Pumping Iron (1977)

Film: Pumping Iron (1977)

Stars: Arnold Schwarzenegger, Lou Ferrigno, Mike Katz, Franco Columbu

Directors: George Butler & Robert Fiore

Oscar History: No nominations

Snap Judgment Ranking: 4/5 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 Arnold Schwarzenegger: click here to learn more about Mr. Schwarzenegger (and why I picked him), and click here for other Saturdays with the Stars articles.

It makes sense to start a month on the man who, more than any other this year, provided the definitive answer to "who is a great action star" with a first for our series.  In nearly seven seasons, we have never done a documentary, mostly because documentaries aren't really something you associate with the creative output of actors.  But Pumping Iron gives us both a really strong set up into Arnold Schwarzenegger, and also is one of the main reasons he became a star.  Growing up in Austria, the son of a local police chief (who was a member of the Nazi Party, something that would haunt Schwarzenegger for the remainder of his life, and would be a marked part of his celebrity donations, giving enormous sums of money to organizations like the Simon Wiesenthal Center and making a pointed effort to focus on Holocaust remembrance and Jewish organizations in his time in the celebrity spotlight and during his political career), Schwarzenegger's first forays into the spotlight came not from acting but from bodybuilding.  While Schwarzenegger would become the most famous figure in bodybuilding due to his subsequent movie stardom, even without that work, he'd arguably become (give or take Lee Haney & Ronnie Coleman) the most significant athlete just within the sport, and a lot of that is due to his work in Pumping Iron, a documentary that nearly wasn't released due to budgetary issues, but when it was in 1977, became a surprise hit (particularly in early home video sales), and launched Schwarzenegger into acting.

(Spoilers Ahead) The movie isn't really a "spoilers needed" situation because it's based in fact, but I'll issue it mostly because the movie is about the 1975 Mr. Olympia competition (and who will win), a bodybuilding feat that is pitting some of the best in this then-niche sport against each other, and we meet them and their families.  The film centers on a number of different figures, and while all of them are big names in bodybuilding (not just because of their success at the time, but also because many of them became famous after this movie came out), you see the pitfalls of the sport, and the ways that only some people get to be the best (while others get to fail in the process).  The monetary award here is clearly secondary to other things, like personal pride, and in the case of the eventual winner (Schwarzenegger) modeling contracts and an intense amount of ego in terms of being near super-human in his perfect physique.

This is the best part of Pumping Iron, a surprisingly strong and intriguing look at a deeply hyper-masculine sport at a time when men weren't being pushed to show their softer side...because the film itself shows its softer side.  We see Mike Katz playing with his kids, and then the disappointment in him when he ends up getting fourth place in the competition he'd been so proud to brag about in the previous scene.  There's Lou Ferrigno, admitting that his parents weren't proud of him initially, and he feels a constant need to push for them to succeed...even though it's clear his parents seem to adore him (whatever the outcome).  And then of course there's Schwarzenegger, who at one point talks about how bodybuilding is the equivalent to having near constant orgasms (he uses the more colorful term of "cumming" that I'm going to use only because it's funny to think a future governor spoke this way even if it might end up getting this post flagged).  But later he has a scene where he talks about missing his own father's funeral because he couldn't deal with the headspace of such actual-world realities when he is in competition mode.  It's said with the same nonchalance as he does when he talks about the sexual gratification he gets from the sport, as if they are similar statements, and not one that's quite silly and the other hauntingly devastating.  It's like watching toxic masculinity, and the damage that it causes, in real time.

But it doesn't feel like toxic masculinity, because Schwarzenegger is unfathomably charming in this.  If you think of him from some of his later action films, where he is forced to drain anything resembling life force in favor of a robotic perfectionism, you are in for a treat.  He is flirty, friendly, braggadocios, and aware that this is a fleeting moment in his life.  You can see that he knows this isn't forever, and in some ways that life isn't forever, so he's going to enjoy and win everything he can from this moment before tackling the next challenge.  It's worth noting that in the immediate aftermath of this movie, it was Ferrigno who had immediate success with the smash hit (pun intentional) The Incredible Hulk which ran for five seasons on CBS.  But Arnold's time was coming, and it would be much, much higher than Ferrigno would ever dare to jump.  We'll talk about that next Saturday.

Saturdays with the Stars: Arnold Schwarzenegger

Each month of 2026 we are looking at an actor or actress who found their fame in action films, fighting bad guys & saving the day.  Last month, we spoke about Harrison Ford, a man who is basically the definition of a modern movie star and would in some ways serve as the template of "action hero with multiple major franchises."  This month, we're going to talk about someone who in many ways was Ford's biggest rival for the title of top action star of the 1980's & 90's (though he was not the rival the press and the actor himself most considered his competition), the only one who would come close to him in terms of tentpole films and action blockbusters.  But this star isn't remembered for that today, primarily because instead of trying new types of movie roles in the 21st Century, he chose instead to go into politics, being elected Governor of California.  This month's star is Arnold Schwarzenegger.

Schwarzenegger was born in Austria in 1947, just a few years after World War II ended, and as a result, his father Gustav was a Nazi military police officer who fought for the Germans on the Eastern Front.  By all accounts Gustav and young Arnold had a tough relationship, and the younger Schwarzenegger would later characterize what Gustav would do to him as child abuse (it's also worth noting, given his ancestry, that the younger Schwarzenegger would become a prominent ally to the Jewish community, donating huge sums of money to fight anti-semitism, in stark contrast to his father).  Arnold would start weight-training at the age of 13, competing in increasingly high-profile body-building competitions, becoming the youngest ever (a title he still holds) Mr. Olympia, the highest honor in the sport.

Schwarzenegger's movie career started with Hercules in New York (where he was billed by the name Arnold Strong), but despite appearing in a number of films in the 1970's, it wasn't until 1982's Conan the Barbarian that Schwarzenegger became a household name.  He'd follow that up with his most iconic role, as the titular Terminator in James Cameron's 1984 science fiction classic, and for the next few decades, until his time as Governor of California, Schwarzenegger would have a fascinating career, making a series of memorable (if not always quality) action films, most of which would be successful in the United States but even more so internationally and in home video markets, the latter two helping him when his action hero roles began to go out of style in the early 1990's.  This month we'll talk about Schwarzenegger's claims-to-fame, his political career, and what his legacy now feels like when his type of movie star (which inspired many copycats in his day) is all but extinct to modern audiences.

The Devil's Own (1997)

Film: The Devil's Own (1997)

Stars: Harrison Ford, Brad Pitt, Margaret Colin, Ruben Blades, Treat Williams, George Hearn

Director: Alan J. Pakula

Oscar History: No nominations

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 Harrison Ford: click here to learn more about Mr. Ford (and why I picked him), and click here for other Saturdays with the Stars articles.

By the late 1990's, Harrison Ford was almost sixty years old, and despite decades of action films, he was starting to show that age.  Instead of playing young rebels & sexy professors onscreen, he was playing the president in movies like Air Force One.  Ford was still an incredibly bankable star (Air Force One was a huge hit & would have long pop culture legs-it's still one of the films that's most name-checked for him), but it was also obvious that gravy train was about to end, and you see that in a film like The Devil's Own released in the same year.  Ford himself had seen a previous generation's action hero serve as his mentor in Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade with Sean Connery playing his father as Connery's career had started to fade.  Here, he was now taking over the father figure role, and young Brad Pitt is the sexy upstart who is at the center of the film even if Harrison Ford gets top billing.  The result is a movie that doesn't really work, and would unfortunately be the harbinger of a lot of Ford films to come.

