When McQueen was king.

• Author: Gehring, Wes D.
• Position: REEL WORLD - Steve McQueen

STEVE McQUEEN WAS AN ICONIC antihero screen star of the 1960s and 1970s. The foundation to that monumental movie career was a hit Western television series about a bounty hunter, "Wanted: Dead or Alive" (CBS, 1958-61). After the completion of the program's first season, Hollywood powerbroker columnist Hedda Hopper wrote an insightful profile of the actor. McQueen revealed in the piece that he long had been a student of one of the Western's signature film stars--Gary Cooper. The young actor also managed to dovetail from his New York method acting training to a Cooper minimalism that he admired more than any technique: "I went to Actors Studio [home of the method] three years, [but] the only 'method' is ... to find out what you can do as an actor. I admire Gary Cooper, an actor who never studied in his life. He had something; he's gifted with a casual manner I've had to work for. Simplicity came naturally to him."

"Wanted" came on at a time when Westerns dominated the small screen. There were so many of them on TV that Bob Hope joked about needing to brush the hay off his set before turning it on. Indeed, there were more than two dozen cowboy stories on in prime time the season "Wanted" premiered. Even more impressively, 12 of the top 25 Nielsen-rated programs that season were Westerns. "Wanted" also was pivotal to McQueen because the Western was of ongoing significance in the actor's about-to-skyrocket career. He became a bona fide film star with the epic "The Magnificent Seven" (1960), a sage brush remake of director Akira Kurosawa's "Seven Samurai" (1954). "Seven" also inspired the parody "Three Amigos!" (1986).

Arguably, McQueen's greatest movie was the neglected Sam Peckinpah-directed contemporary Western, "Junior Bonnet" (1972). Yet, even McQueen's more signature crime movies, "Bullitt" (1968) and "The Getaway" (1972), essentially were Westerns in modern dress. In fact, the actor actually pitched "Bullitt" along cowboy lines, while "The Getaway" was a product of two of the genre's major auteurs--Peckinpah and writer Walter Hill. The latter artist, who went on to become an accomplished director, too, later claimed he saw all stories in horse opera terms. McQueen also starred in the underrated Henry Hathaway cowboy picture "Nevada Smith" (1966) and the sadly forgotten "Tom Horn" (1980).

A central McQueen element brought out by his series, though not fully showcased within it, was the actor's sense of humor. This funny side often has been...