Though not as subversive and dark as Jim Thompson's classic novel (adapted by Walter Hill after Thompson himself was fired), Sam Peckinpah's razor-sharp romantic thriller is still a killer. Steve McQueen excels as professional crim Doc McCoy, sprung from The Big House to pull off a bank heist, thanks to his wife (Ali MacGraw) boffing a sleazy local "businessman" with political connections (the great Ben Johnson). Laced with black humour and filled with bravura car chases and shotgun-blasting action sequences, The Getaway is Peckinpah's gripping fantasy of escape from mechanised 20th-century America.