The Getaway (1972)

It is Sam Peckinpah season at the BFI Southbank and these seasons always go by far too quickly, one month usually, and when you work evenings it can difficult to catch a few films to fully appreciate the season, but I am spoilt, at least in London there is an institution to offer the opportunity for consistent retrospectives of interesting filmmakers, I certainly did not have access to such in Sydney, nor on the Central Coast, it was a pleasure to have the opportunity to see Peckinpah’s The Getaway on the big screen, if it was his most mainstream of films, it is a mainstream that has been relegated to the fringes of cinema today, it has a bleak and nihilistic view of America as is typical of the filmmaker, detectable in barbaric and often satirical violence of its leading villain Laughlin, Steve McQueen and Ali McGraw see no chance of redemption except escape to a more desolate landscape in Mexico, it is Peckinpah’s raw talent to have brought the apocalyptic nature of America to the mainstream, a task unfulfilled by any filmmaker since.