The Life Steve McQueen by Dwight Jon Zimmerman

Author:Dwight Jon Zimmerman
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: MBI
Published: 2017-03-13T04:00:00+00:00

AN ENEMY OF THE PEOPLE

An Enemy of the People was a project that didn’t come to him—McQueen went to it. Bored with the standard Hollywood fare he was being sent, once The Towering Inferno was finished, McQueen decided to retire. But after a couple years of boredom set in, he decided to do something different in film. That “something different” was a doozy: An Enemy of the People, a movie based on Arthur Miller’s 1950 adaptation of Henrik Ibsen’s 1882 play.

A political metaphor about a resort town in crisis after it discovers its source of income, a scenic well, is contaminated, it was the opposite of everything that McQueen’s movie persona was. But performing in a classic piece of literature was why McQueen wanted to do it.

A great international cast that included Bibi Andersson and Charles Durning was assembled. For McQueen, An Enemy of the People represented the ultimate challenge for him as an actor, and he enthusiastically threw himself into the main role of Dr. Thomas Stockmann. But his labor of love proved to be anything but for the studio, First Artists, and distributor, Warner Bros. The short version: they didn’t know what to do with it. The long version: they really didn’t know what to do with it.

Instead of a McQueen action- adventure movie they knew they could sell, they had an against-type art house film. The picture was screened in select “preview” venues, where it was savaged by critics who, like the studio, didn’t know how to respond to it. Warner Bros. never officially released it.

Though critics hated it, many of McQueen’s peers were impressed by the movie. One those peers was Clint Eastwood. Eastwood was so taken by what McQueen had done that he told him, “You have the guts and the courage that I don’t. I would love to be able to leave a classic behind, but I can’t.”

Years later, shortly after McQueen died, the film’s director, George Schaefer, received a request from the Ibsen Society of America asking for a print of the film to show its membership. Schaefer attended the screening with some trepidation. “I was trembling,” he recalled, “because I thought they might light into it. On the contrary, they were impressed with the performances, and the look and the wardrobe and the whole flavor of it. I think we did all we could with it, considering the budget we had. I think Steve accomplished what he wanted to do. It got some nice reactions.…”

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