AFOS Blog Rewind: Steve McQueen: The Man & Le Mans, now streaming on Showtime Anytime, careens down the twisted path of a racing film that’s like no other

From November 20, 2015, here's a repost of my discussion of the 1971 film Le Mans, the subject of Steve McQueen: The Man & Le Mans, an intriguing 2015 documentary that premiered on Showtime on March 18 and can currently be streamed by Showtime subscribers on Showtime Anytime.

With Le Mans, Steve McQueen, an auto racing enthusiast, set out to make as authentic an auto racing film as possible. The result, which was credited to a director from network TV, frequent '60s Mission: Impossible episode director Lee H. Katzin, was an unconventional, existentialist and documentary-style sports flick that baffled film critics in 1971--they wanted way more melodrama than the scant amount the film preferred to give them--and was ahead of its time. The story of an introverted man who doesn't know how to do anything else, except drive fast, was essentially a Michael Mann movie long before such a thing existed. And what are most Mann movies about? Introverted men who don't know how to do anything else, except break into vaults or track down criminals.

Le Mans isn't the best auto racing film ever made--that spot belongs to the offbeat Talladega Nights ("I like to think of Jesus as a figure skater who wears like a white outfit and he does interpretive ice dances of my life's journey"). But as an auto racing film, Le Mans is more powerful and rewatchable than either the soapy and overstuffed Grand Prix--if John Frankenheimer pared that film down to just the excellently shot racing sequences, it would have been an action masterpiece--or Quentin Tarantino's favorite racing film, the similarly soapy Days of Thunder, Don Simpson's 107-minute love letter to his own coke-fueled self. The power and rewatchability of Le Mans are mostly because of what Le Mans doesn't show and what it doesn't have the characters say.

The subplot about Michael Delaney, McQueen's racer character, and his tentative friendship with the widow (Elga Andersen) of a racing rival who died during one of Delaney's racing accidents barely qualifies as a love story, but the minimal dialogue between McQueen and Andersen and the details their scenes leave out (did Delaney and the widow sleep together in his trailer?) automatically cause their subplot to be far more intriguing as off-the-race-track material than any of the off-the-track Grand Prix scenes that don't feature a hot Françoise Hardy or an equally hot Jessica Walter. I love how all the exposition in Le Mans is delivered by a barely audible PA announcer and the film--several decades before the invention of the closed captioning option on Blu-rays and DVDs would have made it easier--deliberately makes the audience work hard to understand what the announcer's saying.

I don't even like auto racing, yet Le Mans somehow comes up with many effective ways to make me give a shit about it, whether it's keeping the dialogue to a minimum, staging the racing sequences so that they're not the "disorienting, incoherent blur of mindless action" Nathan Rabin complained about in his Dissolve reassessment of Days of Thunder or capturing remarkable footage of either the actual 24-hour Le Mans race or the onlookers that would be impossible to capture today, perhaps for insurance reasons or simply because it's not 1970. It's hard to dislike a sports flick that comes up with a shot of a spectator like my favorite shot: a young lady is too passed out from drinking to bother to pay attention to Delaney's pit crew springing into action and assisting Delaney out of his Porsche at the end of his latest shift behind the wheel.

Behind the scenes, Le Mans was such a difficult film to make: it started filming without a script; the enigmatic McQueen was at his worst behavior and was at odds with everyone from studio execs to Le Mans' original director, John Sturges, who directed McQueen in The Magnificent Seven and The Great Escape; McQueen and his then-wife were cheating on each other; and a stunt driver had to have his leg amputated after an actual car crash on the set. The Le Mans shoot's endless troubles have been the subject of both a 1999 book (Michael Keyser's A French Kiss with Death) and now a documentary, Steve McQueen: The Man & Le Mans.

The Daily Beast calls directors Gabriel Clarke and John McKenna's new McQueen doc "a warts-and-all portrait of a man at an unstable time in his life" and is appreciative of how the doc "doesn't look away from the people who were hurt by McQueen's actions." But the Beast isn't as enamored with the doc's overexplanatory nature, in comparison to Le Mans' not-so-explanatory nature ("We don't need to hear someone tell us that McQueen cared about where the camera was, or what shots he was going to be in, because to look at scenes from Le Mans is to immediately understand the artist's curiosity to capture action in images").



The best thing to come out of Steve McQueen: The Man & Le Mans has taken place outside the movie. That would be the bonus tracks on the Varèse Sarabande release of Jim Copperthwaite's ultra-solemn score to Clarke and McKenna's doc. The bonuses are highlights from Michel Legrand's occasionally treacly but otherwise vibrant and effective jazz score to Le Mans.