(Spoilers Ahead) The movie is about Frankie McGuire (Pitt), a member of the IRA (Irish Republican Army) who saw his father gunned down for sympathizing with the republicans in the 1970's, and has now joined them & is trying to buy missiles in the United States.  He does so by staying with an NYPD Sergeant Tom O'Meara (Ford), and his family, and we get a few cute scenes where Frankie & Tom bond over shooting pool (and his daughters all develop schoolgirl crushes on the comely Frankie).  But the movie takes a dark turn when the actual task at-hand, buying the missiles from a violent Irish mobster named Billy Burke (Williams) starts to end in bloodshed.  The film becomes a standoff between Frankie, who inadvertently has made Tom's family the target of violent criminals, and Tom himself, now trying to save Frankie as he knows he's headed for either prison or death at this point.

The film's politics are a bit hard to decipher, and haven't aged super well.  The Good Friday Agreements that would happen the following year make trying to decipher which side you were on very different than in the 1990's when the violence in Ireland would've been on the nightly news regularly (I would assume a lot of modern audiences wouldn't entirely know what to do with Pitt's character here).  The film also glorifies the "honest cop" who still lies to get his partner off for murder, and Ford's character in an era were law enforcement is not universally shorthand for being the "good guys" is a bit tough, and honestly indicates in part why the action genre struggled to stay super relevant into the 21st Century.  This bit also feels tagged on, which if you read about the behind-the-scenes drama of this movie, it was (and caused friction between Ford & Pitt, who would never work together again).

But the bigger problem might be the film gets really dull after a while.  There's not enough new here-the film could've used more scenes with the two men together, having them play off of one another and giving us a better sense of their relationship before they start pointing guns at the other guy.  Much has been made about Pitt's (shaky) Irish accent through the years for this film, and I'm not going to pretend it's good, but Pitt is so beautiful and so easy onscreen I don't really care that he doesn't sound super authentic.  Ford, as well, is a solid leading man but he doesn't take to the complicated aspects of the film, and is too stoic compared to Pitt, and honestly (in my opinion) gets outplayed by him.  Ford is so serious that he borders on two-dimensional.  Gone is the easy charm of Indiana Jones and Star Wars, and we don't have the thrills & stakes of something like The Fugitive (nor the actorly sophistication of The Conversation or The Mosquito Coast).

This would in part be the future of Harrison Ford as he would continue to work.  With the exception of What Lies Beneath (I wish he'd done more horror in his career, as this film is terrific), the next few years would be a series of missteps, critically & financially, even in the action genre with pictures like Firewall and K-19: The Widowmaker (I actually saw this in theaters, making me one of the few who did, and found my ticket stub for it randomly the other day...if my brother makes it this far in the review, curious if he remembers which theater we saw this in).  Much of the next few decades would involve revisiting roles (to differing success) in the Star Wars, Blade Runner, & Indiana Jones franchises, but by-and-large, Ford would never really recapture the glamour of either his action hero heyday nor of his unique acting ability in auteur-driven dramas, and in the past few years his best work has been in television.

Next month, we're going to shift to an actor who was very much Ford's action star peer, and like Ford would end up watching his once impenetrable action hero career go down in flames in the late 1990's.  But while Ford would go on to middling success in a series of notable flops, this actor would encounter a second act so unlikely, it would've been scoffed had it been in one his movies (proving that occasionally, truth IS stranger than fiction).

Patriot Games (1992)

Film: Patriot Games (1992)

Stars: Harrison Ford, Anne Archer, Patrick Bergin, SEan Bean, Thora Birch, Samuel L. Jackson, James Fox, Richard Harris

Director: Phillip Noyce

Oscar History: No nominations

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 Harrison Ford: click here to learn more about Mr. Ford (and why I picked him), and click here for other Saturdays with the Stars articles.

The past two weeks we have focused on Harrison Ford as he might've been.  With The Conversation, we talked about his unique gifts for character work, giving us an important smarmy (but crucial) character in Gene Hackman's journey in the picture, and then with The Mosquito Coast we saw him attempt to escape the everyman hero that he personified in Han Solo & Indiana Jones to tremendous effect.  But Harrison Ford is not an actor you automatically name-check as a great actor-you think of him as a great movie star, and one who is relatively easy to imitate.  So this week, we're really getting into the era of Ford's "get off my plane!" level of ubiquity.  In the 1990's, Ford was a constant presence in movies and basically competed solely with Tom Cruise as the most invincible of stars at the box office.  Everything he touched would turn to gold, but while Cruise would occasionally challenge himself as an actor in these pictures, Ford didn't.  This isn't to say that Ford made bad movies during the era (ending in the late 1990's, which is where we'll close our month with him next week), but he wasn't racking up Oscar nominations like Cruise was, and most of his films are generic even if they would make buckets of money.  One of the best examples of them, and one of the few I hadn't seen yet (I was alive in the 1990's, and my mom loved Harrison Ford...I saw most of his stuff) is Patriot Games, the first of two outings that Ford would take as CIA analyst Jack Ryan, his other other franchise lead after the two I already name-checked.

(Spoilers Ahead) The movie is about Jack Ryan (Ford), a man who used to work for the CIA and is now teaching history at the US Naval Academy.  He, his wife Cathy (Archer), and daughter Sally (Birch) inadvertently witness an IRA terrorist attack on Lord William Holmes (Fox), in which Jack saves Lord Holmes life.  Several members, specifically Sean Miller (Bean) survive Jack's retaliation, though, and are on a quest for revenge against both Lord Holmes (who keeps having people around him dying) and against the Ryans, which escalates to kidnapping attempts on his wife & daughter.  This all ends with us realizing that Holmes' assistant has been a secret informant, and sets up Sean to kill both Lord Holmes and the Ryans in the same party...before Jack saves the day, killing the assistant and Sean Miller in the process.

It's worth noting that this is technically the sequel to another movie, honestly a better one: The Hunt for Red October, where the Jack Ryan character was played by Alec Baldwin (we'll actually discuss this movie a bit before the end of the month in the context of the 1990 Oscar Viewing Project, which I should be done with by next Saturday if all things go according to plan).  A lot of speculation from those in the know (and Baldwin himself) has been stirred about as to why Baldwin, sixteen years Ford's junior at the time and a much more logical choice for a new action franchise, was ousted, with everything from Ford being a bigger star (who had a host of contracts with the studio they were trying to pay off) to Baldwin's salary demands (and legendarily diva-like behavior during his leading man era) all contributing to this bump, but it did happen, and it changes the tenor of the movies.  Baldwin's screen persona was always a bit more seductive & (save for Han Solo) wrier than Ford's, and it shows that Patriot Games is kind of dull.

