perhaps the slimiest characters in Western Civilization). 

It’s a harsh living in a Peckinpah world. But somehow when Doc and Carol make it to the border, smiling with one another, it’s worth the whole ordeal. What a great metaphor for a marriage to survive falling into a dumpster, being driven to the landfill, then ejected into the garbage.

“Punch it, Baby!”