In 2007, Legrand's Le Mans score--it's basically Legrand in froufrou Thomas Crown Affair mode--was reissued with additional tracks by Universal France, but Varèse's treatment of the Le Mans cues isn't too shabby either. Fortunately, in this incarnation, the Le Mans cues are without the Le Mans race track sound FX that were edited into the music on the 1971 Columbia Records LP release of the Le Mans soundtrack (and then were mostly omitted by Universal France, to the delight of film score music fans who don't like hearing sound clips from movies during those movies' score albums).

"The Race, Final Laps" was cut out of the 1971 film, but it's the best and most energetic of the cues Legrand wrote for Le Mans and Varèse added to the Man & Le Mans album. It best captures Delaney's intense drive to get his team to the top, even when he himself isn't in first place, as well as the very subject of The Man & Le Mans: McQueen's ambition and desperation to make Le Mans the way he wanted, even at the cost of several friendships, a marriage, a guy's leg and perhaps his own sanity.

A new doc careens down the twisted path of Steve McQueen's gritty, Michel Legrand-scored Le Mans, an auto racing film that's like no other

With Le Mans, Steve McQueen, an auto racing enthusiast, set out to make as authentic an auto racing film as possible. The result, which was credited to a director from network TV, frequent '60s Mission: Impossible episode director Lee H. Katzin, was an unconventional, existentialist and documentary-style sports flick that baffled film critics in 1971--they wanted way more melodrama than the scant amount the film preferred to give them--and was ahead of its time. The story of an introverted man who doesn't know how to do anything else, except drive fast, was essentially a Michael Mann movie long before such a thing existed. And what are most Mann movies about? Introverted men who don't know how to do anything else, except break into vaults or track down criminals.

Le Mans isn't the best auto racing film ever made--that spot belongs to the offbeat Talladega Nights ("I like to think of Jesus as a figure skater who wears like a white outfit and he does interpretive ice dances of my life's journey"). But as an auto racing film, Le Mans is more powerful and rewatchable than either the soapy and overstuffed Grand Prix--if John Frankenheimer pared that film down to just the excellently shot racing sequences, it would have been an action masterpiece--or Quentin Tarantino's favorite racing film, the similarly soapy Days of Thunder, Don Simpson's 107-minute love letter to his own coke-fueled self. The power and rewatchability of Le Mans are mostly because of what Le Mans doesn't show and what it doesn't have the characters say.

The subplot about Michael Delaney, McQueen's racer character, and his tentative friendship with the widow (Elga Andersen) of a racing rival who died during one of Delaney's racing accidents barely qualifies as a love story, but the minimal dialogue between McQueen and Andersen and the details their scenes leave out (did Delaney and the widow sleep together in his trailer?) automatically cause their subplot to be far more intriguing as off-the-race-track material than any of the off-the-track Grand Prix scenes that don't feature a hot Françoise Hardy or an equally hot Jessica Walter. I love how all the exposition in Le Mans is delivered by a barely audible PA announcer and the film--several decades before the invention of the closed captioning option on Blu-rays and DVDs would have made it easier--deliberately makes the audience work hard to understand what the announcer's saying.

I don't even like auto racing, yet Le Mans somehow comes up with many effective ways to make me give a shit about it, whether it's keeping the dialogue to a minimum, staging the racing sequences so that they're not the "disorienting, incoherent blur of mindless action" Nathan Rabin complained about in his Dissolve reassessment of Days of Thunder or capturing remarkable footage of either the actual 24-hour Le Mans race or the onlookers that would be impossible to capture today, perhaps for insurance reasons or simply because it's not 1970. It's hard to dislike a sports flick that comes up with a shot of a spectator like my favorite shot: a young lady is too passed out from drinking to bother to pay attention to Delaney's pit crew springing into action and assisting Delaney out of his Porsche at the end of his latest shift behind the wheel.

Behind the scenes, Le Mans was such a difficult film to make: it started filming without a script; the enigmatic McQueen was at his worst behavior and was at odds with everyone from studio execs to Le Mans' original director, John Sturges, who directed McQueen in The Magnificent Seven and The Great Escape; McQueen and his then-wife were cheating on each other; and a stunt driver had to have his leg amputated after an actual car crash on the set. The Le Mans shoot's endless troubles have been the subject of both a 1999 book (Michael Keyser's A French Kiss with Death) and now a documentary, Steve McQueen: The Man & Le Mans, which hit select theaters last Friday.