It's not that it's necessarily bad, because it's not.  The supporting cast (actors like Harris, Bean, & Jackson) are all made up of properly good actors, and Ford knows how to command a screen, but it's also generic.  There's nothing really special about Jack Ryan, nothing that we get to know-this feels like he's just playing Harrison Ford in the way that someone like Arnold Schwarzenegger would become famous for at the same time-not giving us anything beyond what's expected.  Ford, though, was a better actor than Arnold, and it's a pity this is what he has spent much of the latter part of his career doing.  It says something that while Ford was called upon decades after-the-fact to play both Han Solo and Indiana Jones, because no one could imagine anyone else playing these parts (apologies to Alden Ehrenreich), by 2002 when they were making the long-awaited sequel to Clear and Present Danger (Ford's second outing as Jack Ryan), it was Ben Affleck, not Ford, who ended up playing the part.  Had he not been going through one of the messiest Hollywood divorces of the era, Alec Baldwin might've enjoyed the karmic revenge of Ford finally losing out on his part to a younger actor.

The Mosquito Coast (1986)

Film: The Mosquito Coast (1986)

Stars: Harrison Ford, Helen Mirren, Andre Gregory, River Phoenix, Martha Plimpton

Director: Peter Weir

Oscar History: No nominations, though both Ford and composer Maurice Jarre got Golden Globe nominations

Snap Judgment Ranking: 3/5 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 Harrison Ford: click here to learn more about Mr. Ford (and why I picked him), and click here for other Saturdays with the Stars articles.

Harrison Ford was not the first actor associated with a specific role or being unable to escape from it.  But in the modern era of filmmaking (i.e. post-Jaws) he really personified the actor whose characters ended up being too popular for him to stop doing them. In the 1980's, this meant that Ford made a number of films as both Han Solo & Indiana Jones (from 1980-84, he made four of them alone, and only took a break for Blade Runner, a rather difficult shoot for the actor despite its later cult status).  But unlike the 1990's, when Ford's dramatic attempts outside of action-adventure would become something of a source of ridicule (and not inspire a lot of critical hosannas), in the 1980's he had a lot of acclaim on this front, particularly in the movie of Peter Weir.  In 1985, he starred in the blockbuster hit Witness, which won him his first (and to date only) Academy Award nomination for Best Actor.  In 1986, he appeared in another dramatic departure from Weir, but unlike Witness it was a flop (he'd recover pretty quickly two years later with the massive success of Working Girl, a movie which got pretty much everyone in the cast but him an Oscar nomination).  The Mosquito Coast is a unique film though (and Ford has frequently cited it as his favorite) given how well it captured a certain type of toxic masculinity, and how brittle & unrelenting Ford's portrayal of the main character is right up until the end credits.

(Spoilers Ahead) The movie is about Allie Fox (Ford), an inventor who hates the American Dream, capitalism, and a global economy that relies upon foreign industries to keep it afloat (there's an early scene where he eviscerates a shop owner for carrying products made in Japan, which in the 1980's you can't entirely tell if this is just him leaning in on Reagan conservatism or makes him truly xenophobic).  After yet another employer being disappointed with his impressive inventions (in this case a house that can make ice), he decides to move his family to the jungles of Belize, where he buys a village in the rainforest.  Allie, his wife Margot (Mirren), whom he constantly calls "Mother," and their four children, including eldest son Charlie (Phoenix) initially find success introducing his impressive inventions to the jungle.  But his paranoia starts to settle in.  He convinces his family that a nuclear war has struck America, destroying the country, and when a group of rebels take over his camp, he murders them (not in the way he planned, initially wanting to freeze them to death but instead having them burned to death in an explosion that pollutes the river).  Eventually he drives his family mad with loyalty tests, and is shot by a missionary whom Allie is convinced is running a Christian concentration camp, killing him as his family finally finds freedom.

It's easy to see, watching the film, why it didn't resonate with Reagan America, even with (or maybe especially because of) Harrison Ford in the lead.  The movie is dark, and shows a toxicity in the male ego that you don't usually find here.  In the 1980's, with Reagan promising a return of the American Dream for white families (and in particular white men) while widening income gaps and unsteady unemployment numbers took its toll on Middle America figures like the Fox family.  Huey Long had said that "every man is a king" and in the 1980's that was the reigning theology for conservative men, and while Allie Fox presents as being anti-capitalist, he is deeply conservative about gender & family life, and that shows in the way that he blames women and people of color for his failures to be truly successful the way he trains his children to think he should be.  It's hard not to watch this film, and in particular the way that he treats his wife Margot (not physically abusing her, but clearly indulging in what we'd now consider emotional abuse) and think of the MAGA movement, and the way that it tries to get back to this era...knowing full well that it is filled with angry men who still blame the world for their failures.

Ford's portrayal of Allie Fox is really good, and it's in part because he doesn't let up on him.  Most actors, particularly ones who are super reliant upon audiences wanting to root for them, wouldn't have allowed their characterization to be so unsympathetic.  They would've given him redemption, or an apology scene with Helen Mirren at the end of the movie.  But thankfully Weir doesn't do that, and we get with Ford's performance a broken man, one you might understand where he's coming from because he's the product of his environment (capitalism can tear us all apart in the end), but who is also so egocentric he doesn't acknowledge the harm he's doing because it's his harm.  In a year where men like Graham Platner (who put so much of the blame for their failings on others rather than himself) are being celebrated by the left (and Donald Trump, doing the same thing, is a deity for the right), it's hard not to think that Mosquito Coast and Ford's layered performance aren't ahead of their time.

OVP: The Conversation (1974)

Film: The Conversation (1974)

Stars: Gene Hackman, John Cazale, Allen Garfield, Cindy Williams, Frederic Forrest, Harrison Ford, Teri Garr

Director: Francis Ford Coppola

Oscar History: 3 nominations (Best Picture, Original Screenplay, Sound)

Snap Judgment Ranking: 5/5 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 Harrison Ford: click here to learn more about Mr. Ford (and why I picked him), and click here for other Saturdays with the Stars articles.

Harrison Ford's public persona has long been of a man who didn't really want to be a movie star.  A lot of this, I have long-suspected, is at least partially untrue (otherwise why do it, especially when he became bonkers rich & didn't really need to do it anymore...after all, his wife is also a talented actor who now rarely works).  But it is interesting that Ford's fame came relatively late.  The role that made him a movie star was Star Wars, which was released just days before his 35th birthday. For comparison's sake with some of his 1970's peers, Al Pacino at that age had several Oscar nominations and the Godfather franchise, Dustin Hoffman had been Ben Braddock & Ratso Rizzo, and Jack Nicholson & Peter Fonda had both boarded a motorcycle into legend.  Ford spent much of the 1970's balancing his time between small roles in movies and making furniture for people like Joan Didion, Valerie Harper, & George Lucas.  Ford's movie career, though, is really interesting because he appeared in a lot of interesting movies, among them Michelangelo Antonioni's controversial Zabriskie Point, and three Best Picture nominees: American Graffiti, Apocalypse Now, and today's film The Conversation.  For all of the talk about Ford at one point before Han Solo nearly quitting the industry to work as a high-profile carpenter, the more intriguing idea might be what he did in this film: taking on the role of distinctive, very handsome character actor in important auteur-driven features.

