Steve McQueen and his wife Neile Adams at the 1967 Academy Awards. Photograph: Bettmann

The big picture: the Oscars, 1967

Stars will make sure the cameras catch them at their best at the Oscars tonight, but 43 years ago Steve McQueen was caught off guard, and goofy, on the red carpet with his wife Neile Adams

Peter Conrad
Sunday 7 March 2010

Steve McQueen in the film Bullitt drove a green Ford Mustang in a chase through San Francisco not "a cop car" and in The Great Escape vaulted a motorbike over the fence at the Swiss border not a "concentration camp".

The sky over Hollywood is inky, except for the glare of the klieg lights. If it weren't for the blue eyes of Steve McQueen and the lilac dress of his first wife, Neile Adams, the scene would be grimly and unglamorously monochrome. The whitest thing in this particular spectrum has to be the portcullis of porcelain teeth displayed by Mrs McQueen. The blackest thing is also white: the cigarette that dangles from the mouth of the man behind McQueen's left shoulder, who would be arrested as a menace to public health if he lit up at this year's Oscars. You can find a "memento mori" in every photograph, and here is a premonitory hint of the cancer that killed McQueen in 1980.

Because of the occasion, this is a photograph about photography, and it contains a veritable museum of gadgets that look neolithically clunky in our digital age. One man wields the kind of flash bulb used by paparazzi to stun their prey; another holds up a movie camera that looks as if it might have had to be cranked by hand; others wear an additional eye on their chests, and peer at the viewfinder as if into upside-down periscopes.

It's also a photograph about the fickleness of the camera's roving gaze, since no one but whoever took this snap has any interest in McQueen. In 1966 he was nominated for an Oscar for his role in as a sailor The Sand Pebbles, and in 1968 he made Bullitt, unforgettably bouncing a cop car down the steeply terraced streets of San Francisco, but in 1967 his wattage had temporarily dimmed. The scrum of photographers ignores him to concentrate on some unseen A-lister who parades past just outside the frame.

Disarmingly, he can't have known that he was being photographed. Otherwise he would surely have closed that goofily gaping mouth, or at least treated us to an orthodontic display like his wife's. What made McQueen a pin-up was his sullen moodiness. He glowered as he stood beside the motorcycle on which he vaulted over the concentration camp fence in The Great Escape, scowled as he showed off Bullitt's shoulder holster, and unrepentantly stared back at the police photographer in a mug shot after his arrest in Alaska for drunken driving in 1973. Here he looks almost gormless, wondering at some mid-air spectacle we can't see – an absence as intriguing as that of the brighter star who monopolises the attentions of the photographers behind him.

Even his wife – to whose pretty head McQueen later held a gun, to punish her for a one-night stand with Maximilian Schell – looks genuinely enraptured. They might be watching the mother ship that opens its doors to admit a few fortunate earthlings at the end of Close Encounters of the Third Kind. Maybe there actually is a heaven; meanwhile we have to make do with Hollywood.

THE GUARDIAN