OVP: The Reivers (1969)

Film: The Reivers (1969)

Stars: Steve McQueen, Sharon Farrell, Mitch Vogel, Rupert Crosse, Juano Hernandez, Burgess Meredith

Director: Mark Rydell

Oscar History: 2 nominations (Best Supporting Actor-Rupert Crosse, Score)

Snap Judgment Ranking: 2/5 stars

Each month, as part of our 2026 Saturdays with the Stars series, we are looking at the men & women who created the Boom!-Pow!-Bang! action films that would come to dominate the Blockbuster Era of cinema.  This month, our focus is on Steve McQueen: click here to learn more about Mr. McQueen (and why I picked him), and click here for other Saturdays with the Stars articles.

Steve McQueen, fitting of a man synonymous with both a sex symbol persona and a cool guy elusiveness, had both a lot of romantic conquests in his life as well as not a lot of press about them, save for his marriage to 1970's superstar actress Ali MacGraw, whom he costarred with in 1972's The Getaway (which I'd already seen, hence why it's not the movie today) and which spanned most of MacGraw's time as a major box office draw post-Love Story.  McQueen, though, would marry three times, including model Barbara Minty very late in his life (they were married less than a year before his death), and would have affairs with Mamie van Doren & Lauren Hutton.  But fitting a man whose onscreen personas rarely are ones that a "woman can tame," none of these relationships really defined his career in the way that Joanne Woodward's relationship with his peer Paul Newman would (or Warren Beatty's legendary bed-hopping would until he married Annette Bening).  

(Spoilers Ahead) I bring this up because the movie we're watching today is something of an outlier in McQueen's career.  The Reivers, based on a work by William Faulkner, is a tale of the South (like all of Faulkner's stories), but one with very little complicated plot and were it not for the presence of McQueen (then a massive star in a way the studio couldn't afford) and the presence of a bordello, there are moments in this that have the vibes of a Disney film, with an unlikely parental guardian in Boon (McQueen) looking after young Ned (Vogel), taking him on an adventure through the countryside along with their friend Ned (Crosse) in a bright yellow 1904 Winton Flyer.  The film itself has multiple chapters, but not a lot of common thread, and is told through a rose-colored nostalgic narration by Burgess Meredith, who plays a grown Ned through voiceover.

McQueen's part here is really uninteresting.  He's not doing anything special-this doesn't have the direness of Cincinnati Kid or the sophistication of Thomas Crown, and doesn't have the gravitas of a western (which McQueen would make three of during his run as a leading man, most notably The Magnificent Seven which we covered for a past season of this series with Yul Brynner).  His Boon is a cad, a likable one, but one who treats his prostitute girlfriend Corrie (Farrell) like garbage, even though he does end up marrying her in the end.  There's nothing really here-it's just blank space, and like I said, were it not for the heavy subject matter, lends itself to the two-dimensional drift of a live-action Disney movie at this time.

The film is notable for its two Oscar nominations, which is a big reason why I picked this one.  Rupert Crosse would become the first Black man to be nominated for Best Supporting Actor for this film (Sidney Poitier at this point had gotten two nominations in the lead category, but no Black person had somehow gotten into Supporting Actor).  His performance is just fine though-he in many ways has a scene-stealing role, but his performance doesn't have enough presence to really steal the scenes away from McQueen even on easy mode, and he likely got the nomination based on a late scene in the movie where he faces off against a racist Southerner.  Crosse would die relatively soon after this nomination from lung cancer, and really this is his only notable role.

The other nomination is from John Williams for Best Score.  Williams' work here is really fun (in many ways it feels like it's paying homage to Aaron Copland, which is not something you would oftentimes say about Williams, and proof of his versatility as a composer).  Williams was still in his Oscar infancy here, getting only his second nomination, and he had yet to win (that wouldn't happen for two more years), but it's also fun to think about the pre-Spielberg years given between this and his even better work in The Cowboys, he was doing a lot more playful stuff onscreen.  He correctly lost to Butch Cassidy, but it's fun to finally see one of his earliest nominations.