(Spoilers Ahead) The Conversation is a movie best headed into with you knowing as little as is humanly possible, so while I provide a spoiler alert on all of my reviews because I generally want to know as little as possible about all movies I'm going to, this one in particular it helps to go in blind so I'll reiterate that now.  The movie follows Harry Caul (Hackman), a man who runs a service that essentially follows people and records them for money (it is not lost on me that The Conversation, which competed with Chinatown for Best Picture in 1974, bears a striking resemblance to the Roman Polanski film as both are about private investigators who uncover more than they expected from a routine case).  Unlike Jake Gittes, Harry Caul does not advertise and is not well-known for his work.  He is, instead, anonymous to the point of unhealthy, keeping everything about him at a distance to the point his girlfriend (Garr) doesn't ever visit his apartment and he doesn't even have his own phone.  This is driven by wanting to avoid retribution, but also the very real threat of violence in his career.  Similar to Chinatown (again) there are allusions to a previous case throughout the film that the audience only understands to be too horrific to mention, and that haunt both detectives to the point they are constantly in fear of repeating it.

The Conversation is considered a landmark film, but because Francis Ford Coppola had it come out the same year The Godfather, Part II (one of the greatest movies ever made), it always feels like it doesn't get its due, and so I wasn't entirely sure what to expect headed into this-would it be a really handsome movie, one that stands up but can't compare with a picture as perfect as Godfather II, or would it be just as exceptional.  Again, similar to Chinatown, it's not clear until the last moments what's happening, and it's also not clear where The Conversation will land in that comparison.  But as the movie concludes, you realize it's also a true masterpiece.  We understand as the film ends that Harry has no idea what he's walked into, and what he's helped cause.  He assumes that the conversation between Frederic Forrest & Cindy Williams at the beginning of the movie is of a couple that might be having an affair, and becomes concerned when he uncovers (while listening to the clips that he initially won't hand over to a man known as "the Director's" assistant without first meeting the Director himself) that a part of the clips that he couldn't initially hear says "he'd kill us if he got the chance."  When he meets the Director (played by an uncredited Robert Duvall) he becomes worried for the young couple's safety as it's clear Cindy Williams is the Director's wife.  But as we learn in the waning moments of the film, he's missed something on the tapes-the emphasis in Forrest's reading of the word "us."

Because as the film ends, it's a case where Frederic Forrest has murdered Robert Duvall's husband with help from his lover, leaving all of the money (and secret organization he has) to Cindy Williams, and leaving them the opportunity to end up together.  The movie's sound work is legendary (and Oscar-nominated) for a reason, as not only is the entire setup with Hackman's Harry filled with us getting whirs & blurs from the recording equipment, but also the film tells in flashback narrative things the audience will have missed.  The film clearly inspired everything from The Usual Suspects to Severance (which borrows heavily from The Conversation's score), and you see why-this is a movie that shows paranoia is justified...and cannot be resolved.  We end the movie with Harry knowing he is being watched, knowing that he can't escape or be safely private...and having to give in to that to not go mad.

Harrison Ford's role is a key component & a crucial part of this story, even if he's only in about three scenes.  He plays the Director's assistant, and plays him with a level of bureaucratic cool that you kind of just assume he's a jackass (also according to most reports, Ford played him as gay which kind of comes across in the way he's super bitchy in a way you don't find a male character in the 1970's, even if there's no hint of this other than him wearing a stylish green suit in one scene that Ford bought with his own money), one who has gotten to this position through being absurdly handsome and honestly it's the sort of character you assume you don't need to pay attention to as the movie progresses.  Because I am writing this about Ford, though, I was paying attention, and it gives you a whole other angle here.  Ford's Martin Stett is the only figure in the film who 100% knows everything that's going on we learn as the film goes by-he works for the Director, but he's also clearly aware of the affair, and given that he's still working for Frederic Forrest & Cindy Williams in the end, it's possible he orchestrated all of this in connection with them.  The paranoia seeps into the actual film...was this all a setup to use Harry, kill the Director, and give the young couple everything they wanted?  Only Ford's Stett, who calls Hackman in the end to tell him he's being watched, knows for certain, and makes him the true antagonist of the picture.  Ford is good in this, and as we'll talk about next week, that layered acting ability didn't totally diminish when his visage started to adorn the postered walls of teenage boys, but as I said above-it's hard not to think of Ford in the same way we think of someone like Robert Duvall or John Cazale, someone who added extra layers to already great movies, as a supporting character actor, while watching The Conversation.

Saturdays with the Stars: Harrison Ford

Each month of 2026 we are looking at an actor or actress who found their fame in action films, fighting bad guys & saving the day.  Last month, we spoke about Bruce Lee, an actor who (like Steve McQueen before him) died relatively young and forged a type of movie star that hadn't really been seen before.  This month, as promised, we are going to start a six-month run of actors who made virtually all of their successful films post-1975.  To start that, we'll begin with the one guy who did have two big movies before 1975 (American Graffiti & The Conversation), but who would become synonymous with two characters that would reshape the cinematic landscape after Jaws, and make him the movie star's movie star, an action hero that the whole family could root for, even if his prickly public demeanor might bristle at such superlatives.  This month's star is Harrison Ford.

Born in Chicago, Ford (like Bruce Lee last month) had a clear path before him if he followed his parents' footsteps into show business.  His mother was a radio actress, and his father a former actor & advertising executive.  He grew up in a mixed faith household, his mother being Jewish while his father was Irish-Catholic, and both were quite progressive, something that Ford would carry for the rest of his life (the rare action film star of the modern era that is very much a Democrat).  Though incredibly handsome, Ford's initial forays into entertainment were middling, getting bit roles in westerns while George Hamilton & James Caan (both roughly the same age as Ford) got top-billing in the same pictures.  So frustrated with acting was he that he had a side gig as a carpenter (one of his clients included writer Joan Didion), and were it not for George Lucas seeing his potential in American Graffiti, he might have made that his life.

But Lucas saw something in Ford that soon the entire world would, as he put him as Han Solo in Star Wars, a movie that would make him a household name, while Lucas (as a producer) a few years later would give Ford the role he might be most synonymous with, Indiana Jones.  These two movies launched highly lucrative franchises for Ford, but they were hardly the only movies that really commanded the public's attention.  Throughout the 1980's and 90's, Ford was one of the most bankable stars in Hollywood, particularly when it comes to launching action franchises.  So famous is Ford that part of me almost didn't want to include him here because I struggled to come up with four major films that I hadn't seen of his (according to Letterboxd, I have seen 28 of his films).  So while we won't review Star Wars and Indiana Jones (as I've seen them all many times), we will talk about them, alongside some of Ford's other biggest pictures of the era, including two forays into more serious acting.

Game of Death (1978)

Film: Game of Death (1978)

Stars: Bruce Lee, Gig Young, Dean Jagger, Colleen Camp, Kareem Abdul-Jabbar

Director: Robert Clouse

Oscar History: No nominations

Snap Judgment Ranking: 1/5 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 Bruce Lee: click here to learn more about Mr. Lee (and why I picked him), and click here for other Saturdays with the Stars articles.

Actors dying during or after the production of a film is not uncommon, and it's actually relatively normal for directors/studios to use creative ways to meld together clips, body doubles, & whatever you can think of to piece together one last movie with a popular star.  Everyone from Carrie Fisher to Philip Seymour Hoffman to Heath Ledger to Paul Walker all had films released after they died that they had been filming at the time.  But no actor in the history of movies has ever continued to work as much in the years after his death in the same fashion as Bruce Lee, to the point where there became a name for it: "Bruceploitation."

