Seems fitting on what would've been his 80th birthday (today) to invoke another of my patron saints: Steve McQueen. In real life, he was a crazy motherfucker, drug-addled and astoundingly insecure, but his iconic cinematic naturalism was unparalleled in his day. Daniel Craig has masterfully mined McQueen for his own shot at superstardom, although he's just a pretender to the throne -- any time I watch Craig acting, I will point out wardrobe choices, looks, walks -- all sorts of things that he's taken from McQueen. Why not? McQueen's long dead, but his shadow hangs over everythign Daniel Craig tries to do.McQueen's crowning glory in movies was his "reactor" quality -- he was called the King of Cool and really still holds that title; there aren't really any actors out there who match his quiet ability to command a scene. The "reactor" nature he put forth was his responding to the acting of another -- so, Actor X would say something, and McQueen would react to it, very internal, very in himself, versus trying to act and drive a scene. It makes for many compelling performances.
He had the ability to take command of any scene he was a part of (and was terrible about upstaging his fellow actors -- watch him in his early movies, and you'll see him doing things, lots of "business" to draw the audience's eyes on him. "The Magnificent Seven" is full of moments like that, where he took a comparatively small part and made it big by doing that, clearly bugging Yul Brynner). McQueen's movies are very of their time, very 60s (most of them, during his apogee), but his performances endure above and beyond them. His all-American kind of antihero way about him, his straightforward, simple-yet-impeccable style, his feral naturalism, those were things I just took to.
I used to wear Baracuta jackets and Clark's Desert Boots in high school in private homage to McQueen, my own kind of lopsided Mod-Punk style (in my view, spot-welding the Jam to the Sex Pistols by way of McQueen -- trying to stand out by looking sharp in a very Classic Guy kind of way, not that anybody really noticed or appreciated it back then). My rule of thumb was that if it looked good on McQueen, it'd look good on me -- and that's held up over the years.
