Word: mcqueen
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...Flip's, a little girl in the grimy ghetto streets of Jersey City. The personality owes something to Sapphire, the endearingly bossy housewife on the Amos 'n' Andy radio show of the 1930s and '40s. The voice is derived from the Delta screech of Butterfly McQueen, the eye-rolling, stereotyped black maid in Gone With the Wind, and of so many other Hollywood oldies. What is different and up-to-date about Geraldine, says Flip, is that "she demands respect. She is not a loose woman. She always has some meaningful employment...
...were lifted straight out of some industrial short like The Glory of Tupperware. Brown solemnly informs us, via the sound track, how dangerous the whole business of bike racing really is, and his attitude toward such pros as Mert Lawwill and Malcolm Smith and talented amateurs like Steve McQueen is plainly, sometimes embarrassingly, adulatory. In the course of his narration Brown mentions that there are 4,000,000 motorcycle riders in the U.S., which gives him a neatly packaged audience who will presumably be more sympathetic toward On Any Sunday than many unconverted viewers for whom the machines might just...
...Steve McQueen's style of glacial cool has been perfected close to the point of impenetrable mannerism. Playing a racing driver in Le Mans, he only stands in front of the camera and allows himself to be photographed. Occasionally his lips will twitch into that shy, strong, ironic half-smile that he has made his trademark. In really grandiose scenes he may make a gesture. He might even wave. But only under pressure...
...story, like the star's acting, is so spare as to be virtually nonexistent: McQueen, injured in the race last year, returns to the competition to have another go at it. Since the film makers appear to have been interested in constructing a kind of fictional documentary, most of the dialogue has been eliminated. What remains is either mundane, mechanical chattel-or pitiful profundities of the why-I-race variety. Visually, the film never gets out of low gear. There is not a single scene or shot that was not done first and better by John Frankenheimer in Grand...
...McQueen is still potentially a good movie actor, but he needs someone to loosen him up, make him play a part, not pose for it. In Le Mans he has surrounded himself with the sort of second-rate production talent that offers no protest to his rampant self-indulgence. Le Mans may be the most famous auto race in the world, but from a theater seat it just looks like a big drag...