The Daily Beast calls directors Gabriel Clarke and John McKenna's new McQueen doc "a warts-and-all portrait of a man at an unstable time in his life" and is appreciative of how the doc "doesn't look away from the people who were hurt by McQueen's actions." But the Beast isn't as enamored with the doc's overexplanatory nature, in comparison to Le Mans' not-so-explanatory nature ("We don't need to hear someone tell us that McQueen cared about where the camera was, or what shots he was going to be in, because to look at scenes from Le Mans is to immediately understand the artist's curiosity to capture action in images").



The best thing to come out of Steve McQueen: The Man & Le Mans has taken place outside the movie. That would be the bonus tracks on the Varèse Sarabande release of Jim Copperthwaite's ultra-solemn score to Clarke and McKenna's doc. The bonuses are highlights from Michel Legrand's occasionally treacly but otherwise vibrant and effective jazz score to Le Mans.

In 2007, Legrand's Le Mans score--it's basically Legrand in froufrou Thomas Crown Affair mode--was reissued with additional tracks by Universal France, but Varèse's treatment of the Le Mans cues isn't too shabby either. Fortunately, in this incarnation, the Le Mans cues are without the Le Mans race track sound FX that were edited into the music on the 1971 Columbia Records LP release of the Le Mans soundtrack (and then were mostly omitted by Universal France, to the delight of film score music fans who don't like hearing sound clips from movies during those movies' score albums).

"The Race, Final Laps" was cut out of the 1971 film, but it's the best and most energetic of the cues Legrand wrote for Le Mans and Varèse added to the Man & Le Mans album, and it's currently in rotation on "AFOS Prime." It best captures Delaney's intense drive to get his team to the top, even when he himself isn't in first place, as well as the very subject of The Man & Le Mans: McQueen's ambition and desperation to make Le Mans the way he wanted, even at the cost of several friendships, a marriage, a guy's leg and perhaps his own sanity.

Before its license to thrill was revoked by Netflix again, Never Say Never Again was full of music so awful it would make Netflix viewers say "never again" to hearing it

(Photo source: New York Times)

Have you ever heard score music that's so terrible during a certain movie that its trailer music sounds like Beethoven by comparison? Michel Legrand, whose jazzy and very French score for the original Thomas Crown Affair is one of the highlights of that very '60s caper flick, clearly had an off day when he wrote the score to 1983's Never Say Never Again, the unofficial 007 movie that was the weird result of a legal dispute that allowed Thunderball to get remade with Sean Connery in the role of Bond again. (The messy circumstances that led to the production of the non-canonical Never Say Never Again--the last 007 movie to pit Bond against SPECTRE before next winter's canonical 007 movie Spectre--are like if the Indiana Jones franchise got embroiled in some sort of legal beef between Disney and George Lucas that would be too convoluted to imagine in detail here, and as part of the settlement, Harrison Ford got to star as Indy one last time in a rival Indy movie for another studio while Disney worked on its rumored reboot with Chris Pratt as Indy.)

The much-maligned GoldenEye score by French composer and frequent Luc Besson collaborator Eric Serra--the only cue I really dig during Serra's score is the very first one, the 17-second gunbarrel music--isn't the worst score written for a Bond movie. Nope, the "worst Bond score" honors would have to go to Legrand's tin-eared score. I realized his weirdly chintzy-sounding and sometimes yacht rock-ish score is the worst after I rewatched Never Say Never Again on Netflix only a few hours before the streaming service lost the streaming rights to the movie once again and had to yank it from its library over the weekend. It's the first time I've watched Never Say Never Again in its entirety since the very first time I saw it--on VHS as a kid. I barely paid attention to Never Say Never Again that day because I was too busy playing with the Christmas present my parents gave to me right before they rented a VHS of Never Say Never Again, and that toy happened to be this:

(Photo source: ActionFigurePics)

(Photo source: Vintage Action Figures)

When you're a kid whose attentions are divided between play-acting battle strategy conversations inside a huge castle playset between He-Man and Mekaneck about how they're going to metaphorically skullfuck the forces of Skeletor and Trap Jaw and watching a VHS of an overlong and clunkily paced but lavish spy flick, it's a little difficult to pay attention to the spy flick. But the one thing I do remember from that Christmastime viewing of the VHS rental of Never Say Never Again is Connery getting stabbed right after the easy-listening sounds of former Sergio Mendes and Brasil '66 vocalist Lani Hall's Never Say Never Again theme song.

