In
Sam Peckinpah's version of
Walter Hill's script, from
Jim Thompson's novel, an ex-con and his wife go on the lam after a Texas bank heist. Denied parole after four well-behaved years, Doc McCoy (
Steve McQueen) sends his wife Carol (
Ali MacGraw) to dirty politician Jack Benyon (
Ben Johnson) to get him out of prison. Carol secures Doc's freedom, on the condition that he does one more bank job for Benyon. Doc and his accomplices Rudy (
Al Lettieri) and Jackson (
Bo Hopkins) get the cash, but Doc soon discovers how Rudy intends to keep it all for himself and how Carol convinced Benyon to get him sprung. While Rudy hijacks a veterinarian and his wife (
Sally Struthers) to take him to get Doc in El Paso, Doc and Carol make their own embattled way south with the money, threatening to desert each other before reaching a trash dump rapprochement after a harrowing garbage truck episode. All sides converge in El Paso for a shootout, but trust a happily married old-timer (
Slim Pickens) to help Doc and Carol have a future. With violence shot in his trademark balletic style, Peckinpah does not hide the damage that Doc can do, whether to a cop car or an enemy. Still, as in such other morally relative outlaw movies as
Bonnie and Clyde (1967) and Peckinpah's western
The Wild Bunch (1969), Doc may be a criminal and killer when necessary, but his and Carol's loyalty to each other elevates them above their crooked milieu. With its non-traditional traditional couple played by the then hot (and notoriously adulterous) stars McQueen and MacGraw, The Getaway was a substantial hit. It was lackadaisically remade with
Alec Baldwin and
Kim Basinger in 1994. ~ Lucia Bozzola, All Movie Guide