MovieChat Forums > The Getaway (1972) Discussion > Worst performance of all time by any act...

Worst performance of all time by any actress

posted 11 years ago by yakikorosu
30 replies | jump to latest

I have seen thousands of movies and Ali McGraw in The Getaway was by far the worst performance by an actress in any major film I have ever seen. I can't think of anything even remotely this bad. Elizabeth Berkeley in Showgirls blows her away. Sofia Coppolla in Godfather 3? Far superior. Her acting is so bad that even in scenes where she doesn't talk it's painful just to watch her vacant, unchanging facial expression. Every line she says sounds like it was memorized phonetically by someone who has no understanding whatsoever of what her character is supposed to be feeling, thinking or even doing. I began to literally cringe every time she would appear on screen. Every scene with her not in it automatically became my favorite scene in the movie. If she and Keanu Reeves had a contest for most wooden acting, she would win by such a large margin the referee would have to stop the match less than half the way through.

I now know what Marlon Brando's character was doing in Apocalypse Now when he says "The horror, the horror": he was watching any scene in this movie with Ali McGraw in it.

[–] LeParas-1 11 years ago

Yeah, well, you know, that's just like, uh, your opinion, Man.

[–] rogerscorpion 11 years ago

That's true, but it was a generally held opinion, in the 70s. Note that you don't see her much--if at all, now. When one's looks are the only thing which gets you hired & that goes, well...

Carpe Noctem!

[–] dini0519 11 years ago

I have never liked her acting in anything I've seen her in. She's attractive, but her and McQueen seemed so opposite in style that I find it hard to believe they were actually married for awhile. And his wife at the time that he died looked surprisingly like Ali McGraw according to a tabloid pic I saw.

Dini

[–] Devans00 10 years ago

After Googling all of Steve McQueen's wives, I see they all are/were slender brunettes. Apparently that was his thing. Honestly, I can't see him with a Sally Struthers type.

Regarding Ali McGraw's performance, I never saw the big appeal of her. In anything, from movies, to TV to interviews. But she did work pretty steadily from the early 1970s to the mid 80s. So someone must have liked her a lot.

That said, I can't really think of anyone else who could have played Carol with the perfect mix of foolishness to criminal's tough wife.

No two persons ever watch the same movie.

[–] FANatic-10 10 years ago

I have to agree she's terrible. Yet, I do sympathize with her - she entered acting after being a successful model and married the wonder boy at Paramount, Robert Evans, then had immediate success in "Goodbye, Columbus" followed by ginormous success in "Love Story". "The Getaway" was only her 3rd major role. She probably realized she had some serious deficiencies as an actress, but by this time she was in huge demand. For me, her big, insurmountable problem is her voice with that Ivy League, prim accent and her inability to put emotion into it. Even when she is showing emotion with her eyes, nothing comes through in her voice; its like a Stepford Wife! All that being said, by the end of the movie she had kind of grown on me - if nothing else, she was a good sport, being slapped around and getting dumped into a garbage truck! Then she married McQueen, he made her stop working, and when the marriage had ended any impetus her career had going for it was kaput.
P.S. Nobody, and I mean NObody has ever been as bad as Elizabeth Berkley in "Showgirls", even Ali. Its not humanly possible.

[–] ecarle 10 years ago

I was around then, and it was the weirdest thing.

Because she had the "surprise hit" of "Goodbye Columbus"(in which, frankly, she did some nice nudity and sex scenes when the "R" rating was pretty new) followed by the blockbuster hit "Love Story," all of a sudden Hollywood shoved her down our throats as the Great New Superstar Actress. This fire was further fueled by her then-husband Robert Evans, who supervised some great movies at Paramount, but over-promoted every movie and everybody, including his wife.

We started to catch on that Ali couldn't act, but then she landed the movie with Steve McQueen, left her husband and became his lover(BEFORE The Getaway came out) and now THEY were a big team of superstars. (We were lucky, during this "hot" period, MacGraw almost ended up in The Great Gatsby and Chinatown. I don't think Chinatown would have survived her.)

But we knew how bad she was. Look, there was APPLAUSE in that theater when he hit her...not because of what her character did, but because of the acting.

McQueen "took retirement" for a few years after "The Towering Inferno" hit big, and he took MacGraw with him to be his stay-with-him-at-home Malibu wife. There are rumors maybe he did that because he knew how bad she was at acting. When she returned a few years later after leaving McQueen, her acting was bad again, but she got ANOTHER hit ("Convoy") for Sam Peckinpah(who was pretty drunk trying to direct it, James Coburn did a lot of second unit.)

But EVENTUALLY the bad acting caught up with Ali MacGraw. Her hits had been for reasons other than her -- except maybe for Goodbye Columbus, where she did the nudity and sex. Came the eighties, she was over.

But hey, she'd been a star....