Thanks to cable network airings of Never Say Never Again that failed to lure me into rewatching it in its entirety and YouTube clips of the opening titles, I'm constantly reminded of how poorly Hall's ballad--which was composed by Legrand and produced by both Hall's husband Herb Alpert and Mendes himself--fits with the opening action sequence. It's not the worst tune, but "Never Say Never Again" is yacht rock-era Sergio Mendes and Herb Alpert, not "Mas Que Nada"-era Sergio Mendes and Herb Alpert.

Together with Hall and the rest of Brasil '66, "Mas Que Nada"-era Mendes and Alpert were responsible for one of the coolest covers of a Bond song, their remake of "The Look of Love," another tune from an unofficial Bond movie, the 1967 version of Casino Royale. The lackadaisical feel of this later Bond song from Hall, Mendes and Alpert robs Never Say Never Again's opening action sequence of any tension or suspense. Yacht rock and spy movies are a terrible combination. It's why I don't like the Rita Coolidge version of "All Time High" the late John Barry produced for Octopussy--a rare musical misstep by Barry--and I instead prefer the more dangerous-sounding (especially at 3:06) Pulp cover of "All Time High" David Arnold produced for 1997's Shaken and Stirred: The David Arnold James Bond Project, the cover album that landed Arnold the gig as Tomorrow Never Dies score composer.

The rest of Legrand's Never Say Never Again score is far worse than the opening theme and lacks the oomph, tunefulness, grandeur and sexuality of the best of Barry's work for the official Bond movies. Oomph, tunefulness, grandeur and sexuality are four reasons why, like recent "Uptown Funk" mastermind Mark Ronson once said in 2011, Barry's work has been sampled so much by hip-hop artists ("It's mean stuff. It's not pretty or sanitised. It sounds tough," wrote Ronson). Legrand's score is a good example of why French musicians shouldn't be scoring Bond movies. Unless they're Daft Punk. That's because I like those two helmeted motherfuckers and I like how the idea of Daft Punk scoring a Bond flick would make way-too-conservative Bond fanboys--the same fanboys who are way too intense about their hatred of French electronica artist Mirwais for producing Madonna's much-maligned Die Another Day theme--squirm.

The Never Say Never Again trailer music has more oomph than the actual music in the movie. Sure, the unknown composer who wrote the trailer music was clearly imitating Bill Conti's score from an official Bond movie, 1981's For Your Eyes Only, without using the Barry/Monty Norman Bond theme that Conti had the freedom to include and neither Never Say Never Again producer Jack Schwartzman (the late husband of Talia Shire, as well as the father of Jason Schwartzman) nor Warner Bros. had the rights to use for their rival Bond movie.

But the anonymous Conti wannabe's trailer music gives off sparks in ways that Legrand's score fails to do. Combined with both the way the trailer house pieced together footage of the movie and the baritone of Peter Cullen (a.k.a. Optimus Prime), the voice of so many trailers and TV spots for '80s Bond flicks, the trailer music makes Never Say Never Again appear to be a more exciting action movie than it actually is.

The best things about Never Say Never Again are the performances of Connery--who's more awake during Never Say Never Again than he was when he sleepwalked through You Only Live Twice because he was sick and tired of the Bond franchise at the time of You Only Live Twice's filming--and Barbara Carrera, who steals the movie as Fatima Blush (like Luciana Paluzzi did during Thunderball when she played the same villainous character, Fiona Volpe, in that version of the story, 18 years before). Carrera was even nominated for a Golden Globe for her performance as Fatima. Throughout my rewatch of the movie on Netflix, all I could think, especially when Carrera wasn't on screen, was "All that money that's up there on screen, and they couldn't get Raiders of the Lost Ark cinematographer Douglas Slocombe to light the locations with more panache, and they couldn't get Connery a more convincing toupee."

The mid-'80s were not exactly the greatest period for Bond movies, whether official or unofficial, although Octopussy has its moments, dumb Tarzan yell gag and questionable attitudes towards Indians aside. I don't know if the most underwhelming aspects of Never Say Never Again were because of cocaine or because of the Taliafilm production company's cluelessness about how to craft a Bond movie a la the Broccoli family, which runs the Bond movie franchise like a tight ship. But when you hire folks like Legrand, Slocombe, Empire Strikes Back director Irvin Kershner and stuntpeople from Raiders of the Lost Ark and they're not putting in their best work (one minute, Kim Basinger's escaping from a castle on horseback, clad in just a slip, and then the next minute, her stunt double's leaping off the castle fully dressed, or maybe those aren't long sleeves and that's the stunt double's actual skin, which is far lighter than Basinger's), the blame for those underwhelming aspects has to be put on the badly distracted leadership of Schwartzman, who was reportedly too busy dealing with constant legal battles with the Broccoli family and Eon Productions to be present for the day-to-day shooting. His absence "left the actual supervision of production in the hands of barely-qualified subordinates," wrote You Only Blog Twice blogger Bryant Burnette.