The films that happened after his death in 1973 run the gamut, from re-editing two movies from old episodes of Lee's time on The Green Hornet to actors using Lee's name or film titles to conjure allusions to the late actor.  Films with names like Bruce Lee Fights Back from the Grave (likely the tackiest of the bunch) were relatively common in martial arts films of the 1970's.  Even Jackie Chan, who would eventually succeed Lee as the biggest name in martial arts films, would get an early start with New Fist of Fury, a spin on Lee's 1972 film that we profiled earlier this month.  Producers, having seen gargantuan paydays with The Way of the Dragon and Enter the Dragon, weren't willing to go quietly and admit that Lee had only really starred in four films, and their gravy train had passed away.  This greed was most encapsulated by today's film and its inexplicable sequel, perhaps the most horrifying movie I can remember seeing given its backstory.

(Spoilers Ahead) Game of Death follows a relatively standard (for a Lee picture) plot, with Billy Lo (Lee...occasionally) fighting against a racketeering syndicate who is threatening he and his fiancee (Camp) as they want a piece of his new movie star success.  Billy, after being shot in the face during a film production, decides this is a good time to go into hiding, and in hiding exacts revenge on those around him, in an attempt to get them back for essentially ruining his career (and eventually, because they kidnap Colleen Camp).

This is the plot of Game of Death...which you will not care about during the movie, as the plot of this movie is very obviously "Bruce Lee is dead."  This is because with the exception of about 12 minutes toward the end of the movie, Bruce Lee the living person is not in the film despite prominent top billing.  He is instead being portrayed by a series of stunt doubles & stand-ins, many of whom have their face onscreen, and are clearly, visibly, not Bruce Lee.  That is, of course, when they decide to even do that.  There's an actual scene (and I had to rewind, which if you know anything about streaming movies on Amazon Prime, is a feat) but there is literally a shot of this movie where they have taped a headshot of Lee onto a mirror, with it clear that a cardboard cutout is serving as the face of the stand-in to make him look more like Lee.

Most famously, Lee himself does appear in the film earlier on in the picture...but as a literal corpse.  That is because, in a shameless scene where we see Colleen Camp screaming & crying while attending the fake funeral of Billy Lo, we see cutaway footage of the actual funeral of Bruce Lee, at one point for a second or two seeing the open casket visage of the actually dead Lee on the screen.  Other than a scene stolen from The Way of the Dragon where he fights Chuck Norris imposed into the beginning of the picture, this is the first time you see the real-life Lee in the movie, making it all the more jarring.

Game of Death is, by my estimation, grave-robbing.  Despite having proper actors like Camp and Oscar-winners Dean Jagger & Gig Young (this being his final film before he murdered his new wife & killed himself, which in literally any other review would be the real-life headline), the only thing worth watching here is Lee.  The scenes, especially his fight with basketball great Kareem Abdul-Jabber, where he battles in a skin-tight yellow jumpsuit, are splendid.  Lee is wry, agile, funny, & sexy-as-fuck.  I will own at this point that I have developed not just a heart-fluttering crush on Lee but also a talent one on him (I will 100% be completing his five film set at some point, as I am a true fan), and so on his behalf, the fact that this movie (and somehow a sequel that patches together even more past footage of Lee) exist is an abomination.

I will note, though, that it also opens up an uncomfortable door into the other legacy of Lee: his son, Brandon.  The younger Lee was also an actor (in fact both of Bruce Lee's children would become film performers), and in the 1980's he was doing some version of Bruceploitation, making films like Legacy of Rage which was released in Asia to try to capitalize on his father's still potent legacy.  Lee, though, didn't have much success, even after getting a chance in some American action films in the early 1990's.  But The Crow would end up being (in terms of box office) his big break.  The gothic superhero film was a smash hit in 1994, but similar to half of the films of his father, it was released after his death.  Eerily like his father's character in Game of Death, Brandon Lee would die from an accident involving a prop gun, in this case accidentally firing a live round that had been trapped in the barrel, shooting Lee in the abdomen, and killing him.  Unlike Game of Death, most of the younger Lee's performance was completed (he only had three days left on production, so most reviews don't note the clear real-life issues with this production coming through on the screen), and so after some jostling between Paramount & Miramax, the latter used a stand-in and CGI (which would later become more common) to complete Lee's performance.  Father and son would eventually be buried next to each other in Seattle.

Next month, and for the remainder of the year, we are going to start writing about the "true" modern action stars and not just the pioneers who forged the way, all six of whom would enter into action movie fame throughout the late 1970's, and especially in the 1980's & 90's, the heyday of the action movie genre.  Our first star, though, is going to be someone who, for much of the 1970's, felt like he was headed in a different direction than action, and it was only a chance twist of fate (and eventually billions of dollars) that would make him one of the Grand Tetons of the genre.

Enter the Dragon (1973)

Film: Enter the Dragon (1973)

Stars: Bruce Lee, John Saxon, Ahna Capri, Bob Wall, Shih Kien, Jim Kelly

Director: Robert Clouse

Oscar History: No nominations

Snap Judgment Ranking: 4/5 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 Bruce Lee: click here to learn more about Mr. Lee (and why I picked him), and click here for other Saturdays with the Stars articles.

We're going to be doing double duty with Bruce Lee this week since I missed one of his Saturday's earlier this month, and we're starting with Enter the Dragon, which for Lee was also the end.  Enter the Dragon was released in Hong Kong six days after Lee's death to rapturous audience reception (and box office).  Some of this had to have been attributed to the mystery surrounding the martial arts icon's demise.  Lee's health had been, despite seemingly being in peak physical condition (he has the body of a modern Olympic athlete in Enter the Dragon, basically unheard of given the training techniques for actors in the 1970's) in a risky position-he had suffered a collapse attributed to a cerebral edema during recording sessions for Enter the Dragon a few months before he passed away.  He was supposed to meet with film producer Raymond Chow about an upcoming picture he intended to make but he had a headache, and took a painkiller & a nap, and when he didn't show up for the planned meeting, Chow went to his house, where he tried to revive Lee, but it was to no avail-Bruce Lee, then one of the biggest movie stars on the planet, was already dead at the age of just 32.

(Spoilers Ahead) This is a weird juxtaposition against Enter the Dragon (we'll get into more of his death in a second) given this is just a grand movie for him, and likely would've opened up a new level of fame for the actor with global audiences.  For starters, this was his first film since Marlowe (in which he had a bit part) to have an American leading man opposite him.  While John Saxon is not as famous as James Garner, he had headlined a number of B-grade pictures, and was about to have a solid run as a featured player in horror classics like Black Christmas and A Nightmare on Elm Street.  Having two leading men that feel at-odds with each other in terms of acting styles helps Enter the Dragon, a really solid action film, one with sensational fighting sequences (and not always featuring Lee), and a plot that feels a bit more rooted in consistency but not repetition.

My favorite part of Enter the Dragon is the way that it incorporates elements of Blaxploitation into the movie.  At the time that subgenre was also part of the action/crime genre in the same way martial arts were, and having these two stylistically against each other works really well.  It helps that Jim Kelly is in the film, a Black man who was about to have a brief stint as an action leading man, as he has some terrific one-liners (there's an admittedly problematic but still funny joke about halfway through where he picks out four women to have sex with, and apologizes to the remainder for not having sex with them too, primarily because he's "had a long day" as if four women alone won't be a challenge at all).  Kelly, Saxon, & Lee are stylistically really different in their approach to acting, but that fuses together to make something interesting-this is the rare film of this era where combining a lot of styles and approaches in one film actually works and doesn't feel messy.

