Quote of the Day (Director Steve McQueen, on Perversity ‘In the Most Beautiful Places’)

“The world is perverse. And sometime perversity happens in the most beautiful places….You can still go to the American South and visit these whitewashed plantations, and a Scarlett O'Hara figure will give you a guided tour of the place, offer you lemonade or ice cool tea, and show you where the cotton was picked, as if it were Disney World.

“That is where these perverse things happened. And that is what I wanted to show, exactly as it was. Deal with it.”—Director Steve McQueen (12 Years a Slave), quoted in Peter Aspden, “The World is Perverse…Deal With It,” The Financial Times, Oct. 4-5, 2015

In the immensely powerful medium of cinema, it has taken a long time for the truth about slavery to seep out. Even the TV juggernaut that the miniseries Roots became in the 1970s didn’t come close to erasing the image left by Birth of a Nation (or, even more so, Gone With the Wind, pictured) about the nature of the South under slavery.

A little over six years after the premiere of the Oscar-winning 12 Years a Slave, many of the romantic myths surrounding antebellum culture and the Confederacy endure. We shall see if the well-publicized moves by Hollywood’s Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences to open its membership beyond white males will corrode these misperceptions at long last.

Song Lyric of the Day (Sheryl Crow, on Steve McQueen)

“Like Steve McQueen
All I need's a fast machine.”—“Steve McQueen,” written by Sheryl Crow and John Shanks, from Crow’s CD C’mon, C’mon (2002)

Bullitt, the police procedural thriller that cemented McQueen’s status as an “all-American rebel”, was released on this date in 1968 by Warner Brothers/Seven Arts. I doubt if you’ll find many people who remember much about the plot--for the record, it concerns a detective’s assignment to guard a criminal witness and the ensuing complications. 

But nobody who's seen it can forget its seven-minute car chase scene, featuring the bad guys' black 1968 Dodge Charger R/T 440 vs. McQueen’s Highland Green 1968 Ford Mustang GT 390 fastback. It was made all the more memorable by location filming on the streets of San Francisco.

The sequence, designed by Carey Loftin, was surely instrumental in winning an Oscar for editor Frank Keller. Director Peter Yates would go on to direct, 11 years later, a far different—but to my mind, no less exhilarating—chase scene, this time involving bicycles, in Breaking Away. 

But the one from 1968 was undoubtedly more influential, spawning, three years later, Gene Hackman’s breakneck pursuit of a drug dealer through the mean streets of New York in The French Connection—as well as far, far inferior knockoffs.