Last week's Movie Quiz winners

Yes, that first picture clue really was Gloria Stivic and Howard Sprague together in the same movie, the 1973 Steve McQueen and Ali McGraw caper film, The Getaway. (One quiz winner reminisced, "I had forgotten that once upon a time Sally Struthers was really quite hot.") As I explained to one disgruntled old-timer, the picture of Steve and Ali was the hard clue.

Today, McQueen and McGraw may sound like a CW act, but in the early '70s when they made The Getaway, they were as big as Brangelina. They played a bank-robbing couple who are always fighting (as in slaps and punches), trying to make their last and biggest score. (Making the movie must be a turn-on for its lead actors, since the 1994 remake was where the hellish marriage between Alec Baldwin and Kim Basinger got started.) Even if Ali couldn't act, they were a great-looking couple, on screen and off.

The Getaway was also the second film that McQueen did with director Sam Peckinpah, who was still on the creative roll of his career. (It kicked into high gear with The Wild Bunch in 1967.) While he's mostly remembered for exploding blood squibs and raising the grue level in American movies, Peckinpah could be great with the small human moments found in his films. Romance wasn't Sam's thing, though, and the scenes between Steve and Ali slow down the action, which is often inspired.

Sly, twisted humor was his kind of thing, and The Getaway has plenty. Most of it's in the subplot involving Steve and Ali's pursuer, a mobster played by Godfather supporting actor Al Lettieri, and his sadistic treatment of Gloria and Howard, er, Sally Struthers and Jack Dodson. The gangster uses Sally's character as his (willing) sex slave, while making her husband Dodson watch. Not only does this movie show Steve McQueen punching Sally Struthers in the mouth, it offers the only post-suicide look at Mayberry's favorite county clerk.