Lee's death would quickly be followed by a funeral (where action stars Steve McQueen & James Coburn would serve among the pallbearers) as well as a mountain of conspiracy theories.  The official cause of death for Lee is what is known in Britain (remember, Hong Kong was then part of Britain) as "death by misadventure" which insinuates that it's an accidental death caused by a risk taken by the deceased.  In this case, it was taking a medication that, in combination with the cerebral edema that Lee already knew he had, caused his brain to swell, killing him quickly.

This is probably what happened, but that doesn't mean that the public, juxtaposing the seemingly banal death with a man they saw look basically immortal onscreen, didn't want to make up new ideas.  They range from other medical theories, one seemingly compelling one indicating it was heat stroke (Lee had recently had his sweat glands removed because they didn't look attractive onscreen) or an undiagnosed case of epilepsy.  Some have said that he may have had a bad reaction to cannabis, but that was addressed by his physicians at the time, and they said that was not possible.

But the most commonly discussed conspiracy theory about Lee is that he was murdered.  There is no concrete evidence of this, but the suspects in the potential crime run the gamut from the Hong Kong triads (killing him for refusing to pay them off or for exposing martial arts secrets) to accusations he was killed by a jilted lover (he passed away in the apartment of actress Betty Ting Pei, whom some have alleged he was having an affair with at the time) to the truly insane theory that he was killed in a martial arts fight by a rival martial artist using the move "dim mak" (aka the touch of death).  I will own, on a personal level, that none of these make sense as a theory, and all of them (quite frankly) feel, charitably, far-fetched.  But they are a part of Lee's legacy as a celebrity, and to ignore them felt irresponsible, particularly given that if you look at Lee's post-death existence, mysterious tragedy would become something of a trend as we'll discuss later today.

The Way of the Dragon (1972)

Film: The Way of the Dragon (1972)

Stars: Bruce Lee, Nora Miao, Tony Liu, Chuck Norris

Director: Bruce Lee

Oscar History: No nominations

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 Bruce Lee: click here to learn more about Mr. Lee (and why I picked him), and click here for other Saturdays with the Stars articles.

As I said when I kicked off this month, trying to get a gage on Bruce Lee's stardom is really challenging.  After Lee's time in the United States making The Green Hornet, his presence in the United States, specifically, is extremely challenging to timeline.  This is best-evidenced by The Way of the Dragon, which was a massive hit in 1972, at the time becoming the highest-grossing film in Hong Kong history, and becoming a behemoth at the US box office, making $5 million during its initial run and at one point becoming the number one movie in America.  By the spring of 1973, Bruce Lee was a major Hollywood box office star, at this point approaching actors like Brigitte Bardot & Sophia Loren in the previous decade as the rare actor who could open a subtitled film in the United States.  His next few films would be highly anticipated, and they would indeed make a lot of money in the US...but they would happen after Lee's death.  Bruce Lee would die just seven months after the lauded release of The Way of the Dragon.

(Spoilers Ahead) This makes The Way of the Dragon, the only film Lee made during his lifetime that he had complete creative control over, a very special film in his filmography, and I will note right off of the bat that it reads as quite distinctive.  The movie is about Tang Lung (Lee) a young martial artist who comes to Rome and struggles to acclimate to the new culture, feeling less cosmopolitan than his frequent companion Chen (Miao), a weirdly beautiful woman who, for all intents-and-purposes, is not Tang Lung's love interest; there is little indication, other than a mild flirtation toward the end, than what would've been assumed from a female lead in an action film in this era (i.e. she's there to fall in love with the hero) is part of The Way of the Dragon, and this is partially because, as we see as the film progresses with Tang Lung's connection to a restaurant that a mob boss is trying to take over, he's meant to be a loner, someone who cannot handle this modern world and must walk the earth solo.

This sounds better than what it is, mostly because The Way of the Dragon is (tonally) a bizarre movie.  Part of this is trying to parcel through an over fifty-year-old film, one that wasn't originally in English, but one that has a very distinctive set of humor.  The first twenty minutes it's important to know that Tang Lung is something of a country bumpkin (which I didn't catch at first...I just thought he was odd), but even with that context, the fact that action legend Bruce Lee's only full directorial effort includes multiple (I think it happens three, possibly four times) moments of him insinuating that he needs to defecate because he ate an aggressive amount of soup at an airport restaurant, is as strange as it sounds.

The movie doesn't work because of these shifts, and a lot of bizarre plot twists that feel like the script was being written as the movie was being made, but it does include a truly incredible action sequence at the end of the picture.  In 1972, Chuck Norris (who would go on to actual Hollywood fame with the success of Walker, Texas Ranger and then meme infamy for decades to come afterward) was best-known as a karate world champion, which would spark debate (that Norris would occasionally prod, despite a friendship with Lee) in the years that followed over whether or not Lee would've defeated Norris in an actual fight...in the film he kills him, in a one-on-one battle in the actual Colosseum (yes, you read that right...Lee managed to bribe his way into having one of the most legendary battles in the history of martial arts films in the actual fighting arena of ancient Romans).  This scene is stupendous...it's just that the rest of the film doesn't live up to it, insisting on humor & oftentimes soap opera-esque approaches when really...all you need is two action stars duking it out to the death in the most famous places on Earth.

Fist of Fury (1972)

Film: Fist of Fury (1972)

Stars: Bruce Lee, Nora Miao, Chikara Hasimotot

Director: Lo Wei

Oscar History: No nominations

Saturdays with the Stars: 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 Bruce Lee: click here to learn more about Mr. Lee (and why I picked him), and click here for other Saturdays with the Stars articles.

I apologize I missed last week (June is one of the few months of the year that Minnesotans actually leave their houses as it's neither too hot nor too cold, so I've been busy), but know that in the coming two Saturday's I will find a way to make up for it and get us all four of our movies this month.  Bruce Lee's filmography is odd, because while it is filled with a number of notable action films, they were released in rapid succession given his death at such a young age (only 32) and many of them were released posthumously, at least in the United States.  Also, more so than even Errol Flynn earlier this year, Lee's celebrity history extends well past his death, and so there's a lot more to tell after it.  We'll focus today, with one of his earliest films, Fist of Fury, by talking about his brief foray into Hollywood prior to finding proper success in Hong Kong.  First, though, the movie.

(Spoilers Ahead) Fist of Fury is a story of two competing dojos, one Japanese and one Chinese, the latter now led by Chen (Lee) after the recent death of his teacher Huo Yuanjia.  The film follows the two as the fighting escalates, frequently along racial lines (there is a shocking amount of really racist language from the Japanese characters in the film toward the Chinese characters, though given that this film was made predominantly by Chinese filmmakers, it's hard not to feel like both directions are getting a pretty rough cut here).  The movie itself, I'm going to be honest, is pretty repetitive after this, with increasingly violent altercations between both sides as Chen seeks vengeance on behalf of his fallen master, as well as against the men responsible for his master's death.