[–] yatzo376 9 years ago

That's How I feel also.
I love The Getaway so much that I,ve come to accept her contributions to the film, however unconvincing she was.
What a beauty...., though.

[–] Synergetic11 9 years ago

Except that "Showgirls" was INTENDED to be over-the-top satire like almost all of Verhoeven's films, therefore Berkeley's performance, as goofy as it is, was exactly what it was supposed to be, what was needed and asked for by Verhoeven. Verhoeven is looking for actors who can make asses of their characters, because he's a satirist. "The Getaway," however, is supposed to be a "serious" crime and action film, so McGraw's acting deficiencies stick out.

It still amazes me to this day how SO MANY people think "Showgirls" was meant to be a "serious" film about Las Vegas that "failed" because of bad direction and acting. Nope. It was SATIRE, like most of Verhoeven's films, and it SUCCEEDED, artistically if not financially, because of EXPERT direction.

[–] InherentlyYours 7 years ago

Yet, I do sympathize with her

The no-talent get hired by her husband, and you sympathize with her.

[–] schinaro 9 years ago

After reading a bio on McQueen it's been stated he only ever liked women with dark hair and bushy eyebrows... McQueen was most definatley a real bush man... Great taste in women (can't blame him)

[–] Soujurn 9 years ago

Ali was pretty bad. If it hadn't been for some important men in the business, she would not have had a career, such as it was.
I think a better choice would have been to cast the talented, beautiful, under used and under rated Meredith Macrae best known for Petticoat Junction.

"Strange women lying in ponds distributing swords is no basis for a system of government."
-Dennis

[–] solex10 9 years ago

So, what do you all think of Kim Basinger in the same role in the 1994 remake?

[–] DracTarashV 9 years ago

It's not a very convincing performance (understatement, yes), but she doesn't spoil the film for me. And yes, I've seen worse. (Not gonna bother giving some examples.)

Hey there, Johnny Boy, I hope you fry!

[–] gioconda 9 years ago

My dos centavos from years of studying movies ~~~

Ali McGraw got the big roles due to her relationship with Robert Evans, one of the most powerful movie producers of the era. If you look at photos of them together, they look like identical twin brother & sister. Talk about narcissism.

She also got the lead in "Love Story" because she was the paramour of Robert Evans. This was a role many actresses coveted, because the book was huge at the time. However, McGraw got the role & was absolutely horrendous in it. True to form though, it was a huge hit.

The Getaway was a huge bomb, partly due to the bad acting, but also because Sam Peckinpah was doing massive amounts of cocaine at the time. Walter Hill & Jim Thompson were not known for sobriety, but I am not aware of any public confession that they were high throughout the production. Peckinpah and others talked about his addiction during this period in several books. Apparently he rarely got to the set before the afternoon because he never slept. He was frequently irratonal & completely incoherent while directing the movie. The failure of this movie is well documented in cinematic history.

Ali McGraw's life around all these coke addicts was no bed of roses. If you are familiar with Bob Evans' life story, around his reign at Paramount, he was involved in a very big murder-for-fire case of a movie producer involved in the "Cotton Club" who also was rumored to be a major coke dealer. Ali McGraw's marriage dissolved, and she eventually descended into severe alcoholism a& eventually ended up in Betty Ford. She has been very, very vocal about her addictions, so I am not reporting this to slam her.

[–] wmlopez 8 years ago

THE GETAWAY was a hit.
What info you reading?

[–] arthurab 8 years ago

Agreed. Where did u get the idea it bombed?? SM was the biggest movie star in the world in 1972. Even with AM's horrendous performance, McQueen carried the movie to success, with help of Ben Johnson, Al Lettieri, and a few others. The photography was great imo, and coke or no coke, Peckinpah pulled off the direction. This is a very satisfying movie.

[–] Noir-It-All 8 years ago

McQueen's first wife made an interesting comment about the women he married - brunettes - versus the women he didn't - blondes.

[–] ridge-m-1 8 years ago

Man, I'm so glad that it finally came to you what Brando was thinking as he whispered one of the most famous movie lines of all time. It had nothing to do with 'Nam. His dying image was of Ali Mcgraw's performance in the '72 version of "The Getaway". It is a known fact that he had his own secret back channel with HQ and that they would chopper in the steaks and beer along with the newest American movie releases. It is a little known fact that as Willard was being tortured in the little cage that a couple of Kurtz's Cambodian fighters edited the film down to just scenes with McGraw and forced Willard to watch them over and over. Now, it is finally revealed why he was so wasted and near death when they brought him back to Kurtz's crib.

You learn the most interesting trivia on this site.

[–] M_Exchange 8 years ago

I think that this film is profoundly underrated on imdb 90% because of her performance alone.
If they had even an average acting performance from the co-star then most people would regard it as the classic that I regard it as.