(Photo source: Lewis Wayne Gallery)

(Photo source: You Only Blog Twice)

Legrand's tepid-sounding Never Say Never Again score cues have been frequently excised from the movie by Bond fanboys in fan edits of Never Say Never Again they've posted on YouTube or outside YouTube. I think they should try inserting into their Never Say Never Again re-edits the theme songs from Bond video games like the Quantum of Solace video game and Blood Stone, which are more enjoyable tunes than most of the opening themes from the '80s and '90s Bond movies themselves.

The Legrand cues are, of course, not part of "AFOS Incognito," the new espionage genre music block at midnight on AFOS. Only the best original music from spy movies or shows is streamed during "AFOS Incognito," like Barry's On Her Majesty's Secret Service cues "This Never Happened to the Other Feller" and "Main Theme." Barry, show 'em how it's done.

Never Say Never Again's rejected theme

(Photo source: Life Between Frames)

Last week, Tim Lucas of Video WatchBlog unearthed Phyllis Hyman's rejected theme from Never Say Never Again, thanks to his friend Stephen Forsyth, who also happens to be one of the composers of the dumped theme.

This was a particularly cool discovery for me because I'm always interested in hearing theme songs that didn't make the final cut. In fact, I once did a Fistful of Soundtracks episode about rejected movie themes, and I played "Thunderball" by Johnny Cash and "For Your Eyes Only" by Blondie. (However, I wasn't able to get my hands on Alice Cooper's "The Man with the Golden Gun" and Ace of Base's "The Juvenile," which was an early contender for the GoldenEye theme. After the GoldenEye producers gave Ace of Base the boot and went with Tina Turner--good call--the Swedish group released their version of "GoldenEye" as "The Juvenile.")

Never Say Never Again, the unofficial 1983 Bond flick that featured a saggy-looking Sean Connery in his first appearance as 007 since Diamonds Are Forever, divides Bond fans. But they all agree that its score, which was composed by a past-his-prime Michel Legrand (The Umbrellas of Cherbourg, the original Thomas Crown Affair), pales in comparison to John Barry's energetic scores from the official Bond movies. Legrand's limp theme was performed by Lani Hall, the vocalist from Sergio Mendes & Brasil '66's "Mas Que Nada" (a tune I was introduced to by another spy movie franchise, Austin Powers). "Never Say Never Again" is one of the weakest themes to open a Bond film, official or unofficial.

According to Forsyth:

I co-wrote the title song for the movie with Jim Ryan. Warner Bros. informed our attorney that the song was to be used as the title song in the picture. However, shortly before its release, Warner Bros. informed us that the song could not be used because Michel Legrand, who wrote the score, threatened to sue them, claiming that contractually he had the right to the title song. So my song was never released...

Phyllis sadly took her own life in the early nineties. The year before she died, she called me late one night and told me she felt that "Never Say Never Again" was "her best and favorite recording."

Though her performance is terrific (she demonstrates restraint, something that's missing from the caterwaulers on American Idol) and the song is better than Hall's final version, it wouldn't have been suitable for NSNA's action-oriented opening credits sequence, which follows Bond on a mission that turns out to be a training exercise. Also, Hyman's ballad suffers from the then-popular "yacht rock" sound that instantly dated the other early '80s Bond themes (Hall's "NSNA," Rita Coolidge's "All Time High" from Octopussy). It took Duran Duran's "A View to a Kill" to break the spell, restore energy to the Bond theme and make it rock again.

In other Bond theme-related news, reports that the Quantum of Solace producers chose Amy Winehouse to sing the upcoming film's theme have been exaggerated. (Note to self: Never believe the non-BBC British press.) When Winehouse isn't busy headbutting and pimpslapping North Londoners or searching for her dealer, she and her frequent collaborator Mark Ronson have been working on the tune, but the Quantum of Solace producers haven't picked it as their theme yet. Will this be another one for the rejected Bond theme pile?