The movie itself isn't good-the scripting, dubbing, and other performances in it are really rough and bordering on one-dimensional (I tried to find this film without it dubbed, but I couldn't...and given that's how most American audiences experienced this initially, I figured at least one of his films needed to be viewed this way).  But Bruce Lee...there's something there.  Strikingly handsome in a way I honestly wasn't expecting (it's worth remembering that Lee was quite young and in incredible physical shape when he made these movies, and so he looks good...you get why he became something of a sex symbol in the 1970's), he commands the screen with an almost magnetic sternness, which (while not great acting) definitely has a movie star quality that you can't look away from.  My worry headed into this month was that I was going to get a lot of movies with sensational action scenes but little decent plot...but I didn't count on Lee being this watchable.  I'm curious as we move closer to his death (and the ensuing health issues) if that will grow or change his style, but I could easily watch three more movies of this type of performance.

All-in-all, it's hard not to wonder why Lee didn't do better with this kind of pull in the United States.  Lee had largely given up his initial goals of becoming a movie star when he began teaching martial arts in Oakland in the mid-1960's, but a chance meeting with TV producer William Dozier (at the time riding a wave of success in the wake of the Adam West-Batman) led him to be cast as Kato in The Green Hornet, a show that only lasted one season but has taken on a cult status in the years that followed, and would remain the most important work that Lee would make while in Hollywood.  Lee would work behind the scenes on a handful of studio films, including The Wrecking Crew which we watched a few years back for our month on Nancy Kwan, and even have a bit part in the James Garner noir Marlowe (and depending on whom you believe, he had a hand in creating the TV series Kung Fu, and auditioned for the role that would make David Carradine a leading man), but by-and-large The Green Hornet was really the only Hollywood property where he had a chance at traditional fame in America.  It wasn't until his martial arts films, though, that Lee would do what he was born to do: star in movies, and even become a success at the US box office.

Saturdays with the Stars: Bruce Lee

Each month of 2026 we are looking at an actor or actress who found their fame in action films, fighting bad guys & saving the day.  Last month, we spoke about Steve McQueen, one of the quintessential figures of New Hollywood, and maybe the ultimate "cool guy" of the era.  With June, we are nearing the halfway point of our year, and also nearing uncharted waters.  In the first six seasons of Saturdays with the Stars, we would occasionally sneak in actors who would make films post-1975, when New Hollywood began to make way for the Blockbuster Era.  This season, though, we will be spending the entire back-half of the year with six actors that (though some made films before 1975) almost exclusively led movies in the post-Jaws era, most of them still working today.  So as a dividing line between the two, we're going to talk about a man who would fit neither of these positions, primarily because his best-known work is not in Hollywood, but in Hong Kong, where he would become less an action movie star and more a living deity, someone whose death at just 32 would enshrine him in a type of immortality that only a few actors ever achieved.  This month's star is Bruce Lee.

Born Lee Jun-fan, Bruce Lee is different than a number of our other stars in the past few months as he felt more at home in entertainment.  The son of an opera singer, he was born not in Hong Kong but in San Francisco while his father was touring with a stage company in Chinatown.  His mother's ethnicity has invited a lot of debate through the years (it is likely that she was biracial), and Lee was appearing in films as early as 1941, just a year after his birth, in bit parts due to his father's connections to cinema.  As a teenager, he began to study martial arts under Ip Man, one of the most storied martial arts grandmasters of the 20th Century, which led to him both becoming a skilled fighter and having run-in's with the law, eventually fighting members of crime families that led his parents to ship him to the United States (as he was born in San Francisco, he was eligible for US citizenship).  For much of the decade, Lee alternated between teaching martial arts and acting in random Hollywood productions that would make use of his fighting skills, specifically as Kato in The Green Hornet, the American production he is most known for today.

Lee is an interesting star, because in many ways his career mirrors that of James Dean, of someone who was incredibly famous in his life, but because of his young death (and the celebration of his movies that followed), he became an icon in a way he wasn't in life.  As we'll talk about this month, most of Lee's most well-known films like Enter the Dragon (adjusted for inflation, one of the most profitable films ever made) and Game of Death came out after he died.  We'll discuss that, and how these films in many ways caused Lee's acting career to appear bigger than it probably was, as well as talk a bit about his death, which more than 50 years later, is still surrounded in conspiracy & enigma.

OVP: The Towering Inferno (1974)

Film: The Towering Inferno (1974)

Stars: Steve McQueen, Paul Newman, William Holden, Faye Dunaway, Fred Astaire, Susan Blakely, Richard Chamberlain, Jennifer Jones, OJ Simpson, Robert Vaughn, Robert Wagner, Susan Flannery, Jack Collins

Director: John Guillermin

Oscar History: 7 nominations/3 wins (Best Picture, Supporting Actor-Fred Astaire, Art Direction, Cinematography*, Film Editing*, Score, Song, Sound)

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's career hit its financial peak in 1974, when he starred with Paul Newman in today's film The Towering Inferno.  At this point, Newman & McQueen were two of the biggest names in movies, and there were quite a few arguments over who would get top billing in the picture (ultimately it was a draw, with McQueen's name first but Newman's name higher), but after this both would suffer career lulls.  Newman would rebound eventually in the 1980's with films like The Verdict and The Color of Money, the latter winning him his only competitive Oscar, but McQueen would never regain this position.  He'd make an ill-fated Ibsen film in 1978 (one that would basically disappear from public consciousness), and then a pair of pictures in 1980 (Tom Horn and The Hunter), both decent-sized hits that might have hallmarked a comeback, but that wasn't to be.  Just over three months after the release of The Hunter, Steve McQueen would be dead.

(Spoilers Ahead) But before we get into that, let's get into the height of his career, at least commercially.  The Towering Inferno was a landmark movie in terms of its box office in 1974.  In the previous years, films like Airport and The Poseidon Adventure had found a formula for success-put a bunch of famous stars, including at least a few studio system legends that can scoop up a supporting acting Oscar nomination, and place them in an insane disaster situation, one that will have at least a few of them die, but the audience can look on in horror as we wonder who from this insanely-stacked call sheet might be safe.  This film is no less than these, and arguably has the starriest cast  of the bunch, but is much more in the vein of Airport (which I did not enjoy) than The Poseidon Adventure (which I did enjoy, in large part due to Shelley Winters' solid work).  The film has the tallest building in the world on fire, and all of our characters, including architect Newman and firefighter McQueen, fighting to stay alive as more-and-more paths to the ground floor are forfeited.  Along the way, some live (including, surprisingly, conman Fred Astaire), and some die, most shockingly Jennifer Jones, who in a morbid twist would be flung from the top of a giant building in the movie two years before her daughter would commit suicide in exactly the same way.

If only the movie was any good.  Technically, this is impressive-the set design, effects, and especially the stunt work are out-of-this-world, but the film spends no time trying to develop the characters, giving us two-dimensional feats from genuinely talented actors.  It's not like someone like Faye Dunaway or Paul Newman can't add a bit of three-dimensionality to their work, but there's no call for it.  Our star of the month, Steve McQueen, feels almost ancillary to the plot of the picture even as he's supposed to be the hero.  Fred Astaire would receive his only competitive acting Oscar nomination for this movie, and man is it unnecessary-he barely has anything to do, other than shout for a dead Jennifer Jones toward the end of the picture.  It feels weird to live in a world where Fred Astaire (whom I love) never got a competitive acting nomination, but, like...over John Cazale in The Godfather, Part II or John Huston in Chinatown...let's not be ridiculous here.

As I said above, Steve McQueen would disappear from movies after this, having a bit of a nomad period where he just went out into the country in a motor home, in the process turning down parts in Close Encounters of the Third Kind and Apocalypse Now that might've dramatically changed his legacy.  But his health by the late 1970's was in terrible shape, and he developed mesothelioma (likely due to asbestos exposure from his time in the Marines).  The National Enquirer, at that point most famous for its ongoing coverage of the death of Elvis Presley rather than the right-wing attack ads that it would become known for to modern supermarket shoppers, broke the story that McQueen was dying shortly before his death (he'd been trying to keep it a secret), and McQueen attempted a number of experimental procedures, including a surgery to remove a tumor from his liver in Mexico, a procedure he couldn't have performed in the United States because no doctor would do it (since it would kill him).  12 hours into the surgery, the American doctors were proven correct, and Steve McQueen died at the age of only 50 from a heart attack.

Next month, we're going to talk about a man who was good friends with McQueen, even if they also had something of a professional rivalry during McQueen's early stardom.  Like McQueen, he also would die young, but unlike McQueen, that death would cement his legacy in a way that would in many ways outlast any films he made in life...and would become the source of near constant conspiracy theory in the decades to come, in ways that would haunt his family for generations.

Le Mans (1971)

Film: Le Mans (1971)

Stars: Steve McQueen, Siegfried Rauch, Elga Andersen

Director: Lee H. Katzin

Oscar History: No nominations

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.

There are a long history of actors who largely got bored with being movie stars, and spent huge swaths of their careers basically just doing movie stardom as a side hustle.  Marlon Brando, Jean Seberg, Jane Fonda, & Sean Penn all clearly wished they could be full-time activists, rather than movie stars themselves.  Orson Welles spent his peak stardom years running across the country doing magic shows with Rita Hayworth & Marlene Dietrich.  Hedy Lamarr may have had the oddest side hustle, essentially inventing GPS.  For Steve McQueen, the coolest of movie stars, that side hustle was race-car driving, the coolest of sports.  McQueen frequently competed in car & motorcycle racing tournaments, and would incorporate his love of stunt driving into his films like Bullitt and The Great Escape.  No film, though, encapsulated his love of it quite like Le Mans, an expensive fictionalization of the famed French endurance car race that has been fictionalized in recent films like Ford v. Ferrari and Gran Turismo.

(Spoilers Ahead) Le Mans is a weird film to summarize, in part because it's not really a movie with a traditional narrative.  The film is about Michael Delaney (McQueen), who is about to race the 24 hours of Le Mans when he sees the widow Lisa (Andersen) of a driver that died in the previous year's tournament, and has flashbacks to the crash of his former competitor, whose death Lisa holds him responsible for.  This is one of several storylines that are told in an almost cross-plot anthology-style bit of storytelling, with everyone underlining the intoxicating nature of the 24 Hours of Le Mans, and how it is seen as one of the pinnacles of athletics, and how important it is for their sponsor (Porsche) to get a 1-2 finish that will make the company look like the fastest car in the world.

The movie is weird, though, because for long stretches of it nothing happens.  This is, I'm going to be honest, also my reaction to car-racing in general (I am not the audience for this picture), but I was struck throughout it that it was meant to be melancholy and almost Malick-esque before Malick was even a thing.  We get extended sequences with wordless dialogue, and not just looking at cars passing each other on a track...it's also random stares between Andersen & McQueen, which might be cribbed from a French New Wave picture if you're being generous, but in reality feels more so like they didn't know how to put a story in here, and the whole goal of the film is to watch Steve McQueen sexily driving around cars the average audience member couldn't even buy if they sold their house.

That being said, on a technical level this film works really well.  The editing, sound work, cinematography, and especially the stunt driving are top notch.  When you have the film in the throes of competition, especially toward the end, it really draws you in and you can almost get why people will literally watch a car drive for 24 hours on their television each year.  But those documentary-style touches (including footage from actual Le Mans races), are more interesting in a technical capacity, and only hold your attention for so long.

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.

OVP: The Thomas Crown Affair (1968)

Film: The Thomas Crown Affair (1968)

Stars: Steve McQueen, Faye Dunaway, Paul Burke, Jack Weston

Director: Norman Jewison

Oscar History: 2 nominations/1 win (Best Original Song-"The Windmills of Your Mind," Score)

Snap Judgment Ranking: 4/5 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.

Coming off of the success of The Cincinnati Kid, for the rest of the 1960's, you'd be hard-pressed to find a film actor who was more consistently bankable and electric than Steve McQueen.  In 1966, he won his first (and only) Academy Award nomination for The Sand Pebbles, a commercial triumph which got 8 nominations in total (McQueen would lose to Paul Scofield for A Man for All Seasons).  But it was in 1968 that he arguably hit his peak.  The most famous film of his career came out that year, the action flick Bullitt, which would be considered by many to be the greatest action film ever made (I liked it, but am not going to be quite that superfluous).  But I'd already seen that film, and with the Saturdays with the Stars, we stick entirely with movies I haven't seen of these actors, so we're going to focus on the other Oscar-winning film that McQueen made in 1968, a movie that was more polarizing with critics but nonetheless continued his trend of printing money: The Thomas Crown Affair.

(Spoilers Ahead) The film is odd, and I'm going to start that right out because the plot is a bit thin.  It essentially follows Thomas Crown (McQueen), a bored millionaire who recruits a bunch of men (who know neither him nor their conspirators) to rob a bank, which they do successfully (and somewhat amusingly) in the film's opening moments.  It then shifts gears, with us meeting Vicki Anderson (Dunaway), a breathtaking blonde who is also clever, and who quickly figures out that Crown surely robbed the bank.  But there's a problem-there's no evidence other than common sense (and intuition), and both Crown & Vicki are mad horny for each other.  So Vicki is torn into a game of cat-and-mouse, with her seemingly closing in on him...all the while not realizing that she's getting played.  The film ends with Crown attempting another robbery, one that works perfectly and that he's confessed to Vicki already, implying to her that she loves him too much to stop him.  When she does, by showing up in the cemetery, she realizes that he did not, in fact, trust her, giving her the money from the second bank robbery for sport (along with his spectacular navy blue Rolls Royce), while he jets off to anonymity with the money from the first robbery.

Like I said, the plot doesn't resonate in a big way.  As I explained it above, it's quite straightforward, but doesn't read that way when you're watching the movie.  This is in part because it's severely underwritten-we don't get a lot of sense of who these characters are out of context with each other.  McQueen's Crown is essentially a thrill-seeker, a playboy, but we don't get much more.  Meanwhile, the only thing we learn about Dunaway's Vicki is that she doesn't play by the rules, which of course means that to all of the men around her, she's portrayed as a bitch (even though most of her best traits are lauded in Crown).  It's frustrating, and it feels stretched, like we're trying to make an excuse for this movie to exist.

But you see a 4-star review for a reason, and that's because it looks incredible.  The cars, the beaches, the costumes, the grand camerawork, it's all sublime.  There is a scene where Dunaway & McQueen, both just impossibly sexy, play the randiest game of chess you can ever imagine, us darting from his icy blue eyes to her pillow lips, each of them thumbing the pieces as if they're taking off each other's clothes.  Combined with a grand score, and the classic "Windmills of Your Mind" (one of the best movie songs of all time), it all adds up to film being a visual medium: who cares if none of it makes all that much sense when you are just looking for a cigarette to light afterward.